To Complain A Little...

So. If I could complain a little?

Keeping the house clean around here is a little - no, wait - AWFULLY MUCH LIKE vacuuming the carpet while someone follows me around with a container and carefully pours sand in my freshly vacuumed wake. It's the crumbs all over the floor I just swept. It's the dumping out of the cars after I just picked them all up. Or the animal basket. Or the marbles. Or pulling books off of the shelves. Or dumping the markers out of their box. Or the crayons. ARRRRGGHH!!!

Gabe is old enough now that he has to endure the steely glint of Mommy's eye as she watches him pick up what he has gleefully kicked around the carpet. But Israel...sigh.

Israel is the child who will manage to spill the last teensy millimeter of grape juice I gave him to swig out of my cup thinking that there was no possible way he could get it on the floor. Hah. Israel manages to make a mess out of anything and everything. Israel loves strewing the dog food around the house and pouring that and the dog water "carefully" from formerly clean container to formerly clean container. Bury head in hands.
Israel needs his own personal man-servant to follow him around and wipe his face every 0.3 seconds. Chocolate, crumbs, snot, marker, suspicious substance, varied forms of slime - it's smeared. Shake of head.

And another thing. My children have this UNCANNY ability to sense the last few seconds that Zion is awake and barge noisily in as his eyes drift shut. Seriously, every morning, 9 times out of 10, as I'm nursing Zion back to sleep, almost the SECOND his eyes close, in comes one of the boys. And then we're all up. Again. Or if I'm nursing him in the chair in the living room, just as he has finally fallen asleep, Israel makes the noisest beeline ever in the whole entire world straight for us, attempts to climb into my lap as I whisper furiously at him, and then procedes to unleash the loudest bellow of protest you have ever heard. And then Zion is awake again. It really is quite maddening.

That Israel child is one of the more louder creations on God's green earth. Lots of loud screams, lots of loud tromping.

Ok. Back to blissful life of unhurried blissfulness...where the windows are always clean and where my children read at a sixth grade level by age three from all the quality time I spend with them after all the crafts we make together and the outdoor hikes we go on. While my self-laundering, self-cleaning, supper-cooking house does it all for me. And where we're all staggeringly healthy at all times. It's just great. Around here.