Hula Hoops in the Bathroom

Okay, this staying home thing might just drive me crazy. Okay, crazier.

My laid-back-cause-I-have-four-kids-and-have-to-be nature is colliding with my type A side...Shane would actually say I have no laid back part, but truly I do.

For instance, there are things I can walk past for days-weeks even-and ignore. Like when we were given some very cute clothes my mother in law found at a garage sale. They are too big for Hope and too small for Ashlyn, but are worth holding on to-they are "so Hope". Yet the box they belong in is on the very bottom of a stack of about 5 full, heavy, totes in our storage room. Although it bugged me, I closed my eyes every time I saw them stacked on the bar. For two weeks. At least two weeks. Finally this week I'd had enough and I begged my sweet husband to pull out that bottom tote and fill it to the brim with cutie pie hand me downs.

Yet today, as we're cleaning (aka: nesting), I come into the mostly clean bathroom to find a hot pink hula hoop in the floor. Oh my. This drives me nuts. Why do toys just fling themselves out of the girls' room and into the rest of the house? You know, nobody did it, it just appeared. Very much like the dishes that never make it to the sink-yet everyone claims they took their plate not only to the sink, but they're all sure they scraped it into the trash first. Yeah.

So how can I be so laid back about some stuff and my blood pressure skyrockets with one bathroom visiting hula hoop?

I have a vision for my house-I read it elsewhere, but it's too perfect not to share: I want my kids' room(s) to look like a monk's room with Elmo sheets. Okay, Dora sheets but you get the picture. I finally have one child on my side, she's joined the Tosser's Club. We're conspiring to get a bit closer to the monastery look before Christmas. Of course, it's in vain since some of the grandparents think Christmas needs to look like a bomb went off in a toy factory, but hey, there's always Goodwill.

We found this poem in our school assignments last week-it so fits our family-except that my housecleaning isn't so fun-but the part about the Mother & Father is so true:

I Like Housecleaning by Dorothy Brown Thompson

It's fun to clean house.
The food isn't much,
And paint's all about
That we musn't touch;
But strange stored-away things,
Not like everyday things,
Make marvelous playthings
From attics and such.

The boxes come out
From closets and chests,
With odd sorts of clothes
Like old hats and vests,
And photographed faces,
And postcards of places,
And cards left by guests.

Then Mothers says, "Throw
The whole lot away!"
And Father says, "Wait-
I'll need this someday."
But either way's meaning
A chance to go gleaning
Among the housecleaning
For new things to play.