Crazy Friday - plus a little

I have taken on two of my previous child care clients - ones I had before we got our children. Mr. M, as we shall call him here, turned 2 in April. And Miss K, as she will be referred to on the blog, turned 2 in December. It has been nice for the children to have a few extra play mates. They both come part time, but I had both of them here on Friday, plus my three, so I had 5 children 2 years and under. The night before, Hyrum was teething and fussy, therefore I didn't get much sleep and Timothy was gone that day from 6:45am to 3:30pm.

I've had them all here at least two times before and things were a little busy, but manageable. Here is what happened on Friday - I'm lucky we all survived:

Mr. M is in a hair-pulling phase and pulls Rebekah's and Miss K's hair almost every time I turn my head. He also pulls Hyrum's hair if I leave Hyrum to play on the floor. So, I was constantly pulling him away from the group so that he wasn't hurting the children and so that, hopefully, he would learn that he shouldn't pull hair. But, the constant pulling was beginning to drive me crazy.

After making Hyrum a bottle, I went into the living room to sit down to feed him. Three of the children were in the kitchen because they had followed me in there, but they didn't follow me back out like they usually do. So as I was feeding, I kept calling to the children to come play in the living room. At first they weren't responding, but finally Brigham piped up and said, "I'm cleaning first." I told him to come in and play in the living room, but he was insistent that he clean the mess. So, I thought I'd better go see what the mess was. I walk into the kitchen and lo and behold an entire $15 can of formula had been dumped all over the floor. And Brigham was trying to clean it up with a dry wash cloth. I was not too happy about this - it was my last can of formula and it had been nearly full. (I was planning on going shopping that night and getting more.) So, not only did I have a mess, but I also didn't have formula to feed my baby and there was no way I was taking 4 toddlers and a baby to the store to get some. Luckily I found enough to make two bottles in the diaper bag.

Brigham and Mr. M have been in a throwing toy phase also, and they egg each other on. I've been trying to teach them to throw only (soft) balls. Well, Friday as they were throwing things a toy got stuck in the pot of our little palm tree. I think Brigham must have been trying to get the toy when he knocked over the tree and it broke. I was not happy about this. See the small fire hat in the pot ?
Did I mention that all four toddlers are potty training? As you can probably guess, we've been spending a lot a time in the bathroom.

So, after dealing with all of this I finally got lunch on the table, the children ate and I got two of them down for naps while the other two were finishing eating. While I was putting Rebekah down, Brigham and Miss K got into the pasta salad and it ended up all over the floor. What a lovely mess, huh? I hadn't eaten lunch yet because I was too busy feeding Hyrum and keeping up with getting seconds, etc for the four toddlers. So, now my lunch was all over the floor.
Well, luckily they took decent naps that day or I would have been the one pulling hair out.

At 2:15 I have to load all the little ones into the van to go pick up a school-age child from school. Luckily that trip was uneventful. Until we were getting out of the van. Rebekah and Miss K were the last ones out. Miss K was moving slowly trying get down from the big van by herself. Rebekah was behind her and must have been tried of waiting so she pushed Miss K and Miss K fell out of the van scraping her arms and banging her head on the foot step on the way down. I sent her home with a goose-egg on the forehead.

Just after we got in the house I had to change Hyrum's diaper. I was in the middle of changing him when all of a sudden I heard Miss K screaming like her hair was being pulled. I run in to find that Mr. M had dragged Miss K by the hair from the kitchen all the way into the living room and was still pulling when I got in there. He had a fist full of hair. Now, at this point, with all that I had dealt with that day and not having got much sleep the night before, I lost my temper. I yelled at Mr. M for pulling Miss K's hair for the twelfth time that day, and right after she had just been injured falling out of the van. (I felt bad for yelling, but I also felt he deserved it a little, too.) Mr. M got buckled into a booster seat and left in the middle of the kitchen. I put Miss K in Rebekah's crib so that no one could hurt her again while I finished changing Hyrum's diaper. I also gave her an ice pack for her forehead. She was glad to get a break from the others.

At the end of the day I got the children into bed and went grocery shopping, but when I got to the store, I just sat in the parking lot outside for about twenty minutes just enjoying a little peace and quiet after my crazy day.

Now, Saturday was much better than Friday (no daycare-yea!), but we did have an incident that is going to cost our family more money than we'd like to spend. I was trying to load the children into the van and while I was getting the others, Brigham climbed into the front seat and was playing around. When I was ready to get him buckled I said, "Okay Brigham, let's get in your seat, it's time to go home." I then reached into the front to grab him, he dove away from me and his head went right into the windshield of the van. The windshield spider-webbed where his head hit. Amazingly enough, he didn't cry, didn't get a bruise or bump or anything on his head (luckily). But, our windshield is busted. I tried to get a picture of it. Yes, that is from Brigham's head. I just laughed and laughed over this one because he wasn't hurt and it was funny, but we're going to have to try to come up with several hundred dollars to fix this.