Monday, May 25, 2015

Magical Orange Vinegar Cleaner


I am always and forever chasing my kids away from the cleaning chemicals. I am also always and forever scrubbing up the messes my kids make, because sticky.
We've also been buying a lot of oranges recently.
So I've been soaking the orange peels in vinegar, which makes a practically free, concentrated, nontoxic cleaner that smells fabulous.
And this morning when Heidi and Ion were squabbling and Rori was trying to get into the (sealed) container of OxyClean, I had a brainwave. Fill up 3 bottles with orange cleaner, give each kid a bottle and a rag, and let 'em go.
The coffee table is now soaking wet, the entire kitchen is swimming in orange vinegar, and they're going after their toy shelf with a vengeance. Ninja mom level: master.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Grateful for chaos

Today I am grateful for the chaos that my life sometimes is. It means that I have four beautiful, creative, energetic children who aren't afraid to ask for (and sometimes insist) on what they want and need in life. It means that I have food to feed them, even when that food is scattered all over the table. It means that we are blessed enough to have a choice in food, so they have the luxury of being picky eaters (and therefore scattering their food). It means they love each other and want to play with each other, even when that means someone steps on someone else, or when it means that Ion insists on being Ana instead of Kristoff and Heidi (who also wanted to be Ana) is stuck without a love interest. It means that they have beds and blankets to make a mess of, and they have clothes to wear or pull out of their drawers and leave in piles all over their room.

Chaos means a lot of things that many people in the world don't have. So since my choices are to be grateful for it or to cry about it, I'm going to be grateful for it. And then I'm going to drink a tall glass of blackberry wine (something else to be grateful for) and start to work on cleaning it all up.

#thegratitudeproject

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Castle of Muskogee

Check out my guest post on Ryan's blog! We went to the Renaissance Festival at the Muskogee Castle, and I wrote about it!