Three Days -- Three Showings

How can you not melt in the presence of this face?
Yet, as moms, we all have our days. Today AiAi cleared all 4 shelves of kids books and threw them in the floor, poked holes in the rising bread, cleared toys off the toy shelves onto the floor, and piled every piece of doll house furniture into a heap of rubble. He also annoyed his brother (who was already having an irritable day) by incessantly by poking him, pointing his toe in his direction (a gesture of kicking apparently), and following him too closely on his tricycle causing him to crash his two-wheeler over and over.

It was a day of many conversations that went something like, "Even though it is wrong to poke someone incessantly, it is also wrong to scream right in someone's face." It was a day when AiAi desperately needed a nap, but fell asleep for five minutes right before I had to wake him up to go pick up Soph, and then refused to go back to sleep even after sitting in his room for over an hour.
In reference to my title -- we have shown our house every day for the past three days. Kind of nice after a month of zero activity. Monday, we cleaned the house spic and span and headed over to the church parking lot to ride bikes. It worked beautifully. On Tuesday, E-Man had a mishap when he accidentally dropped an unopened can of rootbeer on the kitchen tile. It exploded out the top and spun around like a possessed object, spraying soda everywhere. Marvelous. I had to wipe down the entire kitchen, and, after two moppings, the floor was still sticky. At 4:30, I was just starting dinner and had to have Soph to her school by 5:15 to get ready for her spring musical (at 6 p.m.). The phone call came -- another showing. Frantically, I cooked and served dinner, bathed E-Man, curled Soph's hair, and did a 3rd thorough mopping. We were a half an hour late and I was mortified when I had to leave the dinner dishes in the sink. The rest of the house looked awesome, but I realized that even if it only took a few minutes to wash, I would still have to dry, put away, plus scour the sink. Instead I just tried to arrange them to cover the dirty sink, is that weird?

I came home from the play and realized that the floor was STILL sticky! After three moppings. Great, I showed my house with dirty dishes AND a sticky floor.

I figured it would be a breeze to pull the house together Wednesday morning after keeping it so clean on Monday and Tuesday. As I (again) mopped floors, AiAi walked around putting hand prints on all the glass. As I made beds and tidied the upstairs, he went downstairs and pulled two gigantic bins out of storage (bigger and no doubt heavier than he is). One was full of three complete GeoTrax train sets, which he dumped. The other (a far worse mess) was chock full of thousands of semi organized photographs. He opened the box and strew the entire contents throughout the basement! Fortunately, our appointment was more than a half hour late while I cleaned it all up.

If you have or have had a child like this, I wrote this to help you feel better.
As a side note, our last day of school was today. Hooray for summer vacation! And, we are headed up to Bear Lake for a whole week. I can't wait!