This Is My Life: Thursday

No pictures. Blogger stinks. I think my account has been hacked. Or hijacked. Or infected. Or else I just am missing something simple and can't figure out how to change things. (Sorry Mom - no pics of your grand kids today, but I promise they don't look any different than they did yesterday.)

I remember hitting snooze on my alarm this morning. Well, I thought I hit snooze. Today was one of those mornings where I didn't wake up until I heard Annalyse wake up... at 8:30 am. Eighty Thirty?! The good news is that I had no place to be this morning so it was okay that I slept in.

I walked down the hall toward the toy room and saw Micah in a sleepy-eye state coming out of his room and Grady Lee laying on the futon watching cartoons. I guess everyone decided today was the day for sleeping in. Oh happy day that I wasn't in a rush to catch a school bus or make the kindergarten drop off on time, because I would be that mom who showed up late in the first week of school.

Breakfast at 9:00 am followed by cartoons and computer games for the boys and crawling and pulling and yanking and emptying and cruising for Annalyse. I loaded the dishwasher and stripped all four beds of sheets and started the wash. I hate changing sheets. I really do. I wold prefer to vacuum or clean bathrooms more than change sheets. But, on the flip side, my favorite night of the week is clean sheet night so that is my motivator as I yank and pull and stretch to get sheets on bunk beds, a crib, and a pillow top.

By 10:00 am Annalyse was down for nap and the boys tackled some school work. Micah learned more about habitats and animal families, while Grady learned about the differences and similarities between a globe and a map. Highlight of school work today: science and geography lessons offer many easy links to relate what they are learning to what God has revealed in the Bible.

The animals? God created them. Their habitats? God knew the perfect place for them to live. And guess what? God created you too and knows exactly what you need and promises to always take care of you.

The Earth? God created it - all of it! It's rotation? God keeps it spinning and considers it smaller than a flake of dust in comparison to all the stars and planets he controls. But guess what? Even though God holds the big things together, he also holds the little things together. Like you. He sees you and knows you and cares about you.

This - this - is school work at it's finest.

At 11:00 am we put the workbooks, pencils, and markers away and headed to the couch for a half hour of reading. This was a yawner for me, but my boys love listening to stories.

Lunch at noon followed by a run to the grocery store and gas station at 12:30 pm. We return an hour later, the boys dutifully help me carry bags in, and Annalyse insists on being in the center of the action and is underfoot for each turn I made while trying to put things away. I thought about giving her a plastic grocery bag to play with because I know she'd love the crinkle sound, but I decided that the suffocation risk wasn't worth it. I think I made the right choice.

Micah and Annalyse take afternoon naps from 2-3:30 pm; Grady Lee played Leapster and did several puzzles; and I folded sheets, replied to email, gulped another cup of coffee, and bleached the kitchen sink. I found specks of paint from yesterdays spaghetti experiment and it drove me nuts that there was paint in my sink. Now that it's gone my heart rate has returned to that of a normally-functioning person who doesn't have a care in the world.

After naps, we all head to the backyard for fun (fun being a relative word here) time in the sandbox and on the swing. Annalyse goes back and forth on the swing and the boys are intense in the sand with trucks and dinosaurs. I mosey around the fence and discover two snails and suddenly have two boys trying to feed them to their dinosaurs.

At 4:30 pm I head inside with Annalyse to get dinner ready and a few moments later, Grady walks in the door from work. He has a fresh haircut - the haircut looks great but the stylists' attempt with gel was feeble at best.

Around 5:00 pm Grady puts shish-ka-bobs on the grill and at 5:30 pm everyone has clean hands and we sit down to eat. I do the dishes and dust-bust around the table and chairs while Grady keeps everyone entertained in another room.

When the dinner mess is put away I take Annalyse and run to Target for a return and to pick up a few things. While there, the cutest pink satin bow accidentally fell into my cart and rather than put it back I decided I should just go ahead and buy it. Who am I kidding - I saw it across the aisle, stopped what I was doing, grabbed it, and promptly put it in my cart.

Annalyse and I made much better time running through Target than our usual experience of doling out crackers or lolipops to two boys while trying to shop.

We got home around 7:15 pm and the bedtime routines began. It's now 8:30 pm and it's my turn to go grab a shower and say goodnight to my duties as mom.

And, on a personal note to myself, I'm not a fan of documenting my life day by day. Too much work and too little excitement. Too much boredom to write about and surely too little fascination to read about. But, I'll remind myself what I said back on Monday, someday I'll look back and appreciate remembering the moments of monotony since life with kids is always changing.

So, cheers to the last three days of this week and what's yet to come.