What a day!

Today was one of the crazy days.

I've been working on organizing our house. A week from today, we will be hosting another homeschool family with 5 children for a few weeks. They are coming from out of state so that their baby can have heart surgery at a hospital here. Henry made the comment that our guests are going to get the wrong impression about us. Our house is normally not quite this organized.

So this is how my day went.

I got up around 6:30 am. Henry left to go jogging. I spent about 10 minutes doing weights (from the book The 12 minute workout). I then went into our office and got caught up on my blood and food records (this is to show my doctor when I see him next week). I then entered 4 bank statements into Microsoft money. I have a stack of about 25 more to go. I logged on and read my email and started working on a post (which I hope to finish tomorrow).

At 7:30 am, Henry got back from jogging and I went into the kitchen and started making breakfast (fried potatoes, eggs and cheese scramble). While my second daughter practiced the piano, my oldest daughter practiced her clarinet in her room. Sometime during all of this the kids unloaded the dishwasher and set the table. After Henry got out of the shower, we ate breakfast together while reading the scriptures. Usually, everyone just fends for themselves. We've started this new routine of eating breakfast together and having family scripture study. Otherwise, sometimes the morning scripture study gets dropped in the rush of things.

At 8:30 Henry left for work. The kids cleared the table and took care of the dishes. I did the pots and pans. While I am hanging a pan on the pan rack on the wall, the rack falls and all the pans crash to the floor. One of the screws came out. I put carpenter wood glue in the hole left by the loose screw and put the rack back up. While this is going on the older girls are reading books and the youngest is playing "Pets" on the computer.

At 9 am the fun begins. My project for the day was to get the playroom in shape. It is a disaster area which is almost never clean. Because it is our back porch/screen room, I usually just shut the door and pretend the mess isn't there. I had the kids take all their toys and things out of the room. This took about an hour. While I gave the kids a break, I vacuumed. After the break, we hand scrub the carpet with one of those sprinkle on, scrub, let dry, vacuum up cleaners. When we are done with this, the kids take another break while I spend 10 minutes working on the post I started first thing in the morning.

After the break, the we all sorted toys into sets. I encouraged the kids to pare down their collection of stuffed animals. After some negotiation, they parted with a few which a put in the bag for Goodwill. After 25 minutes of sorting, I vacuumed the playroom again. I get my other vacuum out and the kids take turns vacuuming and sorting. During this time, I sent the kids one by one to get a glass of milk, so they don't get too cranky.

I got a phone call from a school teacher interested in our homeschool group. He explained that they have decided not to send their son to kindergarten. I gave him the details about this months park and then went back to work on the play room.

While going through the paper recycle pile, I found a stack of unopened mail. All the kids pleaded the 5th. I give them lecture 253 which states that this is a bad thing to do and it shouldn't happen again. At 12:30 pm, I microwaved a few corndogs and the kids stopped for lunch. I kept sorting toys and junk. By the time we are done, I've thrown out 2 garbage bags full of stuff and have another bag for Goodwill. At 1 pm we are back at it. By 2 pm we were basically done. Henry came home about this time. Our van is at Mike the mechanic's shop (again). I needed the car in the afternoon (to drive the kids to gymnastics), so I then drove Henry back to work. On my way back home, I stopped at Big Lots and picked up some storage containers. When I get home we put the last few playroom items in the storage containers.

At this point, I remembered that we did not have our personal scripture study time. I told the kids to take a few minutes for personal study and I went to the bathroom. Next, the kids gathered up or changed into the clothes they would need for gymnastics. I drove the older two girls to one play date and the youngest to another. They all could have gone to the second play date, but I had already scheduled a play date for the youngest when the second family called this morning asking if the kids could come over and play.

I drove 15 minutes across town and dropped the youngest off. I stayed and visited for a few minutes. It felt so good to sit down. I left and drove back to Big Lots to pick up another storage container and to stock up on some odds and ends. I tried to figure out what to have for dinner. I walked to the grocery store next door. Taking to hear last week's Carnival of Homeschooling post about the homeschool mom who commented that she wished she had baked less bread, I bought a loaf of rosemary potato bread to go with dinner. (I went back and couldn't find which post it was, but I know I read it on somebodies blog somewhere in the last few days.)

I put the groceries in my car and drove to Good Will to drop off the bag of toys. I continued on to the first play date to pick up my youngest child. I then drove to the second play date and picked up the other two girls. I fed them teddy bear graham cracker cookies in the car on the way to gymnastics. After I dropped the girls off at gymnastics, I called Henry and asked if it was alright if I picked him up early since I didn't have anymore errands to run and it would be a waste of time to drive home just to turn around and drive back to pick everyone up in 45 minutes. Just as I was pulling away from the curb, my cell phone rang. It was Safeway delivery service asking if they could deliver my groceries early. I was scheduled to have them delivered at 7 pm, but I told them I could be there in 5 minutes. I called Henry back and told him the plans had changed.

I got home about 5:30 pm. I took a few minutes to unload and put away the things that I had bought at Big Lots. Before I could finish, the Safeway delivery truck was there. (The delivery service is free with a coupon, so I was using it to stock up on food before our guests arrive next week.) After the delivery truck left, I put away the groceries. I had so much frozen food, that I needed to clean out the freezer above the refrigerator. While I was cleaning it out, I found the missing knob from the lid to the piano mixed in with the frozen food. It had been missing for a few years. I used some carpenter's wood glue to put it back on the piano.

I also needed to rearrange the upright freezer in the garage to make room for all the supplies. We store our boxed goods like crackers in the freezer to protect them from roof rats which are common in our area.

By this time, it's about 6:30 pm. I jumped in the car and picked up the girls at gymnastics. I then drove to Henry's work to pick him up. By the time we got back to the house, it is about 7 pm. There was a pile of clean laundry heaped on my bed. (Henry and I have a system. He washes the laundry and I and kids put it away. On the drive home, I told Henry that I didn't have time to get to the laundry. When we got home, Henry took a few minutes to put some laundry away while I started dinner. The kids just collapsed in the now clean playroom and listened to Martin the Warrior on tape. While they are listening, my oldest daughter hand sewed capes for some of the stuffed animals. (They look really cute.)

Henry then went out to work in the garden for a few minutes with our youngest daughter. The older two helped clear and set the table. I opened a few cans of soup (that I had bought at Big Lots earlier that day) and sliced the bread. My youngest daughter came in from the garden with some cucumbers, green peppers, tomatoes and a few cantaloupes.

I cut up some tomatoes, green peppers and cucumbers for dinner. We sat down to dinner around 7:30 pm which is pretty late for us. After dinner, the girls cleaned up the dishes again and we sat down to play a few games as a family. The kids were a little grumpy about this at first. They were so tired, they didn't want to play. After a slow start, the kids had fun. We played a round of Uno and a game of Professor Noggin's Farm. At 8:45pm, Henry read to the family half a chapter from the Old Testament. The youngest fussed the whole time because her older sister was crocheting and she wanted that color yarn.

At 9 pm they were off to bed and I washed the pots and pans from dinner. I sat down at the computer to update my blood and food records again. Finally, I started to blog around 9:30 pm. It is 10:15 pm and Henry asked me if I am ready for bed. What I really want is a few minutes to myself. I haven't even had the chance to look at the comments we got today. However, if I stay up late tonight then tomorrow won't be very pretty.

Tomorrow is Homeschool Park day, so I can spend tomorrow afternoon sitting at the park, crocheting and talking to my friends.