Because You Can Always Buy More Cheese

Keep your sense of humor.

This has become my new mantra. At least, I'm trying.

I am not always successful at doing so, but since the babies have become so mobile (and they aren't even walking yet! Ay yi yi!) and my home life has become, well, the word Ridiculous really sums it up. I've been trying to remind myself that humor is key.

Speaking of ridiculous:

This is where I spent most of this past Saturday. Manning the steps at our house which are apparently the Eighth Wonder of the World, according to Harry and Lucy. Lucy (aka Evil Kaneevil) likes to stand on that bottom step (while holding onto and rattling the step ladder we use as a baby gate--don't ask). Also? While she does this? She laughs at me.

Like I said. Humor. I need to keep it. Or maybe get it? Take last Sunday as another example.

It was a typical weekend day. A laundry list of To-Dos but also the frenzied! panic! to enjoy! and relax! (as much as that's possible these days). But it was also the day we had to switch three out of four car seats (the babies finally, blessedly graduated from the infant "bucket" seats while Ellie got a new "big kid" seat), and by "we" I mean Erin, of course, did all the actual car seat installation work.

While ye old switcheroo took place, the four of us (Harry was napping) provided moral support to Erin, who was busy doing the heavy lifting in the mini van, parked in the driveway. It was an idyllic scene, really. Leo and Ellie played in the front yard, reveling in the age old joy and fun that comes from an empty (in this case, new stroller) box. Yes, a discarded box in Leo's eyes almost always becomes some kind of vehicle. Car, truck or as was the case last Sunday, a rocket ship.

The rocket ship and the maps that Leo and Ellie drew, for said rocket ship.

While the two big kids played, I had Lucy in my lap in a rocking chair.

Then when she got squirmy, I put her on a blanket.

She's a very efficient crawler, but the prickly grass on our front lawn seems to slow her down, keeping her mostly confined to the blanket (at least as of last weekend). Fine. Two big kids frolicking nicely, one baby on a blanket. It's in these moments that I can feel relatively calm. Relaxed. This is totally doable, I think to myself.

And then the frenzied, quick-to-crescendo cry of Harry waking up from his nap begins to rattle through the baby monitor. Any semblance of relaxing or doableness is shattered.

And so begins the quick scramble. The run inside the house to grab the exersaucer so that I may park the second baby in it while I go grab the first baby (can't hold two babies with one set of arms, at least not at this stage). But before you can grab the first baby (who is now screaming very loudly), you first have to run the exersaucer outside, put the baby in it, then dash upstairs to rescue second baby. Note Lucy, in an exersaucer in the background of the waiting-to-be-installed car seat, above. I don't normally just randomly plop babies in exersaucers on the front lawn, I assure you this was a temporary arrangement, and she was not unattended.

Now comes the humor part.

At some point while all this was going on, Ellie went inside and came back out holding a block of delicious, extra sharp cheddar cheese (do you sense foreshadowing here?). She wanted a few slices as a snack. I admit, with all there is going on these days, the older kids don't always get their every snacking whim requited, which I don't think is entirely a bad thing. At that moment, with all I had going on, Ellie's desire for extra sharp cheddar was answered with "Get a string cheese" (unlike sharp cheddar, Ellie can get a string cheese all by herself). A disappointed Ellie disappeared back in the house and returned with her string cheese.

So Harry had his turn in the rocket ship. But before long, Leo and Ellie had tired of the empty box as rocket. Harry's delight (see above) in the box was short-lived. Two mobile babies on a blanket on the front lawn seemed to be entirely too much to ask. Then the babies began to enter their late afternoon, we're too cranky, we don't know what we want phase. Erin was almost finished with the car seat project and I got everyone back in the house to begin the journey toward dinner, bath, books, bed.

That's when I found the empty plastic bag with a few crumbs of extra sharp cheddar cheese.

The bag was sitting on the entry way table. You know, where everyone keeps their cheddar cheese (can you hear my eyes rolling around in my head?).

"Ellie! Why is the cheddar cheese bag here?" I demanded.

She scurried over to me, looked at the bag, then at me. "I don't know. I think I put it there."

"But where is the cheese?" I asked.

"Maybe Ruby ate it?"

Long time readers will know that Ruby is our dog who does serve one key purpose in our home: she is the official eater of all food off the kitchen floor so that I do not have to sweep the kitchen. Ever. So she does serve a purpose.

No, no, no, not the extra sharp cheddar! That I had just bought at Trader Joe's the day before! It would have been one thing if she'd just eaten a small block, but this was a brand new, hardly enjoyed block. It was so ridiculous, it was funny.

Which pretty much sums things up for me, right now.

"Someday, we'll look back on this and laugh," one wise reader once commented here, and I never forgot it. "Why not start now?"