Normal stuff

Last Sunday after church I suddenly woke up nose to nose with my two-year-old. "Moooooooommy. What mommy doin'? Mooooooommy." Somehow both my husband and I had fallen asleep on the couch, leaving the four children loose in the house. I stumbled into the kitchen to get Sebastian a drink of water and discovered half a pint of blueberries rolling around on the floor. "Why are there berries all over the floor?" I asked the two older children.

 Lizzy shrugged and said, "Oh, We were trying to juggle them."

"Yeah," Barak added. "We kept dropping them." No kidding. I instructed them to clean up their mess, and was met with a stream of complaints. 

"I don't want to sweep them up!"

"It's not fair!"

"Why do WE have to do this?!"

As I strove to remain calm and loving in the face of such absurd questions and supervised their clean up, I overheard Sebastian making a lot of noise in the living room. "What are you doing, Sebastian?" I called to him.

"I playing baseball!" he answered proudly. I was a bit distracted at the time, but I could tell his version of baseball was strictly an outside game. "Knock it off," I said. 

"Okay, Mommy," he said and ran off to his room to make a different mess. 

Twenty minutes later, when Isaac woke up, I thought I had things pretty well under control. The blueberries were off the kitchen floor, the kids weren't trying to kill each other and I had almost figured out what to have for dinner. That's when Isaac discovered the broken window. I guess if you throw a baseball against it  enough times a window will break, even if it doesn't give you your mom's undivided attention. 

Later, I told this story to my mom, and I could hear her smile over the phone. "Aw, your first broken window!" she said. It was in that moment, that I realized two things:

• I have four kids. THREE of them are boys.
• When people with grown-up kids say things like, "Enjoy them while they're little; kids grow up so fast!" they are LYING.