With four kids, one of them a baby, ya own a lot of stuff.
Correction: We own a lot of stuff.
There are clothes, and toys, sparkly stickers, and dishes, and food of all the various sorts that all the various and bizarre eaters eat in this house. And then since we are LDS, there is also the food storage and 72 hour emergency kits. There are DVD's, bandaids, computers, tools, magazines and books. Artwork, pencils, rubber bands, papers, mail, bills, ribbons, documents, bedding, toiletries, cleaners, laundry, boxes, furniture...
THINGS.
And the incomprehensible little people of this house moving these things, all of these things all of the time, around in inexplicable patterns and for no knowable reasons. Things that it would never occur to my adult brain to do or to move or to use to play a rousing game of Power Puff Petshop Potter Menace.
It is this aspect, the stuff-management part of my job description; this aspect of being a mother of four children that is sitting on my brain and making my chutzpah scream "uncle!" Today I took LaLa and Pearl to the local department store sale to choose a new backpack each. Later this evening after enjoying being in the audience of our own "pajama/backpack fashion show," complete with catwalk soundtrack and much swishing and posing by three little girls, I gathered together the three backpacks in one place and looked around my front room for a good place to put them. These packs will, after all, be in play nearly every day this up coming school year. But they are pretty darn big, the backpacks... and I already have valuable space taken up by the coat rack and the shoe basket that will also be getting lots of action come cold weather and (gulp) the snow. Plus the paperwork; the blizzards of papers and art projects and flashcards and memos that I can count on from a second grader, a kindergartner and a pre-schooler, these storms of paperstuffs that are soon to grace this home.
Then it dawned on me... in three short years (and the years are getting shorter and shorter lemme TELL you!) I will have four backpacks to shuffle. Holy permission slips Batman, I am feeling dizzy.
S'cuze me a minute...
4 comments:
I cannot imagine because I am being swallowed up by all the stuff in our house. Then again I think it is relative to the size of our tiny bungalow. I cannot wait to get rid of the stuff that we no longer need. Bring it on!
My youngest may be in kindergarten this next year. It's now full day. Didn't used to be. The prospect of that has me definitely dizzy. Then my oldest will graduate in 2012. Pure vertigo.
Believe you me, I'm ready to move on to the next phase of my life. I know I'm done with babies, diapers, sippy cups, tantrums, stickiness and yo gabba gabba. I'm ready to mother in a different way and approach my goals with different resources.
It's still a little sad though.
Oh, I hear you! THINGS THINGS THINGS! Figuring out where to put number four and all the baby stuff has been--a challenge!!! We need one more closet...somewhere! And those forms that I am supposed to be filling out for my boys...they are around here...somewhere...maybe even in one of those many files with their names on them....!!
...What else is in those files I have to wonder??? :)
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