by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
I run a monthly book club, because I like to read and I love getting together with a small group of women to chat about our husbands books. We meet once a month, stuffing our faces with chocolate (because it’s the only time we get to eat it without kids or husbands around) and pouring each other wine until way past our bedtimes.
Husband and the boys know when it’s time for my book club meeting, because I’m typically in the kitchen trying to finish icing those dark chocolate brownies with the dark chocolate buttercream icing I just whipped up in a bowl (because I’m also OCD about the food we eat). (Also, just a note for all you foodies: Don’t ever ask me for recipes, unless you want to get angry enough to karate chop my face. I’m terrible at recipes. I know how I make things, and I’m not sharing. Mostly because I don’t even know how it happens. I just pour and mix and get lucky. My mom called me the other day asking how I make my delicious icing. “Um…butter, vanilla extract and powdered sugar,” I said lamely. Just look it up, guys. We live in a Pinterest world, after all.)
My book club ladies and I meet late enough in the evening where I can help with after-dinner chores and bathing the boys and even beginning their evening story time so Husband isn’t completely overwhelmed with putting six boys to bed (It takes 16 people to do a good job. Since it’s just the two of us most of the time, that means we’re doing a…perfect job, of course.).
But sometimes my pumpkin sugar cookie experiment doesn’t quite (shockingly!) turn out the way I really wanted it to, and I have to take a quick trip to the store for some Unreal chocolate candy. In which case, I usually leave right after dinner and so Husband has to execute the after-dinner chores six-on-one. He says he’ll be just fine. I think it probably won’t happen. He says of course they’ll do their chores. I think yeah right. I don’t say what I’m thinking, of course. I wouldn’t want to defeat the man before I’m even out the door. I’ll let him try.
You can see from the picture that after-dinner chores obviously didn’t happen. Why are yesterday’s onions still sitting in that bowl, on top of the cutting board you cut them on like they didn’t even move? Answer: Because only a crazy person would touch after-dinner chores with six boys and only one parent home to referee. I totally understand. I don’t like it, but what am I going to do? Certainly not stay home.
I’ve been running this book club for more than a year now. I have returned home at 11 p.m. to Husband playing some songs to friends on periscope and an 8-year-old still reading upstairs in the library because someone forgot to tell him it was time for lights out. I have returned to 3-year-old twins dressed in their seven-month-old brother’s pajamas (It’s not even spandex. It’s a second skin with dinosaurs on it.) because someone didn’t check to make sure they weren’t tearing their room apart with already-folded clothes. I have returned to a 5-year-old curled up on the floor outside our bedroom and Husband in the bedroom with headphones on watching a movie.
It’s not that Husband can’t handle six boys. I mean, he was a boy himself once. He’s told me horror stories about the things that he and his brother used to do (We have so much coming). We just do things differently, that’s all.
Yeah. We just do things differently.
So, when I’m done shaking my head about how that rock-hard piece of bread possibly made it past the eyes of the parent on duty who wasn’t me and into the top bunk of a 3-year-old, where it was smashed all underneath his thrashing body during the night (because that’s how 3-year-olds sleep), I usually just thank Husband for trying again.
Cleaning up a toilet papered bathroom is totally worth taking a mom’s night out. Every single time.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Dear Mr. President,
I totally get it. I know that full-time workers deserve a break. We work really hard, week after week, month after month, year after year, helping our great country stand tall with the other countries of the world. It’s really nice to have Labor Day to remind us that we’re appreciated and honored. I love getting a day off just as much as the next person.
The problem is that Labor Day isn’t also Parent Labor Day.
We just started the school year, and I just packed these boys off to school, and now you’re sending them back home to me on my holiday? That’s not a holiday. Can I please go to work instead?
I miss my kids when they’re in school. I really do. But not enough to spend a holiday with them just eight days after school started in the first place. Not enough to deal with the mess they can make in 30 seconds of being awake. (See Exhibit A, below.)
This is my dining room table. We don’t eat here, because kids and hands don’t mix with a glass-top table (I know. We bought it before we had kids.). But still. This is the first thing you see when you walk through the doors of our home. This happened because my school boys get Labor Day as a holiday, too.
Does this look like a good Labor Day holiday? Maybe for them. Not for me.
You’re probably thinking that maybe I should have just taken them out of the house for the holiday, and you’re probably right. The problem is, everything’s closed. Go to the closest national park (or any park), because they’re always open? It’s still a thousand degrees here in Texas, and we all turn into red-faced monsters when we’re outside sweating just from sitting. Take them shopping? No thanks. I’d rather do a hundred burpees. Plan fun activities with them? Well, the 8-year-old thought he’d take care of that himself, and now we have backyard dirt, unidentified hair and some kind of dead bug on the kitchen table because he wants to look at them under the microscope. I’d say that’s enough fun for one day.
So. Labor Day holiday? I beg to differ. My living room looks like a Pattern Play and puzzle explosion, the dining room table makes me want to cry, and let’s not even mention the kitchen table. *Shudder* On top of all that, the refrigerator is hanging on by a vine of grapes, because the kids are home and it’s never, ever closed when kids are home. (They’re going to regret it when they go back to school tomorrow and there’s nothing to eat in their lunches.)
So I’d like to propose that next Labor Day we make it a Parent Labor Day, too. Parents get to spend the whole holiday without their kids. We’re never off the clock when we’re a parent, so a holiday would be nice. We’re raising the future laborers, after all. We deserve a holiday from the work.
I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
A very tired parent whose Labor Day really was a labor day, except way, way, waaaaaaaaay harder than work.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Want to know how I can surely tell that school has started?
Well, of course there’s the amazingly quieter house. That’s a given. But that could just be older boys who are playing on their scooters out front and twins who are locked out back and a baby who’s just as sweet as can be.
There’s also the refrigerator that actually stays closed for an hour at a time, but that could just be kids away for the weekend (any takers?).
No, the biggest clue that school has started in my house is the stack of papers sitting on my bed.
Those are the look-at-later papers.
All three of the boys in school came home with 400 pieces of paper in their red and blue folders (It wasn’t really that bad. It was only 398 papers.) on the first day of school. I had to wade through all of them, because some required further action, like a signature or some kind of permission or even more school supplies. Some of them just went into this pile, to be looked at later (or never, which is much more likely).
We started the school year sprinting. We were so organized I was impressed with us. Everybody picked out their clothes the night before, the backpacks were all hung ready to go, and even the school lunches were packed in the fridge. And then the first day happened and all.these.papers. Is it really necessary to send 5,000 school lunch menus when our kids don’t ever eat school lunches? Is it necessary to send three copies of the same exact information sheet? Is there a place where I can opt out of papers?
Because I know exactly what’s going to happen. It happens every year. We will start off great. I will come down to dinner every evening and sort through those papers in five minutes or less, placing some in a recycling pile, some in a look-at-later pile, some back in the folders because they need returning.
And then I will forget I ever had a look-at-later pile, and by Christmas there will be so many papers we could have saved sixteen trees.
I mean, if this is the price I have to pay to have a little peace from an 8-year-old whose daily grand ideas include starting a vegetable garden in our front yard (cucumbers and carrots are starting to grow in the rose garden) and selling water art paintings out by the mailbox where I can’t even see him, a 6-year-old who’s always hungry and will eat a 2-pound bag of apples if I’m not paying attention, and a 5-year-old who likes to snack on Tom’s toothpaste, then I guess I’ll take it.
Just don’t ask me if I saw the list of school supplies they need for GT. It’s buried somewhere in my look-at-later pile, so. Cut me some slack.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
I mean, I can’t even get mad about it. THEY’RE LOVE NOTES. From my little boys. How is a Mama supposed to get mad at her boys when they leave her something like this?
This is a custom shelf my husband built for Mother’s Day to cover a terrible burn inflicted on the side of our living room chair by a house guest. We’re really good at starting, but not so great at finishing, so this shelf has been waiting for paint for three months now. Half of it is green and half of it…
Well, now the other half’s kid-handwriting art.
I’ve watched a progression of this art. One day I walked down the stairs and was met by a black love note on the corner of the shelf. Another day I walked downstairs and discovered the 6-year-old had gotten into the action, too, this time with red. Yesterday I saw the 5-year-old’s contribution, scrawled in red pen and all capital letters (not pictured here).
Now. My kids (at least the bigger ones) know and understand that it’s against the house rules to write on the furniture. But, in a moment of such deep and overwhelming love, they just had to express their feelings in a way that would forever and ever (or at least until it got painted) let me know their devotion. Like the picnic tables in junior high where kids would scratch their love notes and then scratch them out three days later. Like the desks in high school where couples would declare their undying love under a worksheet and then try to rub it off a few months later.
At least that’s the story I’m telling myself.
Because otherwise the story would be that my kids saw this bare piece of wood that was going to, eventually, be painted anyway and saw a prime opportunity to defy the rules and make their mark.
It surely can’t be that.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
My Sabbath week got off to a fantastic start.
You see that thermostat? It’s not lying.
On Friday, after I’d logged the last writing hour I would log for an entire week (I practice a week-long Sabbath every seventh week to prevent burnout), after I’d sat through a 1.5-hour podcast recording with my husband, I happily went downstairs to feed the baby before we were scheduled to drop our twins off with my mom, who (THANK GOD) wanted to take them for a couple of days.
It was a GREAT day. And then I saw the thermostat.
Though set at 78 (about all we can ask from it in three-digit temps), it was hitting about 82.
“What’s going on?” I said. Husband was in the kitchen, getting some water before he would wrangle the boys into the van.
He looked at the thermostat. “It’s just having trouble keeping up,” he said. “Because it’s so hot outside.”
I had a feeling he was wrong. But, you know, he’s a man. He knows more than I do about these kinds of things.
My three older boys kept coming over periodically to distract the baby and make us leave three hours later than we would otherwise, and every time they opened their mouths, the thermostat climbed a degree. “Close your mouths,” I said. “Your hot air is canceling out the air conditioner’s efforts.”
Husband came in to see if the baby was finished, and I pointed at the thermostat again. “Look,” I said.
The numbers blinked 88 degrees. Husband blinked at me. I saw his shoulders sag a little. He disappeared out back, and when he came in, I knew it wasn’t good news.
The air was quitting. In the middle of a Texas summer, where temperatures reach 10,000 degrees. Summer’s the best, isn’t it?
He called around, because of course he was going to fix it himself, but the place with the part wouldn’t be open by the time we’d dropped the twins off and made it back to town. They weren’t open on the weekend, either. Which meant we’d have to spend an entire weekend without the modern convenience of air conditioning.
“We can do it,” I said when Husband got off the phone. “They used to do it all the time back before air conditioning was around.”
“They also used to die much sooner,” Husband said, in uncharacteristic pessimism.
But I, in uncharacteristic optimism, knew we’d be just fine. In fact, I proposed starting a project called “The Little House on the Prairie Project” wherein we’d spend the rest of our summer without air conditioning and I’d write a book about how we survived. Husband said it should be called “The How Long Until they Kill Each Other Project.”
When we got back to the house without the twins, the temperature was at 90, but the good news was, we’d passed the hottest part of the day. We opened all the windows and let the breeze through.
“This isn’t so bad,” I said. Husband shook his head.
“No,” he said. “We couldn’t.”
“We could totally do this, though,” I said.
“We’re fixing the air conditioner,” he said.
I’m glad I listened. Because by the second night, when there was no breeze coming through the open wide windows and we all just lay in our beds with sleep far, far away in some other country, I knew there was no way my children would survive a summer without air conditioning, mostly because my temper was all hot and bothered and so was Husband’s. It’s weird how heat can do that to you. I’m just glad the twins were gone, because one more straw…
Husband fixed the air conditioning. And we lived happily ever after.
(Mostly.)
