Whew! It's Been A While

I have a problem.  Sometimes I have a project to do, a home improvement, or a thank you card to write and I build it up in my head until I feel like I have to block out an entire child-free day to get it done.  Those days, of course, are relatively rare, and so the projects pile up, the house remains curtianless, and no one knows how grateful I am (really, really grateful by the way, thank you for all your kinds gifts and thoughts, All-The-People-In-My-Life). 

I know no one else suffers from this sort of affliction, so just try not to judge me too harshly.

Most recently I have been neglecting this space.  Partially because I have such a big and exciting arrangement to share.  I would love to get into this in great detail and let you know all the thoughts, rules, discoveries, and joy in it, but partially because of this new arrangement, I am in a different sort of routine and haven't figured out where my computer time fits in.  To top it all off, this new thing seems so big that I haven't really felt right going ahead and giving you information on my salt dough ornament recipe, the progress of our cold frames, our freezer full of grass-fed beef, toothpaste failures, and all the other things going on here until I let you know the big and interesting news.

So here it is, in brief.  I'll get back to it someday soon, but for now, so we can all move on:  Our dear friends and their two dear children have moved in with us and we are sharing (quite beautifully) the space of our 1,000 square foot home.  Just when you thought it couldn't get more colonial over here, it does!  So now, for the first time in approximately fifty years, my home has the grand total of eight souls living and loving within its walls.  There really is so much to say about how this works, the numerous benefits, and the potential pitfalls (I say potential, because so far we haven't stumbled into them).  Any parent can appreciate how wonderful it would be to have another set at hand to help when you get into the danger zone with your kids.

Just last night I had a horrifying bedtime showdown with my darling three-year-old.  When I got up from giving her some pre-sleep snuggles she promptly lost her mind completely.  Her sister had to be sent into my room so she could actually sleep and the little one had to be barricaded into her room by a mommy against the door.  Just when I thought that maybe this was the day I would finally loose it and accidentally thrash my child to kingdom come (actually, I decided to read damnyouautocorrect.com on my phone to keep myself entertained and distracted and from twitching--that is one smart phone!) a vision of a mom came up the stairs to help me.  Oh, lovely, lovely Other Mama! We proceeded to hang out in the hallway taking turns silently putting a hysterical three-year-old back into her bed while the other husband in the house (mine was still at work) fed us hummus covered pita chips from the stairs.  When the hysterical child switched tactics from "I DON'T WANT TO GO TO BED!" to "I NEED TO GO THE BATHROOM" to "I FIRSTY!" to "HEY! YOU NOT MY MAMA, I WANT MY REAL MAMA" I had another mother there to keep my spirits up and my will strong.  With pre-boxing match pep talks and quick neck massages, I was able to (after one hour!) lay my child down, now stripped to a diaper) in the bed, cover, her up and have her not get out of bed until 7am.  Let me tell you how horribly this would have gone down if there had not been a friend around  to help me hold my space.  No, on second thought, I don't want to write anything down.  Just in case I do finally go completely insane, I don't want the authorities to think any of my actions were premeditated.  Let's just say that I'm not sure how I could have gotten through that particular night without help. 

This makes me have a lot of feelings and thoughts about the nuclear family.  These are the thoughts I'd love to go into in a lot more detail but haven't quite made the time for in my new day-to-day format.  But basically I think the nuclear family is bunk.  Really, what a rotten idea.  I'm no sociologist, but it doesn't seem quite natural, and now that I have something a little different going on for a while, and even though we're all adjusting to sharing our space with double the people, it is so much nicer to have more people to help with the junk and expand the love and happy moments.