Puppies and White Boards

This is going to be one hum dinger of a rant and ramble post.. So if you are faint of heart or just have enough to grumble without adding my grumbles to your list... RUN FOR IT NOW!  Otherwise, pull up a chair and get comfy.. This might take a while.  Grrrrr...

Let me state the fact that I love my family beyond belief and I know in a few years I will look back and miss all this noise and confusion... I hope.  :0)

Everyone deals with change in their own way, some embrace it and others tolerate and finally adapt. Then there is me... I don't do change well.  Oh I might put on a show that all is well and that nothing ruffles my feathers and it may appear to the untrained eye that I have embraced it and moved on.  But  my poor husband, he sees through all that and knows that I just REALLY don't handle it very well at all.  Knowing this he gave me plenty of "Let's talk this through" moments and he even made it a priority to check in with me to see how I was handling things.  So I take on some of the responsibility for killing our laundry room two nights ago.  Sigh...   But the fact that we now own three puppies, well I call that just plain FUNNY!!  Have I ever mentioned that Alex doesn't like pets?  The kids got a gold fish from the school carnival when Kyle was 6 and after much begging and pleading we got to keep it, only it died two week later.. Alex all but celebrated and said no more pets.  But the door had been opened to the fact we had gotten a gold fish through Alex, so we worked that opening until Jack found us in the parking lot of the grocery store all dirty and sad almost a year ago now.  But I am getting way off track here, so back to the point...

So I am a neat freak..  Yes, I am.  Every place has its thing and every thing has its own place.  I clean for the cleaning lady, that is how I roll.  (I am getting better at not cleaning for the cleaning lady, but Alex has yet to conclude as much.  Poor guy, he will catch up sooner or later.)  I know with the amount of people living under our roof and two of them being teenagers increases the possibility for messes to occur.  I don't believe our home should be of model quality at all times, but I do expect those that live within the home to respect it enough to clean up said messes as they are made.  Oh and my favorite thing that I love to hear... "It's not my mess to clean up".  So if everyone in the house decides they didn't create the mess and so logically conclude they don't need to clean it.. Who gets left to clean then???  You got in one... ME!   If I don't see it in time my MIL will now jump in and try to clean it up to lighten my load.  (Bless her heart she is the sweetest woman and she always has a ready smile no matter the amount of mess she is dragged into.) But I am not good with that as she doesn't have the energy to be doing such things nor should she be put into that position.  She is a Mom and we go into clean and help mode without thought, it's just auto pilot...  So asking her to ignore the mess and wait for me to deal with it or pick a victim I feel closest to the mess is just going to bug her and me.. As the mess will still be there longer and she likes things neat too.  This has been a on going issue since we moved and in the last couple of week of having Marie move in with us.  Now we have Scott, Alex's youngest brother freshly graduated from college and moving here to be closer and find work.  He will only be with us a matter of weeks, but another young male creates more mess.  (I won't even tell you about the grocery consumption rate in this house now either, since my mess rant is just front and center right now.)  :0)

I decide everyone just needed to be refreshed on zones and who is responsible for each zone and that will help the situation... Yeah, the troops just needed to remember! (We have always had zones that each person is assigned to keep clean, they sort of went to the way side during the move and never got implemented in the new house.) So off to the store I went and found the perfect white board that hangs really well in the laundry room right next to the water dispenser that is frequented often.  I bought the brightest markers I could find for said white board so that it would be very hard to miss the importance of the writing on this white board for anyone passing by to get some water.   I then came home and looked for one of the three capable males in the house to help me hang my new lovely white board only to come up empty handed.  So after a momentary pause,  I decided I am a capable woman and could manage to hang this board myself.. Can't be hard right?  Just find a nail or two since it's a pretty good size board and bang, bang we are good!  (I still can't say that I understand completely what a stud is, but Alex sure did try to give me the tutorial while I was over his knee.  But I was sorta busy at the time trying to .. I don't know survive the spanking, to really take notes. But I thought I would throw out that they sound important when hanging large heavy objects on walls.)

A few messed up nails (they didn't want to pound straight into the wall, they kept bending.. Or maybe I don't hit straight, either way I am not a natural at hammering nails.) and one hole that wasn't noticeable once I got the board hung and I was ready to draw my zones and assign names.  Only the pressure of my pushing or maybe the weight I was putting on the side while drawing on the board up on a ladder (it's a big house so I needed a really big board and it needed to hang high on the wall) was a bit much for it and down it crashed and it sorta threw me off balance and ....boom I went down too. Now all the men and everyone else within hearing distance all came to inspect the big boom and my yelp as I went down.  Figures they are all home now... Ugh.  I am fine, the wall is now patched and a smaller board is now hung up very nicely with pretty zones and names.  Alex took me to urgent care to be looked over as I got a few nasty looking bruises, but I didn't hit my head or anything.  Just more embarrassed and shocked more than anything and really NOT looking forward to explaining the situation to Alex.  I will never forget the look on his face when he came to the doorway and saw me on the floor under the ladder and the mess around me.  The board cracked into two and messed up a few tiles and the grout and the ladder messed up the boarder on the wall.  Plus the board left a huge mess on the wall where I had tried to hang it so it looked like a war zone.  He says I scared a good ten years off his life and it took him a few hours to let me out of his sight again.

After I had been checked out and Alex was waiting for the nurse to get the prescription (which I told them was not necessary thank you very much, my pain was manageable and I hate pills...I didn't think that one through very well, as those pain meds would have been great following the spanking I got for my adventure. But I believe that is what they call hind sight.)   I told him it was freezing in there and I was going to wait for him out front.  So out I go and decided to sit myself down on one of the front steps and wait.  I was only sitting there for a few seconds when I heard the little whine coming from the bushes next to me and so I turned to see two sets of the cutest little eyes looking back up at me.  Seriously, they are the cutest darn little puppies and the vet is guessing them to only be eight week old and they were dehydrated and hungry.  How anyone could be so cruel as to ditch these sweet babies in any situation but let alone our heat (it was 97 degrees out that day) is beyond me.  There was just no question about it we had to help them, so by the time Alex came out I had one in my lap and was trying to talk the other one into coming out from under the bush.  I had tears in my eyes they were so dirty and the one in my arms was shaking... Alex stepped right in and got them both up in his arms and we went right to the vet to have them looked over.  They gave us a list of no kill shelters in the area and apologized they didn't have room or the staff to take them from us.   Alex said that was fine we would care for them until we thought they were well enough and then look for a place for them.

That is how we got Lucky and Bow.   Lucky is very sweet and has the prettiest chocolate eyes where as her brother...well Bow is so ugly he is cute.  Jack our resident monster puppy took one look at the new comers and decided he was adopting them straight away.  We sat them down in front of him and he did a sniffy type circle around them and then picked Bow up and took him to his dog bed and came back and did the same to Lucky.  He then went and got them a toy and watched to see what they would do.. Poor guy is going to have to wait for them to start feeling better and get older to play... But I have a feeling it won't be long and he will have a pack worthy of marathon play sessions.

Alex and I discussed my mini adventure in detail last night and now I am sitting on a very sore and sorry bottom.  Ugh.  But I feel like I was driven to it!  I had been mentioning my unhappiness of the mess situation to Alex and he was handling the situation, but in an effort to lighten my load he did it behind the scenes if you will with the kids directly.  I know everyone is trying to make things easy for me right now and we are all trying to look after Marie with out her knowing we are looking out for her.  She only promised to move in with us if we did so for her company and not for us to worry about her and feel it necessary to watch over her.  So we crossed our fingers and said of course you should come stay to keep us company and have another set of eyes on the teenagers, but we have all been watching and trying to help where we can.  But if everyone is tip toeing around each other and not talking about the horse in the room...Well hello, I am a action kind of gal.  I am going to drive some action to solve issues...  But that is not how things work around here and so that gets me into trouble.  I had taken the right action of talking to Alex and asking for his help, but then not seeing action taking place right away or even seeing him take any action off I went...  After all was said and done I had broken 3 rules and so I paid the price.  But I am not settled about it at all, in fact I am mad today.  It was an accident that scared me and him, totally get that.  I wasn't trying to bring the house down or anything and my intentions were good.. Organized and helpful and it just went really wrong.  If everyone had been up front with everyone else this wouldn't have happen, so I guess I feel like in the end only I paid the price for the many.  But Alex doesn't agree, he thinks I did the majority of this myself and everyone else was just trying to be helpful.. So I thought using his favorite catch phrase might help him get my point of view.  "Well, maybe everyone should try to be less helpful and more harmless."   Um... Yeah, that didn't go over very well and that landed me over his lap a second time.  I was truly sorry by the time he let me up the second time, but this morning I am having a hard time being sorry and not mad.

Normally I feel good about the rules and this way we handle things but right now I am not happy about it much and I think we have too many rules.  So there, I am done with my little (ok long winded) rant and maybe.. Just maybe feel a bit better now that I have it all out.  But grrrrr and double grrrrr.   Now I must end this and go let the floor guys in, they are replacing the tiles and grout in the laundry room..  Sigh.