Saturday Is a Messy Day

Saturday was the day of mess.  Not just one, but many, and ALL DAY.  And, of course, it was the day I had put all of my procrastinating hopes and desperate errands into. 
It even started out fairly well.  The kids and Cliff went camping for the night with my dad, and we all met up for breakfast the next morning at my parents' house.  It was wonderful, and I was glad that everyone was coming back home.  It was just too quiet without them, and it didn't help that I decided to watch Veronica Mars find the body of a girl in the ratty hotel ice machine.  Just the thing to help me go to sleep.  All by myself.  In my big creaky house.  At least Cliff talked me out of buying that huge body sized ice machine and putting it in the basement.
Anyway, after every one was home, I went downstairs to start some laundry and found the first mess.  Water was dripping from the ceiling in the laundry room.  I told Cliff, who was trying to sleep because he and a stick decided to fight all night over who had the right to sleep on a certain piece of ground, and he came down to stare at the huge ceiling paint water balloon that was forming and still dripping ominously. 
I ran outside to where Nadia was both drowning and washing our dog, and told her to turn the water off.  Back inside, Cliff found a bucket and poked a hole into the first big water balloon before I could take a picture of it.  Yeah, I told him next time we have a house catastrophe he needs to take a picture of it first so I can blog.  And maybe show the insurance people later.  The man really needs to look at his priorities in a crisis. 
The ceiling was still leaking, so Cliff turned off the water to the house and went online to check to see what we needed to do insurance-wise.  Good to see that we would be covered, but we still weren't quite sure what was causing the leak.  No laundry happened.
While this was going on, I went on to vacuuming.  Hey, chores still needed to get done, right?  I started on that and also started to wonder what would happen on Sunday and Monday if the water was still off.  We had stinky camp people, piles of school clothes to wash, and small bladders.  More small bladders would be joining us on Monday, as I have agreed to some babysitting during this new school year, and if the water was off in order to fix a pipe, what was I going to do?
So, we now have a water mess, a babysitting mess, and a floor mess because the vacuum was just moving the dog hair into neat little lines.
I was too angry to cry.  We were just barely getting ahead of our medical/dental bills, and now this.  I angrily tore the vacuum apart to find the problem.  I checked all the filters (there are 3) for clogs, the belt, the canister, and then the entire length of the hose.  Do you know what I found?  A sock and a bouncy ball. 
While reassembling the monster, Benjamin came up and asked me if I had seen a ball that he had "put away" in the vacuum.  I think I need to have another talk about how we help with cleaning up and chores.  It did give me a good laugh, though.
I came up to the kitchen to make lunch when I found the next mess.  Brandon had decided to get some koolaid, and spilled.  I am okay with that, but not with the whole leaving it on the floor until some one finds it with her foot.  He had to clean it up. 
We found out that the laundry room mess was caused by Nadia washing the dog and the house at the same time.  There is no caulking or sealant underneath the sliding glass door that goes to the back yard.  Hmmm.  Maybe that explains the frozen laundry room water pipes every winter.  Water was turned back on in the house.
I decided to rinse up any sticky residue in the kitchen before we left to go to the Chukars baseball game.  This was the final mess.  There was a pinhole leak in the water line to the fridge.  Brandon had spilled very little, and the rest had been from this leak.  We turned off the water to the fridge and will get a little coupling piece to fix it.  In the mean time, our ice maker is off.  Which is just fine with me.

War of the Wills

I am currently in a major battle with my children.  Mind you, if you see us, it will look like everything is normal.  But it is not.  We may be going through the motions of every day and the carnage may not be visible, but my dear friends, looks can be deceiving.  Let me tell you about it.

Nadia and Brandon are getting ready to go back to school.  Now, depending on the day or what disaster has recently happened, I am either very happy or very very happy about this.  Yeah, that's right.  No sadness at all.  These two have decided that the cool thing right now is to ignore Mom and just do what they want, and I am pretty sick of it. 
I think part of the new problem is that they are nervous about school starting, who will be in their class, who the teacher is, etc.  We find all that out on Thursday night.  School starts on Monday. 
This does not give them the right to ignore me or pull attitude, however.  How shall I engage on this battle front?  With the sneak attack.  I have agreed to watch some good friends of theirs in the afternoon.  Plus, I don't think they realize how much fun time will be cut with the beginning of school.  There are only so many hours left after school, chores, and homework.  What a shame it will be to let friends play with their toys or ride their bikes while mine are left to wallow on their beds.  Oh, and I will make sure to rub it all in.  Yeah, I checked, the Geneva Convention is cool with it.  Perfectly legal and perfectly evil. I am going to break them.

Benjamin is the bane of my existence right now.  Do you know why I call him the Smiling Terror?  This story and the background info should clear it right up for you. 
We have been potty training for about a month.  I tried to get it done before my trip out to see my sis in VA, and we had made some good progress.  It went a little down hill at grandma's, but really, can you blame a 3 year old who is getting spoiled every day for not always remembering to use the facilities? 
When I came back, we started back up again full time, and things seemed to be going well.  Until I realized that Ben will not go #2 on the toilet.  I have tried bribery, treats, shown him the cool big boy underwear he can have as soon as he keeps dry all the time, and have even gone so far as to give him cold showers.  This is what we had to do with Brandon, and I hated it.  But it worked. 
What I am really worried about is that none of these tactics have yet proved to be effective, and the other Sunday, he was quite insubordinate.  Let me set the picture for you:  it was the last 5 minutes or so of Sacrament meeting, and I was starting to clean up the crayons and such.  Cliff was up front, since he is the new ward chorister, and Benjamin started to help me put things away.  He picked up a crayon, then turned and smiled at me.  Then his eyebrows went red.  For anyone without fair children, this is the sign that business is about to occur.  Like, within the next 15 seconds.  What was I supposed to do?  Oh, and did I mention Caleb was sleeping on my lap at the time?  And the last speaker was still bearing his testimony?  I was stuck.  So instead of grabbing him by the arms and yelling, "HOLD IT!!!" as I ran down the aisle and out the door, I had to quietly watch my defeat.  It was over in under a minute.  We went quietly to the rest room, where we had yet another talk about how appropriate places to go do not include in your pants. 
I am still stumped on a line of attack for this one.  All I know is it is ON.

Tiles

 Oh, I am finally back.  Don't ask me why, maybe it's the strain of trying to potty train a stubborn 3 year old, but I just haven't had the energy to blog lately.  Until I realized that none of you have seen my new kitchen tile, and what a truly rude and selfish thing it would be to not let everyone see it.  This first pic is of the tile and everyone helping to clean it, which will never happen again.  It is a definite go in the "I will scrapbook everything we have ever done...some day" pile of pics.

 This is the before pic.  Can you see why I didn't ever want to spend time in my kitchen?  Do you know how depressing it is to try to clean this, have the floor eat your mop, and after all your hard work, it still looked dirty?

 This is the close up.  I chose a 20 inch tile with a thinner 1/8 to 1/4 inch grout line. Yes, I like flirting with danger.  In alabaster. It is the same color as the lighter shading in the tile.  I really worried about those choices and whether or not they would all tie together with what we currently had in the kitchen, and almost went with a different colored tile and grout scheme.  Or theme.  Or thing. Or whatever.  Hey, I'm a stay at home mom, not a designer.

Look at that.  Absolutely gorgeous.  Now if only I had the same luck with my hair coloring choices.  But that is a different post all together.