Things you forget

It is after 11:00 pm and my house is quiet. The last couple of weeks have been crazy at my house. Craig is taking 12 credits at USU. We had our famiy reunion over the 4th of July. I have had my sisters here for the last couple of weeks so we have been doing lots of family activities together. Kayla was just baptized last weekend. We are moving in a week and a half and I am in charge of my Dad's family reunion in about three weeks. So I will be updating July in pieces and it may take me most of August to get caught up. But right now I just want to blog about the present situation. As of last Friday I have an addition 5 children staying with us ranging in age of 10 down to 1 years of age. My sister Kerry and her husband went to Europe with our parents for 10 days. The kids have had a great time together. They only get to see each other about once a year because Kerry lives in Spokane Washington. I will say that I have forgotten what it is like to have a baby. Now my youngest is 4 which you would think that I would have remembered but you forget how intense life is with a 1 year old. I thought about the obvious stuff like falling down the stairs and keeping cleaning solution, knives anything dangerous our of reach....it is the more suttle things that had slipped my mind. So things that I have been reminded of.....you can't leave the bathroom door open or you will find your 1 year old smiling and laughing as he is playing in the toliet. Now the trick isn't for you to remember to shut the bathroom door but to get the other kids to remember to shut the bathroon door. We have lost a couple of hair accessories down the toilet because I refuse to fish them out. The other thing is how quickly things can go from good to meltdown. One minute they are all happy the next .....well you know. This was well evident in Sacrament meeting today and of course the meeting went over about 15 minutes. Luckily all the other kids did really well and Ben was the only one that had to be taken out. I did have to laugh at when my neice Elsa ( who will be eight tomorrow) said that our sacrament meeting was really noisy....oblivious to the fact the we were a great contributor to the noise. The last thing is that you know longer need a vacuum because they are more than happy to pick up and eat everything they find on the floor. I would not consider my floor dirty but you think about it a little differently when you know any little piece of anything is going into his mouth. We did get some funny looks with nine kids at church today and someone did ask Craig if they were all his. I remember the days when nine kids wasn't that unusual and our family of 6 kids seemed on the small side. The other thing I forgot is how fun it is to make them laugh. That makes all the other stuff worth it. Well I guess I need to sign off and get some sleep.