This week at Parenting.com I’m taking my kids on a virtual tour of our house, introducing them to all the excellent features it has to offer.

Dresser – Kids. Meet your dresser. Your clothes live inside. I know you’re aware that the drawers open but did you know that they can also close?

[Read more at Parenting.com]

The school year started and my two oldest are both gone all day. I wasn’t happy to see them go. I felt sort of mad, like the school was kidnapping them or something. And then suddenly we had the house to ourselves, me and Wanda.

I had a church meeting. I put Wanda down for an early meltdown-induced nap. I made corn bread and thawed meat for our chili tonight. I baked bread and picked a few pounds of blueberries at a farm a few miles down the road and then I took Wanda for a walk. I played the songs I wanted on the stereo and nobody used the toilet and forgot to flush.

If the school’s going to kidnap my kids and educate them, at least I was able to distract myself with a surge of domestical energy. It was one of those days you just want to repeat over and over again.

My favorite part of the day was picking berries. Wanda and I wandered up and down the rows of fruit, each with our own bucket. She’d venture off and circle around to find me again, plopping berries into her mouth from the trees, the ground and my bucket. Unlike Little Sal, she never accidentally started following a mama bear around the field and she was not wearing overalls.

Laylee just said, “Mom, you’re amazing! You can copy any voice and sound exactly like the person you’re imitating.”

“Yes,” I said, “If that person is a member of the Lollipop Guild.” I am known for my munchkin impressions.

“Also French people,” she added.

Ah yes. French people. Ziss I cannot deny. Ahn-han-han.

I’ve been enjoying The Prudent Homemaker, a website dedicated to feeding your family well on a tight budget, among other things. Today I tried out her French bread recipe which worked beautifully the first time around. I was so proud of myself that I started speaking like the chef from The Little Mermaid… badly. Apparently, it was extremely impressive. I now have a reputation as a master of vocal disguise.

I am also a master of short cuts so if you decide to make this simple bread, I found that you can make it even simpler by kneading the dough in your Kitchen Aid rather than by hand. It still rose quite nicely after 8-10 minutes in the machine. It wasn’t as blissfully domestic, but I was able to check email while the bread was kneading so I’m totally okay with that. Maybe next time I’ll wear a frilly apron while checking email and that will even the domestical score.

I’ve been home with my kids from the time Laylee was born eight years ago. For the most part I’ve loved it. As with any occupation, it has its rough moments, but overall I couldn’t have asked for a better gig.

The thing about mothering is, it’s more of a calling than a job so being free to pursue it full time is kind of a joyful thing, even at the worst of times. Loving and nurturing another person is a pretty sweet way to spend your days, even if the person is sticky and periodically obnoxious. I’m sticky and obnoxious sometimes too.

But the Thompsons are slowing down (or stopping) in our child production and the kids are getting older. I’ve been taking on more writing work, most notably my new job writing the Mom Congress education blog over at Parenting.com. My novel’s actually still coming along too. I can’t wait for you to read it.

Today I was typing a post about technology in the classroom while sitting on my front porch while Wanda napped and Magoo rode his bike up and down our long driveway. I would periodically pause to chat with him about form or speed or his need for goggles or a light for when he’s riding on the street at night, which is SOOOOOO likely to happen in this lifetime. Then I’d go back to writing.

Sometimes I write with Wanda on my lap, inserting creative punctuation and closing windows while I’m reading them. I stop to drive a carpool, change laundry loads, pick up from the bus or snuggle on the couch and read a board book over and over and over again.

Right now I have so much to learn about education that I’m spending hours every day just reading articles. Hopefully when I’m a little more experienced, I’ll be able to cut that down.

Probably the hardest part about working from home is knowing when to cut myself off and just be at home. Since home and work are the same place, the line is blurry. There are times when I’m working on the novel and Dan goes to bed without me or I’m reading a particularly dense article and I snap when the kids need my help with something.

I’ll figure it out. Even with things as they are, I’m feeling pretty blessed. I’m doing what I love while being with the people I love and I’m getting paid to do some of it. This is a good situation.

Are any of you working from home? Tell me about it.

I got a wicked blister this week from peeling too many potatoes and carrots. Dan says I must have soft delicate computer programmer hands like him. And that’s funny.

The problem is – I am not a computer programmer. I am a mom. Shouldn’t a mom have calloused hands, worn tough from performing good mom-ish works?

This reminds me. It’s about that time of year anyway. I should check to see if the bathrooms need cleaning… and then add that to Laylee’s chore chart.

There is no shortness of cute at our house lately. There is no shortness of soccer, rain, dirty dishes, cheerios on the floor, or late nights full of homework and milk.

There is a shortness of time. Time is flying by too quickly. The Fatness just turned one and I thought I’d share some pictures I took today. Here she is paying oh-so-close attention during Sunday School.

Mothers who function and manage to look good, keep a clean house and care for your kids – I salute you. Sometimes I’m just barely keeping my nose above water here. But I am keeping it above water.

There’s sort of a magic to motherhood. Things always work out.

Just when you think all is lost because your son stashed his favorite blanket in a crevice outside an unnamed shop at the mall, you find that the sales clerk at Ben Bridge Jewelers has found it and put it aside for you.

When your 7-year-old is exploding with rage and attitude and you wonder if the teenage years are already upon you, you touch her back and feel her melt and turn to you for love.

When you’ve given up all hope of ever figuring out what’s wrong with your moody baby, a tiny white tooth pokes its way through her gums.

When you realize your umbrella’s really for real lost and that you must buy another one or sit drenched at soccer games, Nintendo sends you a back-to-school package with a new one inside. (They must know I live in Seattle or something.)

When the kids are cranky, the house mess is out of control and you can’t think of another nice thing to say, you find that it’s bedtime and you all hit reset for a few hours. Things usually look better in the morning. Well maybe the house doesn’t look any better but you all like each other a ton more after a nice rest.

My approach to gardening this year is to kill kill kill everything in sight.

I wanted to plant some things but there is no room in my yard for useful vegetation because it’s all been taken over by crazy soul-sucking weeds. Blackberry vines that I thought were cute and semi-useful have multiplied by such an alarming rate that I fear they may be organizing to overthrow our family and crush our home. Some of the vines are as thick as small tree trunks.

Then there are the dandelions, the morning glory vines, the moss, the crab grass, the terrifyingly invasive Japanese Knot Weed and all of their friends. Any time I clear an area to plant something, the weeds come in thicker and stronger because they have so much freshly churned earth to grow in.

So this year I’ve got chemicals for the areas around the yard where I won’t be planting other things. And for areas where poison would compromise the soil and surrounding plants, I bought a flame thrower.

For reals.

It’s also known as a garden torch but when I ignite that thing and walk up and down the rows of my vegetative nemeses, an area I like to call “The Kill Zone,” I feel mighty powerful indeed. All of my childhood pyro tendencies and all of my current pent-up frustrations come out as I pull my little red wagon full of propane around the yard, laying waste to every living thing that I don’t choose to let live. It’s kind of magical.

Dan stands by as fire marshal and every once in a while I let him have a turn with the big flaming gun, which he assembled for me.

At one point on Saturday I hit a patch of dried leaves that got a little bit out of control and Dan doused it, worried that someone might call the fire department if they saw the smoke.

I think of fire fighters differently lately.

Laylee’s been playing my Style Savvy game on the DSi. I was hooked for a couple of weeks but got over it pretty fast. It’s a little repetitive and there’s only one body type in the game. But Laylee likes it and I had a fun couple of weeks with it. She was recently telling me all about the shop she’s set up and what her favorite clothing suppliers are.

“I don’t really like Mad Jack,” she said of the goth punk clothing supplier. “It’s my least favorite of all the clothes. I don’t even know who would wear it except like punk rock people and firefighters and stuff.”

Apparently firefighters wear spiked dog collars on their necks, dress nearly all in black, carry their wallets on chains and enjoy wearing their hair in purple striped Mohawks. I hadn’t noticed that before but if they have to come out next time I’m Rambo-ing the weed bed, I’ll keep a closer eye on thier fashion choices.

Dinner. Tonight. Canned soup. Crackers. Cold cereal for desert. Best dinner conversation in possibly the last 2 years.

Dan was at a meeting. I managed to find some canned soup that was less than 2 years past its Best-By Date. I warmed it in the microwave and we sat down to chow. Each kid counted out 10 Better Cheddars to eat with their soup. Laylee thought it was okay to eat but not much to look at.

Magoo thought it was disgusting unless I fed it to him spoon by spoon like a little influenza patient from the olden days where influenza would likely kill you if someone didn’t sit by your bed spooning broth into your pie hole.

“I want to eat it like a robot,” Magoo began. “Robots are really smart and they can look like they’re made out of bottles.”

“Oh yeah?” Laylee chimed in, “Well pigs are really really smart. I’m gonna eat my crackers like a pig.”

Both kids started snarfing crackers like a couple of rabid hogs and I let them with some bland statement about how I was glad they weren’t doing that in front of anyone else because we at least wanted to pretend that being a Thompson meant you had polite table manners. I’m not sure if they heard me over the snorting, chomping and laughing.

I’ve been a little nostalgic lately about the fleeting nature of childhood and putting up with perhaps more than I should because seeing little kids and imagining that I’ll soon be done with them makes me a cry a little in public sometimes. I can chalk the public crying up to being pregnant and no one seems to mind, especially since they don’t have to witness what kind of heathen dinner habits the crying leads to once I get home.

I told Laylee I didn’t think pigs were really that smart. Besides Wilbur, I told her that I thought most pigs were kind of dumb.

But she knew different. Ms. Sweetsie had read her a book about pigs in kindergarten and how they were creatures of untold genius. She said she wished she had a brain like a pig.

“But I’m a robot,” argued Magoo, seeming to say that the two could not coexist at the same dinner table.

I continued to feed him and he continued to talk about robots between bites.

Laylee said that pigs were so smart that they could probably use their hooves (she illustrated these by clamping her hands into tight fists) to pick flowers in the meadow if they wanted to. She mimed the action of picking flowers sans-phalanges.

“That’s why I want a pig’s brain.”

“Do you like the soup?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s great.”

“It’s good if you chew it like a robot.” Magoo demonstrated what mechanical soup chewing would look like.

“If it were ever really cold in the winter and my hands froze until they were black and we had to cut them off so I had no hands at all, I’d need to have a brain as good as a pig so I could still pick flowers in the meadow.” Again she mimed the two-fisted flower picking. “That would be really cool.” Slurp.

“Yes. That would be very fortunate,” I responded.

Maybe it’s just in the air. It’s definitely all around us and through us and it’s fun and LOUD and festive and at times obnoxious.

My mom always used to say that what she really wanted for Mother’s Day was well-behaved kids who were obedient and didn’t spend the whole day fighting. But what about these delicious red bath oil beads?! Surely they’re enough of a bribe that I can spend the rest of the day making annoying mouth noises and poking my sister in the arm until she begs for mercy.

Ah. I understand her so much better now. The kids were very excited and excitable, cute and AAAHHHHHH!!!!!

Dan is a good Mother’s Day husband. He’s actually quite passable year round but on Mother’s Day he knows how to bring it. All I want from him is a flower, a meal or two, something to unwrap, and the assurance that I don’t have to do anything resembling work for the day. Sure, I’ll read the kids a story or brush their hair, but only the fun parts of motherhood, not the ones that involve cleaning or bodily fluids.

Totally off topic but speaking of bodily fluids, Laylee’s current favorite song at church is called How Firm a Foundation and the last line of the first verse says, “What more can he say than to you he hath said, who unto the Savior for refuge hath fled?” She picks this song every time it’s her turn to pick a song and she sings it with gusto. I recently discovered why. She was sitting next to Magoo at our family night and finished, “…who unto the Savior for refuse hath fled. Hey, pst. Magoo. Refuse means poop and pee and stuff. Giggle.”

Um yeah. Upon further investigation, it seemed that she really did think those were the words to the song and hilarious words they were. She was so disappointed to find out what it actually said. Ah, the bitter realities of gaining greater knowledge.

Anyway. I did nothing today in a very deliberate sort of way. There were beautiful flowers purchased on Saturday and placed in the middle of the kitchen table with strict orders from Magoo not to look at them. He burst into my room this morning with a “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! Now you can look at your flowers!”

Dan got everyone ready for church while I slept in and he made my new breakfast obsession, steel cut oats, cooked to perfection.

The talks at church were upbeat and motivating and made me want to be a better mom… tomorrow… when I’m done laying about the house celebrating the fact that I am one.

Dan coached the kids well on buying me fun and thoughtful gifts and even put them in gift bags. He gave me a card with Michael Scott’s wisdom on parenting. He made dinner, did the hard part of bedtime, and cleaned the kitchen.

I feel refreshed and a bit spoiled and useless. I slept too much, parented too little, received too many presents and didn’t do enough for my own mothers. It was a good day but not a great day. I wish I’d played a game with the kids or spent some time talking with Dan while he slaved in the kitchen. Absolute slovenliness doesn’t really sit comfortably with me. In a way it was a good reminder that all these sick fat pregnant days when I feel useless at the end of the day, like I have nothing to show for myself, I’ve done more than I give myself credit for. In the future, I’ll just tell myself, “At least I got more done today than on Mother’s Day ’09. That was a doozey!”

It’s weird too because I got more praise, love and outpourings of support than on most other days of the year and it was the day I felt least deserving of it. Strange thing, this day of mothers.

Today I moved, I really moved for one of the first times in 4 months. Magoo was at preschool a 20-minute walk from our house and there was a smattering of sun peeking through the clouds.

I was out of breath in less than a block, surprised at how weak and puny and scrawny and pathetic and other words generally used to describe nerdy 7th grade boys I was. But I made it to preschool, sure that Magoo would be enraged when he found he’d need to walk home.

You see, my lay-about lifestyle has become the family lay-about lifestyle and my kids, especially Magoo, are sadly out of shape. Actually, even when I was fit, the kids weren’t all that fit. We’ve spent most of the winter inside and although I’d been going frequently to the gym before the sickness, Magoo doesn’t get much opportunity to get his body moving. I need to be more proactive about it. I didn’t have the pregnancy excuse all winter long but I’m happy to use it now.

He wasn’t that resistant to walking home, until we’d traveled about 50 feet, at which point he asked that we walk home in the car next time. But we pushed forward with little to no choice, up the high hills and even made it to the park for 20 minutes before we had to walk to the bus stop to pick up Laylee.

When I got home, I found I had used every speck of strength and energy I had in my body. I fell asleep, impervious to the mounting disaster that is my home.

I was awakened by the sound of my kids opening the door to one of my dinner co-op buddies. She’s a new co-op buddy and this is only the second time she’s been in my house. The dining room table had dinner dishes from last night stuck to it. The sink was full of filthy dishes, every counter was covered in filth and Magoo led her happily into the kitchen to bring our dinner. But she couldn’t find anywhere to set it down so she stepped over the caked-on spaghetti sauce on the floor and placed our dinner on the cold stove, the only clear place in the room.

I wandered downstairs in a post-nap haze and promised her that although my house had looked like a condemned building the only two times she’d visited, it was the exception, not the norm. (Maybe it’s the norm these last few months but over the course of my lifetime, on average, this is definitely a freakish level of filth that I am in no way comfortable with.) She hugged me and said it didn’t matter and when she left I held back my tears while I read Flylady.com for an hour and then scrubbed the everliving cheese out of my kitchen.

It looks good. And the laundry’s done. For just 30 seconds I considered calling up my friend at 10pm and asking her if she wanted to come over and share some jellybeans… in the kitchen. That seemed like a stupid plan but, unsure of what my house will look like next Wednesday night, I went to get my camera so I could email her a picture of my great feat of progress.

I somehow stopped myself… barely. My kitchen may be clean but that doesn’t make me unpathetic.