10:52 a.m. - May 18, 2006
In Preparation For A Home Invasion
The family is coming! The family is coming!
Run, hide!
Actually, not run and hide. That would be bad form.
My brother, his wife, his daughter and her two kids are swooping in from Virginia next week to visit with the Indiana contingent (the Smed family, my parents, my sister and my nieces and all the kidlets therein). My brother, sister and law, and my sister and I are also going to the Indy 500.
They are arriving on Wednesday and flying back at o�dark thirty on Memorial Day.
So, next week will definitely be a tilt-o-whirl of activity around these parts. So much so, I really don�t know what all is going on when and where exactly I have to be.
I�ll just show up where they tell me to, I guess.
When I invited them over to the house to watch the race, I didn�t realize that it would turn into this long event.
But the preparations are the things that will kill me, I�m sure.
For one, the house needs to be cleaned, thoroughly.
It wasn�t in bad shape when Liz and Kristin left for Arizona, and realistically, it�s not in bad shape now.
But there are things piled up that need to get put away all over the place, plus the carpets need to be cleaned because of various cat issues and the like.
Oh, and a klutzy dude who spills coffee once in a while going down the back stairs lives there as well.
The only way to do that is that I take control of the girls for an afternoon, and do SOMETHING with them, whilst Liz cleans.
We have a lot of shopping to do, so I can take them on a shopping trip. And hopefully, it won�t rain this weekend (HAH!) so after the shopping I can take them outside.
Liz is a cleaning machine when she gets time alone to clean. But with Katie always wandering around asking for this, that and the other, playing, running, laughing, and causing merry mischief, let alone Kristin, who is a crawling, standing, getting into things, picking things up and putting them down, knocking the cheerios all over the floor machine underfoot, it�s impossible to clean unless I secure the children.
(Wow, that last paragraph had NO grammatical issues crop up in Word, BTW, no little red or green squiggly lines. Hmmmm�)
That has to be done on Sunday.
We have a big table in our formal dining room. (Ok, it�s CALLED the formal dining room, but we only seem to have birthday parties and big pizza fests with kids in there. Not so much black tie and tails. Not at all.
There is a spot for everything on that table, somewhere. Where, I don�t know.
I ceded organization of the house to Liz. And she has organized it well. It�s just that when times are busy, the table is just so convenient to put stuff on. I think right now it has various toys, books, documents, papers, coupons, crayons, life preservers, statuettes, rose petals, a wombat, and the keys to the file cabinet upstairs.
Ok, so maybe not the wombat. I think I put him in the basement.
Saturday, I have two ball games to cover (if it doesn�t rain, of course). It�s the softball invitational, and that will take me out of the loop from 10-12 and from 2-4. Then I need to write the stories, which will happen Saturday night, I suppose.
This family unit will be an efficient machine of cleaning and organizing. And my biggest job will be to stay out of the machine�s way, and just find out where Liz puts things so I don�t go off half-cocked trying to find the trash stickers when it�s trash day.
Plus there�s the kitchen, also known as the war zone.
When you have an 11-month old, who is now starting to enjoy bananas, strawberries, and all sorts of finger foods, things have a tendency to get dropped on the floor.
A lot.
Thankfully, we were smart and installed vinyl flooring not long after we bought the house. The old covering was this ratty old musty carpet. Can you imagine what that carpet would be like after a dusting of cheerios, gloppy veggies, and other various and sundry half eaten crap?
Ewwww.
So anyway, I already know my weekend will be hectic, busy, thrilling, adventurous and totally, totally busy.
It IS something to look forward to, I suppose. At least I won�t have a weekend where I ain�t doin� nothin�.
(Like THAT ever happens, with a 4 � year old and an 11-month old).
But it will all be worth it, when my brother et. al. wander into our house. And we get to eat, drink, and be merry.
The sad thing is that they want to watch American Idol on Wednesday night. After Season Three, where all of my favorites went down like a ball of flame early on, and I bristled under the theme nights where they chose lousy songs and sung them with no emotion, I have successfully avoided AI.
Can I avoid it again, and withdraw up to the computer and make mixes for some people, or do I have to be a host, and torture myself with all of that dreck?
I already know the answer�don�t tell me!
