What a morning!

I woke up at 7:30 am, and the house was quiet.  Not a good sign, since the kids need to be up, dressed, fed, and out by 8 am.  I had been up with ds2 quite a bit, so I decided since the littles were all still sleeping, to let them stay home this morning.  Fifteen minutes later, I heard ds5 wake up and dd15 was telling him she’d help him find clothes to wear, so as soon as I heard that I quickly got up to help get them all ready to go.  In that short fifteen minutes, all five of the kids who hadn’t yet left to school managed to get dressed and pack lunches, while I quickly fried some eggs in butter, wrapped them in napkins, and put them in baggies for them as a breakfast replacement, in addition to the food we packed for the 10 am meal at school.  Not ideal, but much better than letting them go to school hungry.

It was pouring outside, and right after ds9 and dd11 left with ds4 and ds5 (they take them to school in the morning), I saw one of the two umbrellas had been left behind. I ran out to the porch in time to throw it down to them, so that they’d each be able to stay dry with one little next to them.

I went inside, and not even two minutes later saw that the littles’ boots were still lined up against the wall!  Apparently in the rush, they had each put their sneakers on by themselves.  Usually that’s fine, but in the heavy rain and with a fifteen minute walk to school, that wasn’t good at all.

Ds2 was feeling under the weather (that’s why I woke up so late this morning, since I kept waking up with him during the night), so I held him while I logged on to check my emails after sending the kids off to school.  I was surprised to see responses to a post on vaccines that I hadn’t even intended to send out, since it needed some extensive editing.  (If you commented and don’t see your responses, they were automatically deleted by the system when the post was deleted.)  I had been doing my computer work the night before holding ds, and it seems I pressed ‘publish’ instead of ‘save draft’.  Not the first time it’s happened, but still a rare situation.  I quickly deleted the post.

I was interrupted by a call from ds5’s teacher.  He had just gotten to school and was shivering and his lips were blue, and he needed dry clothes.  Could I please bring him some?  Of course!  So off I go in the rain (which thankfully lessened while I was walking there since I had no rain gear), getting thoroughly splattered by a bus driving by.  When I got to ds5’s school, I saw ds was dry except for the bottom inch of his pants, socks, and shoes, but when your feet are wet, all of you will be cold. I put on dry socks and boots, and he was right away nice and toasty.

I had taken along a set of dry clothes for ds4 as well, assuming that if ds5 gotten so wet on the way, ds4 probably also had.  So I went into his school with dry clothes for him, and the teacher told me he was drenched when he got to school, and what was I thinking to send him dressed like that?  Sometimes you have to make a conscious effort not to feel defensive when questions are posed in that way!  I told her that I thought between his lined rain resistant windbreaker and being under an older sibling’s umbrella, he’d be fine.  Doesn’t that seem reasonable on a rainy fall day?  I exchanged his wet shoes and socks for boots (otherwise he was totally dry), gave him an extra sweatshirt for warmth, and headed home.

When I got home, partially dry but slightly shivering, ds2 wanted to be held some more, so I looked at my emails again while I held him.  Then I read an annoyed sounding message from someone who had sent me the first message at 1:30 in the morning, wanting me to take care of something ASAP.  I asked dh if he could soak some barley while I took care of that issue, and a few minutes later, he came in to show me that the barley was crawling with bugs – really infested.  Yuck.

So that was all thrown away, I went to prepare some more barley for a thick stew for lunch (since I was out of coconut milk for the planned meal), when I saw that I was out of onions.  And someone had used the little  shopping cart filled with apples waiting to be made into applesauce as a step stool, apparently, because some ripe apples were smushed all over the floor.  And the cloth shopping cart material was all ripped and the flimsy metal frame broken.  Oh, well.  This is an example of the costs in having a big family – things that you might think would last a while are closer to disposable!

I made some soup, cleaned up the kitchen, swept up the house, noted with dismay at the clothes on the clothesline that hadn’t been taken in last night when they were dry, then got online to let those of you who saw the deleted post know why it was gone.  And then saw that somehow, it wasn’t deleted the first time.  So I deleted it again – I hope. 🙂

Some mornings are just like that, but I have still have hours ahead of me to enjoy a wonderful day!

Avivah