Is It Naptime Yet

My girls don’t have a lot of toys. But they’ve slowly been disappearing and some of their books have too.
Why, you ask.
Well they haven’t been cleaning up after they decide to pile as many toys and books as they can get past me onto Eden’s bed.
Then after they have piled so many toys or books we make them clean them up and sometimes they don’t want too. I know shock little kids not wanting to pick up after themselves. The problem comes because 8 time out of 10 Eden has to be put into timeout just so she will begin cleaning up. Then once you mention clean up Lilah decides she’s tired, her arms are tired, her legs are tired, some thing is always tired. So we fight with them and hover over them to clean up the mess they’ve made. We’ve just started setting the timer and then taking away whatever they don’t put away.

It started about a week ago when Lilah did this to our couch.

Literally every child book we had was on the couch and nearly every toy. Jon had let her do this because when we try to limit what they take they complain, so he wanted Lilah to understand the consequences of piling everything together. Jon gave her a half hour to clean it up but mostly she just whined. We got a box and put all the toys and books that didn’t get put away in it and and put it in our closet. The box is big, something I got from Costco and is bigger than a laundry basket.

Today it was toys on Eden’s bed. They hadn’t heeded to Jon’s first attempts to ask them to clean up so Jon set the timer. Lilah had to go to the bathroom and you could hear her saying loudly how she didn’t care for the toys and didn’t want her stuff animals. Then when I went in there to wash hands it was all about how much she loved them and wanted to take care of them.
Eden did a lot of the cleaning up, so thanks to little sister Lilah has more toys and books to look at.
After the 15 minutes was up we put the few things left into another box to go into our closet.
I was going to give the big box of toys back this week, after a week of being taken away, but one, the girls have seemed to forget about them and two, they make big enough messes without those toys.
I’ll probably sort the toys out later this week, maybe Sunday after I have the baby shower and my lesson taught. I hope to organize them and clean off some toys that could use a good washing or disinfectant and then purge ones that either annoy me or find little use.
My kids don’t even have that many toys, but it sure feels like a lot when it takes 20 minutes to just clean up one little bed and lots of whining

We had lunar eclipse the other night. Jon set the alarm to be up at like 2:30am or when it when it would transition from a partial to full eclipse. I awoke at some time, but was afraid to get up and then shortly after Jon jumped out of bed. It was like 4:30am and we had missed the full lunar eclipse but we went and saw the moon as a partial lunar eclipse.
Jon was then too awake to sleep so he went to the living room to study and I was pretty awake but I lied in bed trying to sleep but instead I stayed up thinking about the baby shower for Andrea this weekend.
We finally made it to sleep later, but I’m sure Jon didn’t get much sleep before he had to be up for work and school.

I did lots of shopping yesterday with some girls. One in particular whined a lot while at the first store so I threatened that once we got to the library she wouldn’t be able to pick out any books unless she was good at the next two stores. I gave her three strikes and she only took two. Once at the library both girls just played with some toys and I actually picked out all the books but one or two which Eden wanted.
At least the threat kept Lilah from whining so much while at the store.

Last night Janice Kapp Perry and her husband Douglas spoke at a fireside for the women of three stakes in our area.
It was really fun and I learned that her and her husband have quite a sense of humor.
She told the story of the first thing he ever said to her. They had many classes together but he hadn’t seemed to notice her, then right before she was to do some clarinet solo thing for her class she was nervous and while she tried to focus he said to her “I bet those lips are made for something better than playing the clarinet,” or something to that liking. After she said this he came up to defend himself and she just held onto the mic so he couldn’t respond so then he gave her a big kiss. She replied that she wouldn’t ever tell that story again…..or maybe she would.
Basically they talked about the influence of good music in the home and one point she made was if you’re satisfied with you life, or even bored and thinking now what, take little steps to accomplish some secret dream or goal. Each step accomplished should be a victory so even if you don’t get to the actual goal you should celebrate what you’ve actually done.
Also you’re never too old to try something new and develop a new talent.
She actually didn’t begin her major song writing career until she was 40 or so. She broke her ankle playing basketball with the kids, which was her life, and her husband asked if she could find something a little less dangerous for her age. She had studied music in college, but hadn’t done any song writing or composing since then.
While her ankle healed she wrote the original songs for a rode show for church and continued from there basically.

It was a fun fireside.