Real thing that just happened.

Emma (5yo) runs into the kitchen and yells: Momma, I was just sitting on the toilet and Aubrey (7yo) was trying to pull my tooth out but Daddy said it wasn’t ready yet and I should just go to bed.

Sadie (3yo) runs screaming incoherently through the kitchen naked. She circles the room twice before going to the bathroom to retrieve her string cheese which she dropped in the tub while bathing.

Sadie: PEEL IT Momma. Peel it!

Me: I don’t WANT TO FEEL IT.

Make them go to sleep. Please.

For Christmas my oldest daughter, Aubrey, was given a collection of classic books that had been revised for her reading level. She tore through “Little Women” and learned several new words while reading “Anne of Green Gables.” I didn’t even realize she’d read “Huckleberry Finn,” until dinner last night.

All three of my daughters sat side by side at the bar in our kitchen, happily eating pancakes and bacon when Aubrey said, “You know… I realized something reading Huckleberry Finn…”

I raised my eyebrows as she continued.

“Huckleberry Finn and Emma are sort of the same type of character,” she said, referring to her five-year-old sister. I tried not to giggle. Emma is the most mischievous of my children. I knew exactly what Aubrey meant but I wanted to see where she was going with this.

“How do you mean?” I asked innocently.

Emma crunched her bacon, flipped her hair out of her eyes and listened intently.

“Wellllll, they both have a lot of adventures and they like to tell lies…”

I reflected for a moment to the four laundry baskets worth of Emma’s folded clothes I had recently discovered shoved under every piece of furniture in their shared bedroom and all the empty laundry baskets that had been presented to me with a smile. In all fairness to Emma, she’s not mean spirited or devious, just a little creative but once you’ve given her specific instructions she’ll obey you to the letter. She’s now given a full laundry basket and instead of saying, “Put this away.” I say, “Put these where they BELONG. In your drawers and in the closet, understood?”

But regardless, calling Emma a liar seemed a bit harsh so I opened my mouth to defend her, “I don’t know if that’s a very nice thing to say about your sister…” I began as Emma thoughtfully tucked her hair behind her ear and nodded.

“Well…. Yeeeeaaahhh.” She agreed.

My husband threw in his two cents, “But Aubrey, Huck lied to protect the fella he ran away with remember? What was his name?”

“Oh, yeah! Jim! That’s right! Huck was trying to help him. Emma just lies because she likes it.”

I made eye contact with Emma, who shrugged, giggled a little, then swiped a pancake off her sister’s plate.

photo credit

Aubrey and Emma, my seven and five-year-olds, have gotten quite good at riding their bicycles. They hop on their bikes and ride around our yard and make laps up and down the driveway. But after several days of circling the trampoline they wanted to branch out and ride their bike to a park less than half a mile from our house. They aren’t big enough to go by themselves so I borrowed my best friend’s bike which has a baby seat attached for Sadie.

I buckled Sadie into her seat and spoke to her sisters, “I’m going to ride on the center line and y’all stay to my right, okay? If you don’t listen and do exactly what I say we will come home. Got it?”

The girls nodded their blond heads and jumped on their bikes. I looked up and down our street and waited until there were no cars in sight to yell, “Go!” We successfully crossed our first street and rode our bikes down a quiet side street headed towards the park. I pedaled slowly to wait for them. Emma wobbled a bit on her bike and looked up at me.

“Don’t look at me Emma! Watch where you are going!” I said as she veered off the road and rode into a ditch and a huge mud puddle.

“I’m okay!” She yelled, dragging her hot pink bicycle out of the ditch and coating her new shoes with mud.

I sighed and waited. We had two more intersections to cross before we got to the park and I was beginning to think this wasn’t the best idea. Emma climbed back on her bike.

“Alright, let’s go!” We had moved approximately 20 feet when I saw a car turn onto the street ahead of us, on the opposite side of the road. It was still several blocks away but I told the girls, “Stay to my right!” I figured if I kept them pinned between me, riding down the center line, and the side of the road, the worst thing that could happen is that someone would end up in a ditch again. But as I yelled for the girls to stay right, Emma swerved hard to the left, crossing over the center line behind me and yelling, “LIKE THIS MOMMA?”

“NO!!! OH MY GOD! YOUR OTHER RIGHT! EMMA!! GET BACK ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD!!!”

I could feel hairs on my head turning gray and I’m sure I shaved a good three years off my life.

“Get off your bike and come over here!” Emma jumped off her bike and walked back to the right side of the road. The car turned off the street before it even reached us.

“From now on, just get off your bike and stand on the side of the road if you see a car coming,” I instructed. It should be noted that at this point I could still see our driveway and should have taken the opportunity to turn around and go home, but did I? You know I didn’t.

We pressed forward, Aubrey and Emma hopping off their bikes every time a car was within sight. We crossed a busy intersection successfully and finally, we could see the promised land.

I rode down to a low spot where I could ride my bike across the grass and rode as quickly as a could across the small hill. I stopped and turned to make sure Aubrey and Emma were getting out of the road and saw a truck turn onto the street behind them. My bike was now sitting on a small incline and as I turned to yell at the big girls to get off their bikes and walk the rest of the way, the weight of my preschooler on the back of the bike combined with the bike’s position on the hill, joined forces and the bike began to fall sideways. Because it was so heavy on the back, I couldn’t stop it from falling and it knocked me sideways as it fell. Sadie cried from her seat (which curved around her, thankfully protecting her arms, legs and her head) as I pulled myself out from under the bike and lifted it back up.

Aubrey and Emma rushed to my side to check on Sadie and me, and the truck slowed as it passed the spectacle on the side of the road. I prayed they wouldn’t stop to check on me— the only thing more humiliating than falling off a parked bike with your baby strapped to it would be acknowledging what just happened with a perfect stranger.

When my family of five heads to The Farm in Curry, Ala for the weekend we are ready for the chaos that comes with it. Including my girls, there are nine cousins— all girls— ranging in age from 12 months to 12 years. The three oldest girls make excellent babysitters and will pick up the three smallest cousins and pop them up on a hip faster than you can say, “Where’d my baby go?” Nine children and around 8 adults stay in my in-laws house, sharing 1.5 bathrooms, kitchen duty and and shared insanity.

There is no such thing as privacy at The Farm, as my mother-in-law, Plum, lovingly pointed out one evening. I was laying in the bed in the room Zeb and I shared with Sadie and laughed until I had tears streaming down my face when I heard Plum banging on the bathroom door downstairs.

“What are you doing?!” She yelled through the locked door, “THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS PRIVACY!”

Shower times should be chosen wisely. You don’t want to get in the shower after Emma and Mary Frances, as they use it as a rinsing station between rolls in the sand pile and shower shoes are required. You also don’t want to get in the shower after the tweens as there will be no hot water left, and you don’t want to get in the shower while any one is running the dishwasher or the washing machine as you will alternately scald yourself and/or freeze to death.

The Farm People, as my children adoringly refer to all of their Daddy’s family, are amazing folks— cut from the same cloth as Laura Ingalls Wilder. If there ever was a nuclear holocaust I’d hightail it to the farm as fast as I could get there because I know without a doubt they would still have running water, transportation (maybe just a mule drawn wagon but they’d be mobile) and possibly a good wi-fi connection. The Farm People do things like saddling horses and go for nature hikes and other things that involve sweat and the great outdoors.

I’m not cut from the same cloth— so while I was zero assistance as they hung beams in the new living room and sleeping loft they built for all the Grandgirls…

That’s my m-i-l on the left. Roughly 30 feet off the ground about to lift a beam that weighs 100 times what she does. And that’s Zebulicious on the right.

Filed under: Things I Could Not Do Without Severely Injuring Myself.

I know my place. The kitchen is where I can be of the most use and where I can contribute to the family. So I cooked. From my vantage point in the kitchen, I watched, laughed and shuddered with fear as huge beams were carried into the living room and hoisted onto scaffolding.

I visited with everyone as dinner was scarfed down then took a post at the kitchen sink to clean up the mess that is inevitably made when cooking for a small army. The adults grabbed hammers and climbed back onto the scaffolding and I enlisted my troops. Faith, Zoe, and Kasey, the tweens, cleared the tables and swept the floors. I sent Emma and Mary Frances, the kindergartners, to clean up the playroom. Sadie and Mary-Ann, the toddlers, giggled and bounced on their bottoms down the stairs. Aubrey and Abby, the smart ones, ran out of sight before they could be assigned a task.

I stuck my hands in the soapy water as the kitchen magically cleaned itself behind me. I reached for a white ladle whose scoop has been stained brown from years of valiantly scooping Pop Pete’s hot chocolate into mugs for little girls exhausted from a day of chasing horses, gathering eggs and digging in the dirt. I rinsed the ladle, placed it in the sink to dry and sighed, thankful, to somehow be a part of this family.

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