Happy princess popcorn day!

Our sweet baby girl turns 5 today!!!  For her birthday, I got her a popcorn maker, ala my friend Elaine...this morning it is popcorn for breakfast and Despicable Me...that is the fun stuff for right now.

What is really on my mind is domestic.  Not as in the opposite of foreign, but as in domestication and housekeeping types of things.  I would say that, on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is Pig Pen as a hoarder and 10 is maybe Jack Nicholson's OCD character in As Good As it Gets, I probably fluctuate between a 4 and a 6.5- maybe on a special occasion or oddly motivated day I might hit a 7, but if I do, it doesn't last long. 

Keeping my little world here clean has been an extra struggle since having Cilly and Neil.  Aiden is pretty self contained.  When he was 2, I don't think he ever took out toys- he just ran back and forth and plopped onto the couches full speed face first.  And wrestled with John and jumped on the couches and even danced.  (see?  my genes are in there...) 

Cilly was a different story.  She took out toys all the time.  Which was cool, just hard to keep up with.  For her first birthday, the theme was duckies- something like "Rubber Duckie, Cilly's 1!"  and we got tons of rubber ducks- some tiny on her cake and bunches to put in the little blow up pool in the back yard...and as she grew, she would take them out-all of them...and there are a bunch...I never counted them, but upwards of 20 before our little dog started to eat them.  She would take them all out and line them up.  Seriously...  my two year old princess would constantly get her ducks in a row.  Ha!  Yeah...then she would take all the magnets off the fridge and line them up.  Then she would pull out all the sippy cup tops, put them on the floor, suck on them all (quality testing, toddler style?), and then put them all back.  We thought it was hard to keep up with her antics...and it was.  But not in comparison to Neil.

Granted, John had cancer basically all of Neil's short existence.  And anyone who has had a family member fighting cancer with little kids in the house knows that there is an extra layer of crazy that, I am sure, looks different in each family.  Basically for us, it meant that when John was home with the little ones during the day and I was at work, if dirty dishes were left in the sink and toys and blankets were strewn about, well, I tried to remind myself that it meant that he was still here with us.  But Neil would be tricky in any household.  He would not just take out some toys.  He would take them all out.  And not necessarily to play with them, although sometimes he did that too.  No, just for the fun of taking apart the toy bins.  He would empty them, then head to the kitchen and take out all the sippy cup tops, chucking them onto the floor.  Then we would swing his arms in large, sweeping motions to knock off all the magnets and watch them scatter.  Then he went to the dog bowls and swatted the food around till dog food nuggets were everywhere.  Such a cutie, though...seriously.

Suffice it to say that right now, with my addled brain, bizarre emotional and energy roller coaster, this house is absolutely impossible to keep up with!!  I find suitcases in the bathroom, hair brushes on the living room floor, cat poop in the sink (don't ask), oven mitts in the kids rooms, crayons EVERYWHERE, and all I am doing right now is stepping over it all.  Well, most of it.  I clean the sink poop...so yeah....me and grief and three kids, two dogs, three cats = about a 2.5 on the domestication type scale right now. 

Just sayin....