One of those mornings. . . Carissa is still sick. Her temperature is around 102.3 this morning.
David cried and cried in his bed this morning. His morning naps that have helped with the first part of our homeschool year, but I’m realizing: they will not last. David really wants to be up in the mornings now, and I need to get on board. Besides, our afternoons will be much better if both C&D nap at the same time. So I need to re-do our schedule somehow for homeschooling Mara & Micah and keeping Carissa & David busy at the same time.
I spent probably 20-30 minutes upstairs with the little ones: changing diapers, reading, taking Carissa’s temperature and giving her medicine. When I went upstairs, Micah had been playing with the toy laptop, and Mara had been writing down the Dr. Seuss story about a “a nook can’t read, so a nook can’t cook, so what good to a nook is a hook cook book?” I thought that would keep them busy while I was occupied with the little ones.
I was wrong.
When I came downstairs, they had taken packing foam out of a box I recently received. They decided to “make things” out of the foam, seemingly oblivious to the sea of white in which they were swimming.
When does common sense start to kick in?? The big pieces of foam weren’t a problem. But the floors in the kitchen, dining room and part of the living room were literally covered with teeny tiny static-charged foam balls!
David not taking his nap and Carissa being sick were small disturbances to our school schedule, compared with what I was looking at!
I gave Mara and Micah brooms, and we all started sweeping. But there was a problem: When we swept, all the tiny foam balls would jump behind the broom.
As you might imagine, this was amusing to the kids too!
None of the little white balls were following us. {sigh} Even the Swiffer sweeper only captured a few at a time.
Then I stumbled upon a blessing-in-disguise! Dog hair! (Yes, I actually said my archenemy was a blessing!) For once in my existence, I was actually grateful for dog hair because there is some sort of electrical charge that attracts the foam balls to the dog hair. (Yes, it sounds really disgusting but indoor-dog-owners understand the dog hair battle, and for everyone else, I won’t even try to explain.) I found out that if I swept some dog hair across the floor, the foam balls would jump onto the dog hair!
With the help of dog hair and after a lot of Swiffer sweeping, most of the floor was finally free of foam (and dog hair).
I turned my attention next to Mara’s hair, which looked like Jack Sparrow with all the foam balls.
We brushed for 10 minutes, but it was impossible to get the foam out of her hair. She still looks like Jack Sparrow. Hopefully it will come out in the bath. . .
At that point, I just had to look at the humor of it.
Tiny foam balls still cling to my black pants. Micah sees, and he is coming straight at me, brandishing the Swiffer at eye level.
In his very serious ‘I-can-handle-this’ tone, he says, “Hold still, Mommy. This might tickle.”