Specificity works! (also begging…). So yay! I got the fancy little slimline Casio Exilim camera that I wanted for my birthday (thank you parents, Hubby, and SIL). It’s teeny tiny so it fits in my purse/diaper bag/crochet bag, has video capture, and it’s even red. So cool!

Apparently if you email everyone who might buy you presents with the make and model of what you want, a picture of what you want, where to buy it, how much it costs, where to get online coupons for it, and that if they possibly might do a group gift, you are much more likely to get what you were hoping for as your birthday present. Who knew?

This is the first time I can remember that I’ve actually had something over about $30 that I’ve wanted for my birthday, so being that particular felt really weird but now I have a cool new camera. Yay! Plus my Hubby bought me this cool new Wireless SD Card that automatically uploads your pictures to your computer through your wireless network.

What that means is that all I have to do is be in the house and turn on my camera, and my pictures get sent to my computer. I don’t have to mess with adapters or any of that stuff. I do have to plug it in to get the video on the computer, but even that is pretty uncomplicated.

Last week Hubby worked 76 hours on site (as opposed to at home) between Monday and Saturday, so we basically didn’t see him all week. I spent most of the week trying to keep the kids nice and busy so they didn’t drive me totally crazy. We went to the park with the wading pool, the library, Grandma’s house, Bunya’s house (Grandma on the other side, the Russian side), and ate half a flat of fresh Oregon strawberries.

Since it is strawberry season, I had to make my favorite strawberry season breakfast that I (and now the kids as well) look forward to all year. See? Strawberry crepes. Just tell me this doesn’t look delectable.

What did you have for breakfast (also known as “neener neener, I had yummy crepes and you had nasty corn flakes”)? If you have only had those flavorless loser California strawberries that they try to pass off as real fruit in the grocery stores, you have no idea what you are missing. It’s worth living in Oregon rain country just to get good berries for two weeks in the summer.

As my son astutely pointed out, Oregon berries don’t have all that white blech in the center of the berry. They are red all the way through. I’m going to buy a whole flat this week so I can freeze half and, well, wolf down the other half. That should probably hold me for another year.

Okay, well I guess that covers this year’s ode to strawberries. I did make one other discovery recently that I am planning to put to good use this summer. As you know, me and mopping do not get along well. So the week before Family Camp I was trying to get the house clean in an effort to not have every ant in the county trailing along the kitchen floor eating all the leftovers my children graciously leave for them.

I asked my charming children who wanted to play Cinderella. The girls all tripped over each other with excitement so I gave them a mop bucket with some soap and each of them a rag, and they mopped the entire floor. Did a pretty good job of it too! Georgie decided he didn’t want to play (!), but would rather be the Wicked Stepfather and go around telling them all that they were having way too much fun. Overall it went very well.

This week I decided that this new game needed to be a more regular event, so they played again on Monday. Georgie decided he didn’t want to miss out this time and mopped as well. Unfortunately, this added an unstable element to the otherwise fairly tame mopping time, and I had to reprimand the children for trying to clean the ceiling by throwing the rags at it, mopping the walls by spinning cloths on them (which sprays mop water all over the house), and doing target practice by dropping rags from upstairs over the staircase railing to bullseye into the mop bucket. Should this behavior occur again next time, mopping will again become a girls only activity. Argh!

So I leave you today with some video of my mopping maniacs (note Faithy’s cute hat that I actually made). The video is about a minute long. Thank you, Mr. Disney!

In case you’re really bored and have 27 seconds more to burn, here is some video of Henry rolling over. It was late at night on Saturday while George was still at work so I was going to take pictures of Henry and fiddle with my new camera. He didn’t seem to like that idea though and immediately rolled over for the first time. I switched the camera to video mode, propped Henry back up (because he liked it so well the first time as you can tell….), and shot this:

Ciao!

Oh wait, that’s “Resistance is futile.” Well, if they had small children and didn’t live in a cube, no doubt they would agree that mopping is also futile.

My out-of-town cousin and his family (three kids) came over on Saturday for the day, and my parents and my brother & family (one kid) came over to visit with them too (we had a great time). This made seventeen people, eight adults and nine kids. We cleaned up the house tolerably well, but I sort of petered out when it came to mopping my kitchen/dining room floor and just swept it instead.

This happens a lot when I’m pregnant. Mopping sort of drops to the very last thing on the list, you know, like the thing I do if every other thing in the entire house is cleaned, organized, folded, put away, I’ve eaten, the kids are all in bed, and I still have enough energy left to do it….

It occurred to me that mopping right before seventeen people were here could potentially be a stupid idea anyway. I didn’t do it. Then we were planning a family New Year’s Eve party of Monday night (25 people), so I again contemplated moppage but again rejected the idea. After the spill list for the weekend, I was pretty happy that I hadn’t bothered.

Spill #1 ~ Saturday afternoon Georgie drops his cup of orange juice on the kitchen floor.

Spill #2 ~ Saturday afternoon my cousin knocks his cup of coffee on the floor but cleverly manages to miss spilling any on his wife’s white sweater.

Spill #3 ~ Sunday afternoon Faith dumps her cup of milk all over the table and kitchen floor (actually, I think this was Kyra’s milk that she had declined to finish and hadn’t bothered to put on the counter).

Spill #4 ~  Monday morning, Kyra tips her cup of orange juice over onto her chair and the floor. I hadn’t even made it back to the kitchen to wring out the rag when….

Spill #5 ~ Anika dumps her orange juice on Kyra and the floor. Kyra was a bit distraught at this point.

Spill #6 ~ Anika decided that she wanted some leftover mac & cheese for dinner, so she put it in a bowl and microwaved it. Instead of removing her bowl from the microwave to the table, she took it out and dropped it so the macaroni got thrown all over the kitchen (the bowl wasn’t hot).

And the moral of the story is….. if you want clean floors, don’t have small children (or cousins). I figure that after all that, at least half of my kitchen is now clean. Four spills under the kitchen table and two on the kitchen floor got cleaned up, so that’s a good chunk of floor that got wiped down. That counts, right? RIGHT? Okay then. Of course, now that the last of our scheduled company is done, they’ve quit spilling everything in sight.

See, there’s two theories on mopping: One, you could mop before company comes and dazzle them with your shiny, sparkling floor for the five minutes before everyone dumps their drinks and crumbs on it; or two, you could mop after company comes so that you can enjoy your sparkling, shiny floor for the five minutes before your own family dumps their crumbs and drinks on it. That’s it. Those are the only two choices when you have five children under age ten. Well, that’s not true. You could just do neither of those and procrastinate mopping as long as humanly possible and just not mop until you can’t stand it any more. Hmmm, tough decision….

Rachel