Among other things...

Yesterday I spent nearly the entire day doing the unfun jobs that need to be done far too often. I mopped the kitchen floor, moved kitchen appliances to give the counters a thorough wipe down, cleaned and polished the wood of the entry way, and vacuumed the rest of the flooring. I even cleaned the toaster. It is amazing how four hours of work can be undone in a matter of minutes. Still, project "Home Beautification" is still under way at the Burtons.

Apparently, Zack feels his room is beautified when he opens his dresser and tosses all of his clothes and Andrew's clothes hither and yon. He also enjoys flipping his mattress off his bed. I am still struggling to impress my vision of room beautification on him. Needless to say, we are still lightyears away from a Pottery Barn Kids room photo shoot in the boys room. Even as I type this, I can hear him upstairs rearranging his furniture rather than taking his much needed nap.

Mylie is growing more and more active. She is no longer content to the confines of her exersaucer or jumperoo. She enjoys crawling up behind me and grabbing onto my pants to pull herself up. Thus I am forced to walk extremely slowly, as she clumsily attempts to follow me. As I was doing the lunch dishes yesterday, I left the dishwasher open as I walked to the table to get more of the kids dishes. When I returned, I found my little My-My bent over the open dishwasher sneakily trying to snag anything she could reach in the dishwasher and giving me a big slobbery grin with various utensils hanging out of her mouth.

Andrew has been quite a good helper lately. He has been putting his dishes into the sink without me even reminding him to. He will put every toy away in the basement for a penny, which makes us both happy. He is convinced that he is filthy rich, because he counted that he had over twenty coins in his coin jar. About seventeen of those coins are pennies. I love kids.

Madeline came home from school and confessed that during lunch she had decided to pull up her skirt and show her underwear. I was not very happy. She explained that she just wanted to show her friends at school the picture of Minnie Mouse on her underwear. Note to self, no more character underwear. After our discussion, I am 79.4% certain that she got my point that such displays are inappropriate, and I am about 82.0138% sure she won't do it again. These are just odds that I will have to accept. It is scary to be the "Waaaah-Wah-Waaaah-Wah" adult end of a Charlie Brown-esque discussion.

Last night, during a quiet moment before Maddie went to bed I attempted to explain what it is like to be a parent. I said that a mom can look at her little children and be so amazed by them and wonder what incredible things their futures will hold, like what if this one will be the president, what if that one will find a cure for a disease, will this one be a famous writer...

At this point in the conversation, Maddie leaned in close, rested her elbow on the armrest of the couch, placed her chin in her hand, looked directly into my eyes and matter-of-factly said, "I know what you mean, Mom. I'm pretty sure that if I had been born a boy I would grow up to be the prophet. But, I am pretty sure that you have to have the priesthood to be the prophet and I'm pretty sure that only boys have the priesthood." She said it with such conviction that I was almost convinced that I was only one chromosome from being the mother of a prophet.

Ben has exactly one week of his life left in his 20s. On May 31st, Ben will turn 30. He has been dreading this birthday for the past five years. I find his apprehension amusing. He lives in fear of finding a gray hair. He really doesn't have any gray yet. Still, I keep reminding him that there is a whole line of hair coloring Just For Men. I don't know what the big stigma is in his mind about turning 30. I guess that the 20s are just the last hurrah of fun. When you turn 30, then all of a sudden you enter grown up world. Wouldn't you think that nearly eight years of marriage and four children would be a sign post for having already reached grown up world? Oh well, he can be Peter Pan for the next seven days.

Now that Mylie is awake, I am going to go try to chisel out some formula for her. Maddie tried to be helpful yesterday by making Mylie a bottle. BIG MISTAKE. She thought it would save time if she just poured some water into the nearly full formula canister, so she could just pour it into the bottle. This was disasterous on so many levels. She made this concoction in my spotlessly (MANY hours of mom slaving in the kitchen) clean kitchen. I was forced to throw away many bottles worth of formula scoops that were jellified, and now I am to the less-damaged level that will work, but requires all my energy and strength to chip out. I know that Maddie really only wanted to help, and that she was certain she had found a fabulous new approach to bottle making. I couldn't be too angry, because I once had a similarly disastrous stroke of genious. When my parents were out and I was babysitting my younger siblings, I made Jessie a bottle. I poured cranberry juice in it, since that child had recurring bladder infections, so cranberry juice was her drink of choice (this was before she discovered her famous Orange Juice and Diet Coke mixture). Anyway, she wasn't supposed to have cranberry juice upstairs. But, I put her in her room with it anyway. When I went in to check on her later, she was asleep and there was an enormous puddle of dark red cranberry juice in her white carpet. Well, this happened the same year that I was finally allowed to use pens instead of pencils at school, so I had learned the purpose of white-out. This was white carpet. Unfortunately, I did not have any white-out. So, I went to my parents bathroom for the next best thing...my mom's white deodorant. It was quite surprising to me that the deodorant just made clumpy streaks through the cranberry juice, semi-hardened several chunks of the carpet, and who would have guessed that if you rolled deodorant out for only about 1/2 an inch it would just fall off its base. So, I was in MUCH trouble with my mom when she discovered that I had not only ruined the carpet but also her deodorant. Speaking of deodorant, this morning I found Zack coating his neck with my deodorant. He smells so Spring Fresh today, but that's our little Secret...