Summertime Blues

It has been a long time since I last wrote. I could blame it on the fact that it is now summer and I have all four children home with me and spend a great deal of time caring for and spending time with them (which really is partly to blame). But the truth of the matter is that I just can't think of anything worth taking the time to write about (or that someone would want to take the time to read!). I do not have the talent of making seemingly small things still amusing and witty (like Ilene!) so I just keep putting it off. However, my husband and oldest son are at the ward Fathers and Sons outing and everyone else is in bed so I decided to stop procrastinating and try to compose some of the small happenings going on here in the Hansen Household. Hopefully, then, the guilty feeling I get every time I read Ilene's blog will cease for a short while.

I decided to try out an idea I found on-line for keeping the kids excited and happy about helping around the house during the summer. It is sort of like a camp, but we don't really run it like that. Basically we plan certain fun activities to do each day when the kids finish their routines and chores in the morning and give rewards for their help so that they can earn small prizes and things. The only thing that we have done to make it sort of campy is to have a way for the kids to earn a sleep out in the family room. We did it once already and the kids loved it so that now I just have to remind them that they are trying to earn another fun night of games, stories, treats and movies in the family room and they shape right up and pitch in. This last week we were really busy spending time with family so things started to fall apart with all of our running around and Hannah said that we needed to get the house picked up so we could get it back to feeling like it did last week. It was nice to know that they could tell the difference and wanted to have the other type of home. I mean, it is hard to tell that your kids don't like living like pigs when they throw their garbage on the ground as nonchalantly as we throw ours in the garbage can, refuse to change out of their favorite clothes even when they are filthy, regularly trash their rooms (in a short amount of time) so that you can barely glimpse the floor, etc. You get the idea. It was just nice to know that they could feel a difference in the atmosphere of our home when things were more orderly and we were spending more time together. I found the time spent together helped me to appreciate the great kids I have rather than viewing them as mess makers and loud voices full of whining and demands. I am actually enjoying my kids more now. That was not something I was expecting from spending MORE time together. Before I always found that I needed to get away from them for a couple hours in order to enjoy that feeling!

However, talking about the camp out in the family room reminds me of the utter chaos we had that night. I had decided that we would just roast hot dogs and marshmallows over the grill to keep with the whole camp theme and was looking forward to this easy to prepare and clean-up meal. Well, I realized that we didn't have any hot dogs and so needed to go and get some. Paul was busy re-roofing our house that week and ran out of materials and so needed to run into Tri-Cities (45 or so min. away) and get more supplies, but he would be late getting home. Well, I thought that eating later would be okay since we were letting the kids stay up late and party anyway so I asked him to just get the few things we needed while he was in town so that I wouldn't have to load everyone up and go into Mattawa (where you pay an arm and a leg to get anything). He called up when he was at the store to get a refresher of what he was supposed to get so everything I felt that everything was going well . . . until he came home without the hot dogs! Luckily we had three ratty old hot dogs that I figured wouldn't kill anyone to eat so the kids could roast those and I could cook a few hamburgers to make up the difference. I turn on the grill and throw on the hamburgers and then I leave to go round up the crew who were all very busy and seemed as though they couldn't care less about food. I go back to flip the hamburgers and find that our grill had run out of propane! So now I drag everything back into the house to cook it. I throw the burgers on a frying pan and turn it on high so that I can cook everything fast (I mean Paul didn't get home until after 6 and I was trying to hurry here.) I run out to tell Paul that everything should be ready soon and to please bring in the kids. I get distracted, however, because Paul had just crashed his remote control airplane into the corn field by our house and wanted to tell me about it. We are talking for a while and then I remember the hamburgers and realize the noise that I have been hearing in the distance is the fire alarms going off in our house! I tell Paul to round up the kids and dash into the house to find charcoal burgers and a kitchen thick with smoke. So now I am rushing around opening windows and trying to get the alarms to turn off! I tell you, this simple meal just wore me out! Everything went pretty smoothly after that but I had no energy to present the meal in a nice or attractive way and I couldn't really get into a campy spirit cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over the stove in our kitchen so the meal was much more low key than originally planned. However, the rest of the night went smoothly and was lots of fun except for story time which took almost an hour to read 3 stories because each kid seemed to want to comment or ask a question after what seemed like every sentence! Needless to say, the kids didn't get into their sleeping bags with a movie playing until 10 o'clock. Next time I am not mixing dinner and camping out. It is too stressful to have such simple fun!

Other than that there really hasn't been anything happening and all my thoughts seem to be focused on the house and kids activities which leaves me feeling pretty low on the blogging ideas. I feel kind of in a whirl some days. Yesterday and last night provided some excitement in the form of a near drowning of my baby and an attack of croup in my oldest daughter, but I think I will save those stories for another blog. This one is already long and boring enough. It is only ten but my brain feels like it shut off around 2 or 3 this afternoon so I apologize for the non-creativity of it. Maybe I can make the drowning sound really dramatic when I blog about it. Don't hold your breath though. I never think that it is going to be long between blogs and then I realize that weeks have gone by and I haven't done a thing. But due to having all four kids at home I definitely make no promises for better behavior in the future!



This has nothing to do with any of the things I just wrote about but it is one of my new favorite pictures and I just wanted to share. My little Mozart-in-the-Making!

Wal-Mart trip from *@!?

Today I took my baby to the doctor and found out that he is wasting away! At 10 months he weighs only 25 lbs. 9 oz.! He has now gone down from the 97th percentile for weight and is now matching his height in the 90th percentile. : ) But this blog is not about Joshua. I want to rant a little about the time spent at Wal-Mart after the doctor. Living an hour away from any good shopping we take what we can get. In Othello, where our doctor is, there is just a Wal-Mart so that is of course where we headed to run our errands. However, this trip to Wal-Mart was one of the worst that I can remember.

I had the girls and Joshua with me and Emma spent half the time whining and crying, Hannah spent half the time telling me all the things she wanted to buy and sulking because I wouldn't let her (and complaining about how it wasn't fair that Daddy and I got to buy whatever we wanted but they never got what they wanted! If she only knew!!!), and Joshua had had it and needed a nap and bottle. I went into the store before feeding him because I wanted to get him a new nipple for his bottle first and I was only going to be in there for 1/2 an hour. I should learn by now that when you add children into the mix you are never going to get in and out of anywhere in the time you normally would. We did not leave Wal-Mart for an hour and a half and half an hour of that was spent in checking out.

Shopping of course takes longer when you have everyone constantly fighting over who gets to push the cart and who gets to ride where in the cart (and there are never enough spaces for all my children). And then of course I have so many helpful little shoppers that I have to keep curbing and replacing all of there "purchases". And of course Joshua does not want to be anywhere except in my arms and in case you didn't catch this earlier, he is 25 lbs.! I cannot do a lot of carrying and cart pushing and supervising without becoming quite stressed. However, with a lot of maneuvering of children and keeping a strong curb on my temper we make it to the checkout stand and the real torture began.

My first problem was that I got in an extremely slow line (not that there were many choices). My second problem was that when I finally got everything unloaded I found that we had lost the tag for the fabric we were buying. The register would not accept a typed in price so when we finally got everything rung up and paid for (try writing a check and holding a fussy 10 month old at the same time--NOT FUN) I had to go back to the craft section of the store and get a new price tag and then go back and pay for that. Imagine to yourself the great time I am having. I saw one Self-Check register empty so I thought I would just go there since I only had one item and was paying with cash. This turned into a big mistake. Hannah wanted to help and accidentally rang it up twice so then we had to wait for someone to come and help us and, of course, there was no one around to do that! I finally caught someone's attention after 5 min. and could pay but found that I was short just one penny in cash so had to dig out my debit card to pay and then the receipt wouldn't print!

All of this is frustrating enough but keep in mind that I had a crying baby who didn't want to be put down and a 3 year old who kept up a running whine/cry of wanting to be in the cart (which was full!) and wanting to leave and being tired of standing, etc.; and you can see why I was wound up like a tight spring. I still have not really come completely unwound and we have been home for many hours.

To make the perfect end to my horrible day in town we went to the KFC drive-thru for lunch. I thought everything would be good since I was able to avoid having another lunch at McDonald's (my children's food of choice). However, as we are driving down the road I reach for the mashed potatoes and gravy, which was all that I ordered and realized that they neglected to give us any spoons!!!!!!!!! I thought I would have to continue starving until I got home, but I decided to be creative. I dug around in our diaper bag (of course we were pulled over, what do you think!) and found a tube of Baby Orajel. I used the bottom edge of this as a scoop to shovel those potatoes in. Of course I spilled a bit on myself but I didn't care since we were just going home and I could change (or not!), but I just couldn't help thinking that this just put the icing on my terrible day cake!

I need bedtime so I can stop dealing with kids and messes and just relax. Hopefully then I will be okay! Sorry for this unloading but I really just needed to vent and Paul only now walked in the door. Life really is not that bad around here, it has just been a rather stressful day. I will write again when I feel better so that you will not worry about my sanity! : )