Vacation

You know that feeling on the way home from a week away? When you've been in the huge van with SIX kids for 14 hours? Climbing over seats to reach kids with drinks, snacks, books, dvds...for FOURTEEN hours. The anguish as an older child laughs loudly at a movie immediately after the baby has fallen asleep. The wonderment at your nephew's rare bowels that act up only on car trips, requiring that you toss his undies into the trashcan at the rest area and squeeze him into a diaper. The sheer joy at seeing the five older children running around trees at the rest area; enjoying themselves. They collapse at the picnic table as you are examining an unknown dark sticky substance on the baby's clothes. And your clothes. And you touch it and realize that his diaper exploded. Moments later you look down at three of the breathless children and spot dog poo on their shoes and ankles. Oh, the joy of excrement. And traveling in the midst of it.

Maybe you haven't had that feeling. Pulling into the driveway after a week away and a very long trip home. Still so much work left to do before we can truly relax, but we are home.

Home sweet home. Where the cats decide to use the bathroom mat for a litter box. And one of them thought it would be fun to try the armchair in the living room.

Home sweet home where the basement flooded while we were gone. And the cats couldn't use their boxes because they are in the basement. And the water saturated the precious schoolbooks we used this year for the little kids. Expensive, lovely books.

Dear friends come to our rescue that night with dinner and a shop vac. Tracy stayed until 10:30 helping.

Our mothers are in a car the next day. We must sound desperate. They come to hold the baby and scrub the floors with bleach. They do a wonderful job. Baby is content and floors are now clean. But we can't save the books.

Though we try with crazy schemes. They were all laid out on the deck when a storm blew in complete with tornado sirens. We grabbed the books shortly before we headed to the (now clean) basement. We've frozen them, baked them, and stuffed them with paper towels. It's unsure as to how any of that will work. So far, about 2 trash bags of books have been tossed. The fate of 30 is still undecided.