Hopping Along (03-21-2008)

I started a blog at Blogger because I changed email addresses and forgot my password at Wordpress. Most of the stuff I've written over the years is kind of dumb, but some of it might be worth preserving. I'm copying it over here so that when I forget my login info again, I can just copy it from this one place.

Naomi is up on crutches due to a mysterious foot ailment, so I’ve been doing my best (or so I claim…do any of us ever really do our best?) to maintain a hint of sanity around our household.  It has been a frustrating excercise in futility. I’m guessing all my excercise is really paying off, though, because I am becoming quite adept in this area….heck, I’m probably an expert in futility.
 
Through it all I am becoming much more empathetic to the struggles of Naomi’s plight as a homemaker (a term she disdains…she prefers the title “ringmaster”).  I took Amelia to Church Sunday morning, and in the two hours (ish) we were away, the other two kids had managed to dump a nearly full box of sticky, tiny, granular, rainbow colored cereal all over the living room.  Naomi, confined to the recliner had watched helplessly through through the fuzz of painkillers.

Actually, I exagerate.  The painkillers Naomi was on have been fairly mild and non-haze-inducing.  But, I imagine the flying rainbow speckles would have made for quite an experience if she had been a bit loopy.

Our kitchen is in a particular shambles at the moment, so we set up a blanket in the living room to have a “picnic” lunch.  Unfortunately, that first required vacuuming up the sticky, specks of technicolored cereal.  So the kids waited patiently as I cleaned up their mess.

Actually, I exagerate again.  The girls ran screaming into our room and slammed the door behind themselves.  Nathaniel scrambled up the couch in a desperate attempt to save his life from the certain peril of the vacuum cleaner.   Scale is apprently a concept lost on them.  But before I poke too much fun, Naomi recalled a time when she was terrified by the certain doom contained within the swirling vortex of an unstopped bathtub.   I have vague memories of a similar terror.

After we had had our picnic, and cleaned up the resulting mess,  I went to the pharmacy to get Naomi’s prescription filled.  When I returned, frustrated as always, from my pharmacy misadventure, I walked in the door to find a can’s worth of chips crumbled into the carpet.  Once more, the kids had taken advantage of Naomi’s state of helplessness and run amock in the living room.  Once more, I did another repetition in my exercise regimen.

We are fortunate to live close to both sets of parents, so in a state of overwhelmsed crisis, we called for backup.  Nathaniel went home with my mom, and Amelia went to Naomi’s folks.  We spent the evening with just Arden, who is the most self-sufficient of the three, but who was disappointed because she had to stay with someone “boring”.

We watched Ella Enchanted from the warmth of a blanket fort (apparently, it was snowing in the living room, or so Arden claimed) before playing a game of Dora the Explorer “Membory.”  She then got to sleep in our floor in a Dora Futon sorta’ thing.  I think that while the other kids are away, it will be a nice chance for her to spend some quality one-on-one (and -two) time with Naomi and me.
Hopefully she won’t be too bored these next few days with the “boring” one(s), but I guesss if things get to be too much of a ho-hum drugery, I can always fire up the ol’ vacuum cleaner to liven things back up.  The living room could use it again.