Things that make me smile

I love that Paul will spend 10 minutes straight trying to make the biggest bubble for Gracie to pop in the tub.
I love watching cousins build a fort so they can cuddle up and watch a movie together.
I love when my almost 10 year who I think sometimes has no free time gets to play with Legos for 3 three hours. She came up with the coolest bouquet of flowers that I didn't get a picture of.
I love watching babies learn how to give kisses.
Saturday morning jobs. They are actually helping get all of the laundry into the laundry room. It takes them 10 times longer but they do get the job done and they always have fun throwing it down.
I love seeing my kids work together. Hard to get that to happen.

I just had to document this sight so I won't forget it. Sam has been asking for a gameboy or DS since he was five and we held off. He is so excited to get one finally. It hasn't been as bad as I thought. I can actually get a lot of good behavior out of him by taking away this privilege.I love my little girls bedhead in the morning. We always take pictures when our kids look perfect which are so fun and nice to remember. I just wanted to make sure I had one of these. Sometimes we just cuddle up after the big kids go to school and watch some Dora and hang out together. I don't want to ever forget images like this.


I am feeling lately that I want to document all the chaos and just embrace it. We have all heard the poem about little fingerprints......how we are constantly cleaning them up and it will actually be sad when they are not around anymore. I am trying to remind myself of this. I know it will be so weird to clean the house and actually have it stay clean. It will be so weird to have a quiet house someday. I really can't imagine that right now and that is OK! I am not ready for that for a long time. I will just have to continue to find quiet moments in the middle of the night and in the wee hours of the morning. I will have to continue to communicate with my husband via text messages and email because we can't hear each other at the dinner table or any where else in the house til the kids are in bed.

I have a few other images of our ordinary, unorganized family life that I need to capture so brace yourself. If I video taped our typical dinnertime....... wow that would be interesting. Lets just say clothing is optional lately. Maybe I need to crack down on that now that I mention it. Oh well, it is getting late. I always share more dirty laundry(literally tonight) than I intended to when it is late. So off I go.