Common Misconception #2

Tuesdays are my busiest day of the week. I've been up for only 2 hours and already done 2 loads of laundry, vacuumed the living and dining rooms, nursed the baby twice, had breakfast, loaded the dishwasher, read 4 pages of the kid's history lesson to them, ( really interesting on the different Indian tribes here before the pilgrims ), made my phone calls to bank and mortgage company, rocked baby to sleep ( he's growing so fast that I don't like to rush that one. ), cleaned off our counters, fed and watered animals outside and a few other miscellaneous chores. This brings me to another common misconception people have - that the more kids you have - the busier you are. Okay, this might only be a misconception for me - I don't know how anyone else's lives work but I think every single time anyone asks how many kids we have and I reply (4 ), they always say " Wow - so you're really busy! " They said that when I only had one child. On some of those makeover shows I think it's funny when they're giving a woman a makeover and they need to give her a haircut that only takes 5 minutes to style or a 5 minute makeup regime because she has one or two kids and has no time for anything.

The thing is, I was way more busy when I didn't have any kids and I seem to get less busy with each new child. What's that saying? " Many hands makes light work." John Heywood

So this is where I admit, I did not do all that work this morning by myself.

I used to have to do it all myself and go to work in between. Now I have many little helpers around and the more quickly we get the work done, the more time we have to play!

Look here, I have time to write this very wordy post on my blog! The kids are, at this moment, playing video games and I'm pretty much free for the rest of the day until I need to get started on dinner and then take CT to tae kwon do and KN to piano lessons. Many ask how I have time to blog? I was reluctant to start blogging for fear it would take up time with my children but soon realized that I was struggling to keep up our photo albums and scrapbooks. Something I used to do quite efficiently and then got way behind on sometime after the birth of baby #3. I still had the same amount of time to sit and put the albums together but was tired of the huge mess it created all over the dining table which then had to be cleaned off to eat meals and it was also extremely expensive to buy the albums and other items needed to create them. With this blog I can document and post pictures all for free and without the mess and in only 10 minutes or so.

The 3 older kids have many chores. MN is really good with laundry. Here she is this morning loading the washer. The only part she can't do on her own is put the soap in - the rest she is proud to do herself.Here is KN and Tater doing the dishes. ( Don't think I let the dogs out of pulling their weight. They live here too! ) CT takes care of all of the outside animal chores and recently switched his indoor chore of vacuuming the whole house to cleaning the bathroom which he is really good at! We've divided up the rest of the chores and every few months we rotate them - some are better at certain things than others and believe me - they still find plenty of time to play after chores and school work are done. ( Didn't I just say they are playing video games right now? ) They also seem to find plenty of time to be bored which I will remedy very shortly. =)