My week without Zach
Zach serves as an advisor to the 16-18 year old young men at church and as part of that assignment, he had a chance to go to Canada for a week of sea kayaking at the beginning of August. (insert subtle hint that I think Zach should write a post about his trip on our blog) That meant that I had a week of taking care of the kids by myself.
Zach left early Monday morning. I thought I’d have a typical Monday morning which means I do laundry and chores and we don’t usually go anywhere. I did take the kids out for a quick trip to the post office to find out if they’d give me credit for any of the 13 stamps that Nicole used as stickers on a paper the day before (they gave me replacement stamps for most of them).
One thing I’ve learned about myself is that my mood can be closely tied to the cleanliness of my house. When my house is clean, I feel successful and happy. When it’s messy, I feel overwhelmed and stressed and I’m much grumpier.
I can’t say exactly when it happened, but at some point everything fell to pieces. I remember the point at which I started to despair. I had been working hard on keeping the youngest three close to me and out of trouble. I knew the older kids were making a cool off zone and saw them taking ice packs upstairs, what I didn’t know is that the girls floor was soaking wet (like an entire bucket full of water soaking) and there were blankets, books and bread crumbs all over the floor. I told Charlotte that she had to clean up the mess and that she could only leave her room to eat and use the bathroom till it was clean, but she laid around and made no progress.
By dinnertime I was so frustrated that I gave the kids a slice of cheese and some crackers for dinner. I was just waiting for one of them to complain so that I could tell them how I was going to make something more delicious, but they didn’t clean up their messes. I think they knew I was mad and no one complained and I set them back up to clean after dinner.
By 7:15 they had made no progress and I was ready for the day to end. So I started out bedtime routine early. I told Charlotte that we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere fun until her room was clean. She still laid around and made almost no progress and I went downstairs to fold laundry. By 10:00 I was exhausted and frustrated, the room still wasn’t clean, although Charlotte had finally made some progress on cleaning, and all 5 kids were awake (Thomas had slept a little, but the rest had yet to fall asleep).
While I was folding laundry after bedtime, Nicole made a mess with water and chalk:
I was not looking forward to a whole week by myself.
Charlotte finally finished cleaning up everything except all the bread crumbs and everyone fell to sleep.
The next morning, Charlotte vacuumed her room and we picked up all the toys and clothes in the rest of the house. I told the kids that if we had a good day, we’d have chocolate chip waffles with raspberry syrup for breakfast.on Wednesday. When everything was clean, I packed a lunch and we ran a few errands and then met a friend at the park. We stayed at the park most of the day and on the way home, we got our weekly free kid’s meals at IKEA for dinner. By the time we got home, it was nearly bedtime and everyone was tired from a long, fun day.
Wednesday they earned their waffles:
We spent a good part of Wednesday at a friend’s house celebrating her youngest son’s birthday with a BBQ and water fun.
I told the kids that if they were good on Wednesday, I’d let them finger paint on Thursday.
A friend who is a member of a pool invited us to come swim with her on Friday, so I told the kids that if they were good on Thursday, we’d go swimming on Friday. I got a babysitter and took Thomas in for his 6 month well check on Friday morning then we spent the whole afternoon at the pool. On the way home, we picked up a $5 Hot N Ready pizza for dinner.
Between the bribes and the long outings, the rest of the week flew by and we had a lot of fun together. (and since we were gone most of the day, the house stayed clean).
**I have pictures from our outings and finger-painting to share in other posts.