Home Comforts

Today Archer left for the week for the first time since Paul was born. We had planned to have my mom come up to help me while he was away, but alas, she is too sick to come, possibly from something she caught on her last visit 2 weeks ago, but who knows?

Last night as A attempted to launch the dishwasher, it made no indication of receiving his instruction. Nada. He vowed to attempt to fix it in the morning, and we left the dirty dishes in there.

This morning, we woke up to a very stinky house, as one of the dogs had diahrrea all over the house, probably due to her eating the dry rice off the floor from Micah's trucks/rice bin.

So before church, all that we could accomplish was getting ready for church and cleaning up the worst of the mess (in the kids' room, where the dogs sleep).

After church, we were having friends over for lunch, so Archer did another pass on dog-cleanup and I washed bowls so we would have enough to serve everyone chili in. We had a lovely visit with our friends, the kids went sledding, and we all parted ways to our separate afternoon events: they to Cub Scouts, us to a Barn Dance! We all had fun dancing (even Paul, safely snug in the baby carrier), and left from there to drop A off at the bus stop to catch the Express to the Boston Airport for his week in Florida. (It was -1० F here last night. Lucky dog.) So the kids and I stop at Costco on the way home to  return some things and eat some "pee-pah". Then at home I work on mopping up more of the kids room and putting clean sheets on the affected beds so I can put the people in the beds.  Then Lily and I went downstairs for some quiet time, I called Archer (whose flight was delayed and was still sitting in Logan), and discussed my plan for calling my cleaning lady for an emergency visit, because even after all the rounds of cleanup I was still finding  spots of dog poo I hadn't seen before on our painted brown floors, and the idea of soaking and mopping our entire house in addition to washing all of the dishes by hand this week was a bit overwhelming. He suggested I teach the girls to wash the dishes. I told him that it's not as helpful when you have to train, retrain (um, that's not clean), and referee arguments and complaints among your helpers, and hung up.

Since Lily was the only one still up, she and I started into the kitchen. Upon seeing the electric kettle I decided we might as well go all out, and turned the kettle on, told Lily to pick her tea, and got out the book on all things cleaning, and read the section on Dishwashing out loud while we waited for the water to boil. Then, we turned up the music and implemented.  I took all the dishes out of the dishwasher and sink, rinsed out the dishwasher, and started washing.

After about 15 minutes Noelle came down and said she couldn't sleep, and neither could Clara. Paul also woke up and wanted to eat, so I finished up the dishes and set the girls to washing, drying, and putting away the enormous bowl of cutlery, and made more hot water for tea. 

They worked cheerfully, and my kitchen looks great! Noelle even cleaned out the silverware drawer while she was at it, and we all had a few minutes of quiet sipping tea together before I put us all to bed.

All 4 of us girls are looking forward to the dishwasher being repaired or replaced, but in the meantime we enjoyed the comfort of camaraderie and cheerfulness, and a job well done.