Weekends

 

A typical weekend day frequently starts a little after midnight when our bedroom door creaks open to spill the hall light on my face.  My three-year-old has one of those impressive little clocks that is red when she is supposed to be in bed and green when she can get up.  At midnight it is decidedly red.

On this particular day my son, who regularly takes morning duty on the weekends, is sick; I figure the best plan is to take the baby to the basement to sleep so she doesn’t wake the house at 6:30 again.  Sleeping with her is an adventure all its own because she can have night terrors and thrashes.  This night, she flops herself enough that by morning, she is upside down in the bed and I am cuddling/guarding myself from her feet.

After getting three heads of hair brushed and fastened in place, we are off to the church building.  I can’t help but smile when my three littles sprint when they spot my oldest daughter waiting for us in the lobby.  She helps us wrangle the girls into their respective Sunday School classes. We four adults make it to our seats moments before the service begins. While the announcements are made my husband whispers that he is grumpy.  I ask why.  He says it’s because he hasn’t kissed his wife all day.  I lean in and he is magically cured!

I am frustrated with myself during the service because I have difficulty focusing.  Usually, I take notes to stay on task, but this morning I assumed a more passive role and paid for it.  I range from praying for each of my kids and husband to listening intently to the teaching on Zephaniah—a favorite book because of the image of Christ dancing over us.  Interspersed between these heavenly-minded activities I discover the Bible app has a new “pages” feature, wonder if Derek Hough is still a Mormon, try not to fall asleep, and pray/imagine how great it would be if we could get a second vehicle.

Once home, I help the littles get out of their tights—one pair heads straight for the trash can. I take a 5-minute break in my room and answer some texts.  I get on Facebook for a minute—why do I do that?!  I see a wholly inappropriate reel that I send my husband and two choice friends who won’t think less of me.  Then I scuttle downstairs to cut my son’s hair, supervising the three-year-old, who is eager to ‘sleep’ up all the fallen hair with the broom that I keep reminding her to keep on the floor. 

After that, I ask my grown girl to take the chicken out of the oven as I run up to comply with a request to check a painful vulva to see if it needs cream—it doesn’t, but some is applied anyway. I give medicine to another daughter who is fighting yet another UTI. Then I check on the most recent poo to confirm that it does, indeed, look really cool.  I kiss my adult daughter before she goes to Bible study and feed the three littles.  My son joins us after a shower. My husband returns from grocery shopping just in time to kiss the girls while I kick them to the backyard to burn some energy.

Sending the girls to the backyard means hearing the slider open and close with a frequency that makes me wonder if we have an asthmatic donkey in the house.  Potty breaks, asking for things, telling on each other, asking for food—we did JUST eat.  Today is momentous because the neighbor boy was permitted to get tossed over the fence so they could play together ON THE SAME SIDE!  So exciting! The slider wheezes a few more times to announce how much fun they’re having. I bring the baby in because she keeps screaming her various protestations.  She decides to spend the next half hour cleaning up a single puzzle.  Works for me!

When my oldest girl returns from Bible study, she and I take the littles to friends for our weekly play time while our men (my husband and son plus her husband) play games.  They have three kids whose birthdays are just a few months before our youngest girls.  And the six of them are divinely matched in their cute/naughty ratios to be splendid playmates. 

Today is special because we share our monthly Yums box where we sample snacks from around the world.  Today is Belgium.

Our washer is broken, so I run my laundry through her machines because she is the rockingest friend ever.

We do our bedtime routine that includes a chapter from The BFG. After that, it’s movie time for the adults.  We are watching the Hunger Games movies with our oldest and tonight’s the fourth!