Laundry and lots of it!

Laundry...not a very cool topic but it is what have I been doing all day!! Yes, laundry in this house is more than a chore it is an undertaking of a momma mission! I do anywhere from 22 to 30 loads a week!! NO I am not exaggerating! My wonderful husband is 6'7" tall and weighs in at 285lbs. Now my husband is by no means fat or even heavy he is big boned. Haha yeah that's we we all say but no seriously he is. He wears a size 18 EEE shoe!! His blue jeans alone way 5lbs each dry!!! So needless to say his laundry takes up a lot of room. I do not have a commercial washer or dryer although that would be awesome!! I do however have a set of Maytag Neptunes and they have worked really well for me seeing how I have abused them for many years now. So there are 9 people currently living here, 5 female and 4 males. The younger boys are easy because they would stay in their PJ's from bath to bath if I let them. The girls are another story, can you say multiple outfit changes before school with the clothes they do not decide on ending up in the laundry basket in their room or on the floor. I have countless times thrown a tantrum over this to no avail! Yes, I tend to lose it over this house rule violation since I do all the laundry and it is work! Now take in the amount of towels for bath taking, wash clothes, dish towels, towels for the dog and you get the idea right! We also have 7 beds for 7 kids and a queen for us that need stripped and replaced at least once a week if not more depending on night time accidents, the kids not us heehee! And being winter there are tons of socks and gloves to wash and of course lose at least half of the matching sets which I have a large bucket of onesies waiting to find their match. Plus washing coats, rugs and extra snuggy blankets the kids wear around on the weekends. Yes it is a LOT of laundry!! I am in the process of teaching my 3 older ones how to do laundry but the rules of sorting and measuring seem to go on one ear and out the other. I often wonder if this is a hint that they really don't want to learn so they are not stuck in that little room day in and day out, nah laundry is fun right!!!! Ding, ding....yep time to go the dryer is beconing me with it's musical ring...

Went to pick the kids up at school yesterday and ran into one of the parents who I had purchased a flat of strawberries from as a fundraiser. She informed the berries were just delivered so I drove around the back of the school to the semi and waited for my haul. The kids were so excited to have fresh strawberries so early in the year (there was fresh snow on the ground just 2 days ago) they wunbuckeld thier seat belts and were staring out the windows of the van watching the flats get loaded into pick ups. I was handed my one flat and I returned to the van where many little voices asking, "Can we eat them now? Please mom, Please!!" Of course I had to say, NO!" They haven't been washed yet, wait until we get home" Home we did not directly go and as children often do they changed their attention elsewhere until we hit the driveway and as soon as I set the flat down on the counter they tore into the strawberries with me reminding them to wash them first. 2 pints were inhaled in a matter of minutes with Summer in the lead to down them the fastest. Her 2 most favorite foods are strawberries and tomatoes!! She will sneak into the garden to pick and eat a tomato!! She is the only we have that love's to garden beside her oldest sister who is grown and lives far away. The rest of the group complains about the bugs, the heat and of course the hard work of weeding. They have said many of times that they would rather starve than have to tend a garden. Hmmm...I wonder if that classifies as child abuse if I let them go hungry a day or two just to see if that would stop their complaining?? Nah...They would still complain might as well keep their bellies full so as not to add that to the long list of whining!! heehee! Okay back to the strawberries!! My plan was to make several batches of Jams, freeze a few quarts for winter, cut up fresh for some early shortcakes and a couple of strawberry pies. I started with 12 pints and I used six for Jams, the kids inhaled 2 more, I froze 2 pints and only have 2 left. I"ll have to wait until the kids get home and take a vote on whether to make shortcakes or a pies. It just amazes me how fast an entire flat of strawberries went! Luckily there is an orchard about an hour away that will have strawberries late May early June so I can make some more Jam! :) I guess next year I should double my order!

Okay...I seem to be getting the hang of things with this blogging. Still a beginner but I finally was able to get a background that didn't swallow up my entire page. Yea for me!! So where does one begin when writing a blog???? Do I start slow or jump right in to the madness that is my life?? For the most part my life is fairly boring in the fact that we do not travel much and yes it is because the of the expense of traveling with a large family :) In the beginning with just 2 kids at home we traveled on vacation every year to Florida, Smoky Mountains or just camping somewhere near a lake so my husband could go fishing. We could sleep in a tent or rent a hotel room. We've even taken the family dog along and carried him in wrapped in blankets like a sleeping toddler to stay in our hotel rooms. That was then and this is now...There is no tent big enough to accomidate all 9 of us comfortably and my children are still too scared to sleep in a tent next to ours although we are thinking about doing girl/boy tents with in the next year since the children are getting older and of course my husband and I would be the sleep in chaperones for each tent! But there lies the dilemma of having to rent 2 campsites since campgrounds have a rule of only allowing one tent per site, yep bummer. So we have taken a few short vacations on Spring Break when the kids were younger and we could cram them all into a couple of double beds, then it came the time to get 2 rooms 1 for boys and 1 for girls again my husband and I split camps. Here within the last year we have grown so much that we now require 3 hotel rooms! I mean physically as well as numbers! Both our older girls turned 13 this year and WOW what a change that has been! No way will they will share a room with the younger girls!!! Not to mention adopting another 2 children from Africa! Yipee!! Yes we are growing to a family of 13!!!! So I hope you see why we don't travel much at this time but who knows what the future will bring! Oh did I mention we not only have a dog but 3 cats, 2 guinea pigs and a rabbit? Ya they are kinda hard to travel with :)

In the beginning there was a mom who did not know a thing about blogging. She had so much to say and it wasn't about logging. I know bad poetry but true! So if you are checking this blog out be sure to leave "how to's" and "should have done" or "hey, I haven't fiqured it out yet either!"