Sisters

I have two sisters, one 19 months younger then me, and one 4.5 years older then me. Growing up, 4.5 years was a pretty big age difference, but we still played together quite a bit. Granted it was mostly a slave game that Heather made up to get Erica and I to clean her room and bring her food (she sat in bed, speaking into a hollow toy tree to make her voice echo, calling us J8 and E6, our first initials and our age), but I think we still all had fun. And you have to admit, Heather was pretty creative.

Some of my most fun memories are of a summer that Heather and Ammon (at the time her boyfriend, now her husband) came home and lived with us while on break from BYU. We had a Super Nintendo that our dad had hidden because it had caused too many fights, but we easily found it and snuck it out every night to play it together. We had devised a complicated plan of action in case we heard anyone coming. Everyone had a job. Heather: grab all the controllers and run them to the console, hand console off to Erica. Erica: run console to the bedroom off the family and hand it off to Jennette. Jennette: hide console in cupboard in bedroom. Ammon: scream.

One night that summer we dressed in jammer-jams (button down PJ's), Ammon's complete with a necktie, and went to the drive-in theater. I have pictures of this night somewhere in my huge bin of old pictures, and someday I will find them and post them. This night is one of my favorite nights of my life, and probably the hardest I've ever laughed. I honestly don't even remember what was so funny (beyond Ammon's necktie), although I do know someone sprayed orange juice out of their nose and all over my mom's van. Someone tried to get out of cleaning it up, but E15 and J17 were not having it.

Now that we are all adults we still have wonderful times together. The three of us got to spend a week together in Costa Rica this past January, a week I will always treasure. Erica and I are so much alike in so many ways, it is almost creepy. So many times we say the same obscure thing at the same time with the same inflection and then laugh the same exact laugh. Heather is so caring and so protective of her little sisters. Kind of hard to believe now, but Tom and I actually had a hard time conceiving before we had Harper. I remember taking negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test, it was so depressing. One early Saturday morning I thought for sure I would see a little pink plus sign, but it wasn't so, and I called Heather crying. She cried with me, then told me to go hug my husband, the best advice I could get. I feel so connected to both my sisters, sometimes I sit at home and I swear I know what they are feeling.

Today I found out I am having my third little girl. Harper, born on Erica's birthday, Nora, born on my birthday, and our new baby, due on Heather's birthday. After having Nora I had a hard time dealing with the fact that I would never be able to give 100% of my time to each child now that I had more then one, but someone reminded me that I was giving them a gift they could never have on their own - a sister. So thank you mom, for giving me my two wonderful sisters (and, of course, my brother, whom I love equally but who isn't included in this post - but will be on my next pregnancy when I find out I'm having a boy due on his bday), and thank you to my sisters for being you.

Crappy Mother's Day To You, Too

It seems my Mother's Days are destined to be filled with crap. Not the metaphorical crap, as in "I had a crappy day," kind of way, but the literal, "There is crap all over me and my house and I have to clean it up and possibly go puke" kind of way.



Last year there was the Harper diarrhea, the dog eating the diarrhea diapers and spreading them throughout the house, then the dog throwing up the diarrhea diapers, again spreading it throughout the house (AFTER I had cleaned, sanitized and, when possible, bleached everything in my house). It seemed like there was a lot of poo the first time around when it actually came out of Harper, but it exponentially multiplied by the third time around.



This year, the day before Mother's Day, I cleaned up every type of bodily fluid imaginable. Over, and over, and over again. And each time I naively thought to myself (and once even said out loud, to no on in particular), "This HAS to be the last time for today...."



It started out as a really great day. Friday night Harper had her first sleepover at her cuzzies' house, so Nora and I had a leisurely morning, a yummy breakfast, and a fun Target shopping trip. When I went to my brother's to pick up Harper, Nora immediately went for what my mother calls the "Bubble Car." It's one of those plastic cars with the big bubbly looking top that you use your feet to make go, Fred Flinstone style. It was impossible to get her out of that thing, so when she had a dirty diaper I had to drag her out and forcefully hold her down while I took it off and wiped. In the 4 seconds it took me to let go of her and reach into my diaper bag for a clean diaper, she was back in the bubble car, sans diaper. I walked over, picked her up, laid her on the floor to put her new diaper on, and wondered what all that brown stuff all over the carpet was. It kind of looked like poop. Oh. It was poop. Nora has pooped in the bubble car, walked in it, got it all over me, and all over the carpet. I felt terrible, but of course Heather was a sweetheart and ran over to help me clean up.



After everything was clean I decided it was probably time to go, so I packed everyone up and headed over to my parents for an uneventful (read: no poop) afternoon, then headed home for dinner. This is when the real fun started. Harper fell asleep on the way home, and when we got home and I picked her up out of her car seat she peed all over me (still asleep). She's been in panties for over a month, but I guess the urge was too strong while she was sleeping. It woke her up, or maybe my screaming did, I got her in the house, washed up and clean, dry clothes on.

About 20 minutes after we got home I heard this weird noise coming from the hallway, so I went to investigate. For those of you who don't know our dog Scout, he is a little different. We love him, but high maintenance and high energy doesn't even begin to describe this dog. Like most Viszlas he has a touchy stomach, so Tom taught him to puke in the toilet when he was only a few months old. He does it on a regular basis, but he does not know how to lift the lid, and since I have been keeping the lid closed so Nora doesn't drown herself (yes, she would), or put any more of Harper's Barbies or clothes down the toilet (yes, she has), he has puked on the bathroom floor next to the toilet a few times. Not a big deal, but he is a big dog so it takes quite a few towels to clean it.

But I digress. I'm in the hall investigating the noise when I see Scout come out of the bathroom and puke on the carpet in the hall. The noise was him retching the first time on the bathroom floor. The smell is so overwhelming I run back into the living room to avoid puking on his puke, but I know it will be impossible to keep Nora away from it for more then 30 seconds, and the smell is starting to make its way throughout the rest of our house, so I take a few deep breaths, a drawer-full of towels, and head back into the hall. As soon as I get there I change my mind again and run back into the living room. Seriously, it is bad. Nora is fighting me like crazy trying to get back there, so I find some Febreeze and start spraying like mad and holding my breath while I head back again (Nora on my heels). When I get down on my knees to start the cleaning process, I realize he has thrown up POOP. Yes, you read that right. It's poop puke. He had just played outside for a while before I brought the girls in from the car, so I'm assuming it's some random dog's poop that he found, ate, then ate what looked to be about 2 lbs of grass to get it back up. Apparently the poop alone wasn't enough to make him puke.

I am really trying hard not to puke, but I am pregnant and quite sensitive to smells, so by the time I got to the portion of the puke on the carpet, I threw up on the throw up, which then made me throw up some more. So now I am sitting in my hallway, crying, surrounded by puke and trying to keep Nora away with my foot, and I hear in the living room, "Mommy, I peed." So I tell her to not move, get the poop puke cleaned up, then head out to get Harper cleaned up for the second time in the last hour.

About a half hour later we are eating dinner and I think to myself "Only an hour and a half until the girls go to bed, at least I won't be cleaning up anymore poop, pee or puke," when Harper gets a somewhat shocked look on her face and says, "Mommy, I peed." Again. At least this time Nora is strapped into her booster seat so I'm not trying to keep her away from a pile of puke or a puddle of pee, so I run Harper to the shower, rinse her off again, think there is NO WAY she will pee again in the next hour so I put her in another pair of panties, PJ's, and back to finish dinner. We read stories before bed and head into the bathroom to brush teeth. Harper likes to stand on the toilet seat and lean over the counter, and while standing on the toilet, she peed her pants again. Couldn't she have at least just lifted up the seat???

After the girls were both clean, dry and in bed I decided to organize my closet, so Tom came home to his wife sitting in the closet, surrounded by a huge pile of shopping bags (I save them for a few months then purge), shoes and sweaters everywhere, crying and trying not to think of the poop puke lest I throw up again.

Being a mom is so hard. Not just because you have to constantly clean up every type of bodily fluid imaginable, although that does really suck. It is mentally and physically exhausting and there is never any down time. Even if the kids are asleep or at preschool, you are always "on-call", poised and ready to do whatever is necessary to take care of your children. And yes, I would do anything.

The next day at church, Harper ran up to sing Mother's Day songs with the other Primary children, and louder then any of the other kids I could hear Harper, looking right at me, sing (yell) "MOTHER, I LUB YOU! MOTHER, I DO!", while I'm holding Nora who is laughing, pointing at her sister and waving. I'd clean up poop puke again a million times over, just for that moment.