Kids Making Messes

The kids are testing my resolve at keeping a clean house. I mentioned the fort from last Friday. On Monday night Sophi was making a salon in the bathroom. We're now 4 weeks of a spankin' clean house, so I'm not used to having a messy kids' bathroom anymore. Abi and I cleaned it up Monday night. She's my best cleaning helper, and yeah, we saw this all over the counter and were like "Nuh-uh!" It's cute though, and Sophi, I want you to know that I admire your creativity and am trying to be calm about the mess. Sophi cleaned it up on Tuesday night (under threat of all her dolls being confiscated.) Good job Soph.

And then one more mess I found recently - the kids wanted to paint downstairs and I said to do it on the unfinished side, but I soon discovered that they were painting at my desk down there, which was already cluttered with lots of old school papers that I need to clean up, but they shoved it all around making it even a bigger mess. But they were paining on the finished side of the basement! It started with Sophi painting something maybe for a school art contest and I gave her permission for her, but it ended with them taking two of my new canvases without permission, and there being a mess of brown all over one of them and paint dripping down the side and dried and sticking the canvas onto the wood desk. It's been several days of cleaning it up. Monday I soaked the dried paint on the desk several times and used a straight edge razor to scrap it all off. I have now locked all the paints in the hall closet again. I guess it's pretty impressive that I've kept the house so clean lately when the kids haven't been slowing down with their mess making! Good job to me.

And we'll send with few pictures from today - Peter and Wes taking a nap together. I took a picture of them sleeping facing the same direction...

And came back later and they had both switched sides - 

I shared these pictures with the older kids and Joseph commented "Synchronized sleeping" - ha! They are cute. Peter with a new toy dinosaur I bought him. It is a storage compartment for other small dinosaurs that fit in it's mouth. 

Corey and I on a date night tonight. This is how we cope with 12 kids - by consistently going out together on Friday nights. Tonight we went to the Jordan River Temple and then out to Blue Lemon after for a late dinner.

Life is good.