Mopping, Cooking, Laundry

What a weekend!! Saturday I finished up my cleaning to get my 15 hours in even though we had been gone on our trip most of the week. Our church has never had someone "official" clean the kitchen. It's always been left up to whom ever was the last one to use it. Ha! Ha! Anyone who's ever used a church kitchen knows that they are almost never truly clean... ours is no exception. When I started cooking dinner for the youth every Sunday night back in September, I realized then that no one really cleaned it completely when they were done. The floors and the walls behind the work tables and next to the stove were the worst, but not any more. I spent about 6 hours in there between Friday and Saturday getting it somewhat caught up to where it should be. It shouldn't take me as long to clean it each week now that I spent an hour with a magic eraser scrubbing the grease off the wall beside the stove and another 3 hours scrubbing the entire, very large, floor. It still looks bad, but I know it's clean.

Saturday evening we all came home from the church, had bacon and eggs for dinner and everyone crashed in our room for the night!!

Sunday mornings are always fun in our house...Smart Guy always leaves about 40 minutes before first service starts at 8:15 and there is no way I'm getting up that early on a weekend. So that means that I'm left to get everyone up and ready for church by myself. If I get it together and get everyone's clothes out on Saturday night, we usually make it to Sunday School. If I don't, then we don't make it until the 11:00 service. Considering the fact that I was still washing clothes for everyone to wear to church at 10:00 on Saturday night, we didn't make it to church until the 11:00 service. We went home, had a quick (read easy to clean up) lunch, rested until 2:00 or so and headed back to the church to make dinner for the teens. Last night's menu was salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, greens beans, corn, and apple crisp with ice cream for dessert. We cleaned up from that, went home where I promptly laid down on the couch, was quickly joined by Bee under my blanket, and we were both out cold and oblivious to the world in about 5 minutes. We stayed there nice and toasty warm and drowsy until about 11:00 and then we went and climbed into our cold beds upstairs.

Today has been a wonderful day of staying at home all day long. We sorted laundry... well actually my children sorted laundry while I took a shower at 2:00 this afternoon. I started to do this monumental task when I suddenly had a thought... this is a kid proof job. I transferred Mt. St. Laundry from our closet to the middle of our bedroom floor and then put things into each pile that would be necessary to sort all of it. It took all three of them about 30 minutes to sort it all... pathetic I know. Here's the funny part... I went and took my shower while they worked.

For those of you that don't know, I'm a big chicken little. I'm not as bad as I used to be but I still have everyone sleep downstairs when Smart Guy is out of town just in case there's fire or someone breaks in it would be easier for me to get everyone out by myself. I know, I think too much... that's just who I am. Anyway, one of the things I started doing way back along time ago when I first starting staying home with Prophet and would usually get my shower when Smart Guy wasn't at home was to turn on the hallway light and turn off the bathroom light while I showered. My thinking was that if someone walked into the hallway with the light on, I'd see the shadow because the bathroom light was off. Fortunately I never got a chance to test this theory. After awhile I just began enjoying the peacefulness of taking my shower in the dark, especially now when I get up first thing in the morning and have to get ready immediately, it's a good way to relax for just a few more minutes. So today while the kids sorted the laundry I closed the door to the bathroom all but a small crack for light enough to see if I was washing or conditioning my hair and jumped into a very hot shower with full intentions of staying there until it was no longer hot water (which means a very long shower in this house with our huge hot what heater. At our family reunion I think we took about 10 showers back to back, a few going on in two different bathrooms at the same time, and still didn't use all the hot water up). As I'm standing there enjoying the water, the door opens and the light comes on and someone asks "what pile does this go in", I answer, the door closes, with the light on. Same thing again, except this time, the light gets turned out and the door left wide open. Same thing again, except this time the light is left on and the door closed. And again, but this time, the light is turned off and the door is pulled completely shut, leaving this mama in the complete blackness of a bathroom without a window. After a few seconds when my eyes adjusted I decided it wasn't worth the cold air to get out and open the door a crack knowing that one of them would be back in a minute or so anyway to turn the light on.

So now, I have at least 13 loads of laundry still waiting to be done and I've already done about 6. Isn't there a saying that says something to the effect that there are two things for certain in life... death and taxes... I think I could add laundry to that for it never goes away!!!

All three kids go back to school tomorrow morning and I'm gonna work six hours while Bee spends the day with her daddy!!