If there was room for it, the complete title for this blog would be “What Almost Every Mother Knows, But Keeps to Herself”. Yesterday, Nancy took our three oldest adopted children to visit our daughter and her husband for the night. They had planned activities for this morning. She left me at home with our four year old and 30 month old boys.
Ok, I will admit it. Nancy is much better at taking care of children than I am. It does take both of us at home to raise them given the number and their special needs. When we were raising our grown children, she did the child things and I did daily “hand to hand combat” in the corporate world. I am still much better at doing the manual labor and letting her be the child care expert. She just seems to know how to do it.
Like most couples who have been married a while, we have a division of labor. For instance, Nancy does the laundry, dresses children, and breakfast. I do most of the dishes, trash collection and disposal, most appointments that involve taking a child somewhere, and putting the troops to bed. She can take care of all five boys for most of a day, I can’t.
This morning, I knew that she was not going to be back until after lunch. I finally had to throw in the towel and take them somewhere because they would always be in either a child car seat or the stroller. I left this note in case she got home first:
“Nancy, I am very sorry for the way the house looks. The mess in the bathroom is from last night. Believe it or not, I spent a lot of time cleaning today, but while I was cleaning, they were always somewhere else messing something up. I threw in the towel when Isaiah went out the backdoor while I was trying to fix our bed which Caleb wet (your side) last night. I ran out the back and the first thing I heard was Isaiah telling me from somewhere that he was stuck. In the short time that I was working on the bed, he had gone outside in just a diaper and tried to climb a bush in the front yard. We will be doing “guy things” until you get back.”
I don’t know why I didn’t appreciate all the things that she does with our children more when we were young. Now that I am home all the time, I appreciate it a lot!