A Springtime Miracle

I cleaned my kitchen. (That's the miracle. I could probably end the post here, which would also be a miracle. But I'm going to keep writing, because I'm avoiding the 90+ chemistry problems I have left to do--I've already done almost 40.)

My friend Tricia came over today with her cute family. She was getting rid of a stereo and I was wanting a new one for my kitchen since the old one no longer plays CDs or tapes (the radio works, though!), so it worked out wonderfully. Except that I was at school when they came over. But Drew and Owen loved playing with little Ethan and told me later that they want him to come over tomorrow.

I had to clear a space on the counter to put the stereo. I don't have any pictures of what my counters looked like before, but you can get a general idea from the background of this Samantha video:

Here is what my kitchen counter looks like since I gave it a good de-cluttering (I put so much stuff in the trash instead of finding somewhere else for it all; it felt so good!):

There are still some dishes in the corner that didn't make it into the dishwasher, but this is probably the least cluttered my counter has been since we moved here.

Here's the stereo up close and personal.

While I was at it, I de-cluttered the other corner of the kitchen, which before today has been the bane of my existence. Or at least a close second. See my early birthday present over in the corner?

It's a 30-year-old, used-maybe-once-or-twice Oster stand mixer that my mother-in-law found at D.I. for $40. She has one just like it that she got 30 years ago for over $200. This one came with the original user's manual and most of the original parts:

It came with 2 bread dough hooks, two beaters, a meat grinder, and a food processor with four different blades. The only thing missing was the smaller mixing bowl. I even threw away a bunch of junk from my cupboards so I'd have a place to put my mixer parts, which before today had been sitting in a Rubbermaid bin on my counter.

So thank you, Tricia, for the stereo, and in a way, for the clean kitchen. David thanks you, too!

Tiny Tails

I love having a little girl to dress up and make look cute. I plan on taking advantage of it while she's young; I'm sure the day will come when she'll want to pick out her own outfits and do her own hair. But for now, look what I get to do:

This looks worse than it is. I painted Samantha's toenails, but of course an 18-month-old doesn't want to sit around and wait for them to dry, so they got all smudged. Eventually, though, any polish that wasn't on her actual nails wore off, and her toesies looked really cute.

Samantha's hair is finally long enough for pigtails. Her hair is getting really long in the back; it's almost down to her shoulder blades when it's wet. So if I don't pull the front up, it looks very mullet-ish. (And she loves Oreos and hot dogs.)

Above are Daizy and Wubbzy, from the boys' favorite show (even Samantha likes it; she'll point to the TV and say "Wow Wow"). After I put pigtails in Samantha's hair Owen asked me if I'd give him "tiny tails like Daizy's." Then of course Drew wanted them too, so all my kids wore tiny tails for an afternoon.

I'm so jealous of Drew's hair. One of his pigtails, which is made up of less than a quarter of his hair, is as thick as my entire head of hair. It's just no fair!

Louis CK Gives Us Some Perspective

A friend posted this on Facebook. I love it! Too funny and too true!

My Mini Meltdown

This has been a rough week. I have had all kinds of homework and quizzes in my classes, along with a project for my statistics class. Pretty much everything was due Thursday. On top of all that, our ward had a dinner (on Thursday, too) and they asked me to make a centerpiece for one of the tables. The theme was "Angels Among Us" so I decided to draw some pictures representing all the people in the ward whom I consider my angels.
I didn't really plan my week very well so I ended up doing most of my Statistics project Tuesday night (I don't think I did anything productive on Monday, but that was so long ago it's hard to say for sure), then I polished it up on Wednesday night and spent most of Wednesday night drawing pictures. It took about four hours and by the time I got the kids to bed and my Stats project finished it was 11 pm. before I was able to start on my centerpiece. I thought the drawings turned out really cute, though.
Thursday was crazy beyond crazy. Wouldn't you know Samantha ran out of diapers, so I had to run to the store and get some. Then I had to dash home and get everybody ready so I could go to class and the kids could go to the sitter. We hauled the kids across the street to drop them off, but the sitter wasn't there. Slight panic! (I didn't feel bad or anything, though, 'cause I've done that to her once before, too. Oops.) I called another friend who was able to watch the kids on about two-minutes notice. I was only five minutes late to class. Good thing my professor is really laid back (he did call me a reject, but I'm pretty sure he was joking. I hope). Between classes, my friend Nirmal and I put some finishing touches on our Stats project, printed it out and handed it in.
After class, I had to run to the store again. I had also signed up to bring Mexican rice to the dinner, and realized that I didn't have any of the ingredients except for the rice and a can of tomatoes. Oh, and some cumin. So I made a quick trip to get some green peppers, some soup stock, a jalapeno, some garlic and an onion (we never have this stuff on hand because David won't eat anything that contains those ingredients). Then I dashed over to pick up my kids and dashed back home to make rice, feed the kids, clean the kitchen and put my pictures onto some paper flowers to make an actual centerpiece.
We made it to the church for the dinner, but we were about 10 minutes late. I walked the kids to the nursery and no one was there. I started to lose it. This whole thing had taken so much of my time and energy, not to mention my precious sleep time. And I was going to have to turn around and go home. One of my church friends came in to see why I hadn't returned to the dinner. She had no idea there were no babysitters; there were supposed to be, but they hadn't shown. She went to find out what was going on. By the time she got back to tell me a sitter was on the way, I was a mess. I felt really dumb for crying over something so silly because normally I'd just say, "Oh, I guess I'll bring my kids to eat with me and we'll just skip out early." But I was so tired and so stressed and had put so much energy into this thing, that this was the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel's proverbial back (at that point yesterday, "proverbial" was probably substituted in my mind with a few other choice words).
My girlfriends at church really are my angels, though. A couple of them sat with me until I regained my composure and then went in with me to get something to eat even though everyone else was pretty much already finished eating. I was sort of on the edge the rest of the night; every time someone asked me if I was okay, I started to well up again. But I made it through, and when I got home I got everybody to bed, I wound down by watching Ugly Betty (love that show!), then I crashed. I woke up feeling much better.
I still have a speech due Tuesday that I'm kind of stressed about because there's a lot of research to do and I'm having a hard time finding the right kind of sources.* We are only allowed to have a few Internet sources and have to have mostly books. So I've got a trip to the library scheduled for tomorrow, and hopefully it will be productive.
*I'm looking for statistics and laws about ladies who abuse drugs and alcohol while they're pregnant. I personally think it should be considered child abuse, so that's what I'm going to argue for my speech. But I'm having a hard time coming up with sources from a legal standpoint.

Here are the pictures I drew of my angels:

They're Calling Her Octomom?

Why not the Tetrakaidecamom? After all, she has 14 kids, not eight. Even though I was slightly appalled and a little annoyed when I heard her story, I appreciate the insights offered in this article and I agree on many of the points the author makes. Particularly this quote: "With our glorification of bizarre behavior, we dare the emotionally needy to shock and appall us. And then we slam them."

I'm going to try* to quit buying into it all.

*It'll be difficult; I do enjoy perusing the celebrity gossip columns on msn.com every now-and-again (read: every day).