Author Archives: Becky Bean

A Day With Four Kids

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Things I’ve Already Done Today:

  • Wake up.
  • Change both babies’ diapers
  • Kiss The Bean goodbye as he heads off to work
  • Plop both babies in their high chairs, return to kitchen, and ponder the contents of the pantry and the fridge.  No milk.  No butter.  No cereal.  No gluten-free bread.  No tortillas.  No cheese.  No … well, anything easy.
  • Scramble some eggs.  Eggs and leftover Cheerios for everyone.  Yay, nutrition!
  • While everyone is eating, go outside.  Let Artemis go pee.  Feed horses.  Water chickens.  Water the wilted tomato plants.  Collect chicken eggs.
  • Return inside.  Dress all four children in clean clothes, brush their hair, their teeth.  Occasionally scream out “WE ARE LATE!  MOVE FASTER! WHY IS THE TV ON?!?!?  STAND IN THE CORNER! NO, WAIT, THERE’S NO TIME!”
  • Drop older boys off at Vacation Bible School so they can learn about patience and love and gentle kindness.
  • Idle in the parking lot and consider what you are going to make for lunch and dinner. Factor in your schedule. Realize there is no avoiding it – you need to go to the grocery store, RIGHT NOW.
  • Drive to Longview.
  • Arrive at WinCo.  Plop one twin in the cart, the other in a carrier, and purchase $280 worth of groceries, self bag, and get an extra cart to hold them.
  • Drag out both carts by yourself, load them up in the car, load up the babies and hand them each a squeeze pouch of apple sauce.  Realize it’s only been 41 minutes since you arrived.  Turn on car and head for home.
  • Pause at a red light and marvel at your awesomeness. 41 minutes.  You rock.
  • Turn on the latest Bloody Jack/Jacky Faber audio book.
  • Five minutes from home, wince as Magpie succumbs to carsickness and explodes vomity applesauce everywhere.
  • Pull into driveway.
  • Unload Magpie, strip her down, and haul nekkid baby upstairs and plop her in the shower.
  • Head back downstairs.  Use paper towels to wipe up the visible vomit.  Toss into plastic bag, then trash can.
  • Load up arms with as many bags of groceries as you possibly can.
  • Head back upstairs.  Deposit said bags on kitchen floor.
  • Head back downstairs for more groceries.
  • Repeat a stupid number of times.  Mentally cuss architect who invented houses with a main floor not on the ground level.
  • Bring up the last thing – a watermelon – and then head downstairs, turn off car, extricate sleeping Finn who stays sleeping.  HOORAY!
  • Creep through threshold of house, which (as always) automatically causes the sleeping Finn to wake and begin shrieking violently.
  • Plop shrieking baby on floor.
  • Grab towel, go get Magpie out of the shower, and head to her room to dry her off and put on new clothes.
  • Step over shrieking Finn, who continues to follow you around the house so he can be very certain you are hearing his outrage properly.
  • Change Magpie into clothes, then plop both babies in high chairs. Swipe contents of their still-dirty-from-breakfast trays onto the floor.  Good thing you have a Labrador, right?
  • Give them Ritz crackers to keep them quiet.
  • Clean out fridge of old food, wipe down shelves.
  • Glance at clock.  ACK!  YOU HAVE TO BE AT THE CHURCH IN 16 MINUTES!!
  • Put away frozen and refrigerated foods.  Stack the non-perishable items on the counters.
  • Lock Labrador in bedroom so she doesn’t give in to temptation, eat the groceries, and force you to skin her alive.
  • With a baby in each arm, use your chin to hit the unlock button on the van keys. Head downstairs carrying both babies.
  • Arrive at van, reach out a hand to open the door, and have it automatically lock as soon as you touch it.
  • Take a brief moment to imagine using a castration knife on the idiot engineer who decided that when you hit “unlock” on a vehicle that it should automatically relock itself.
  • Walk back upstairs with the babies.  Try to tuck the keys in the waistband of your pocketless workout pants you’re wearing.  Give up.  Grab the keys with your mouth, instead.
  • Walk back down the stairs while staring up at the left sky, right sky, left sky, right sky, left sky, right sky in an attempt to keep the keys out of the four baby hands trying to jerk it out of your mouth.
  • Get babies in car seat, pretending not to notice the still-wet vomit spots on Magpie’s carseat.
  • Drive like the wind to the church.
  • Kids are supposed to leave at 12:35.  It’s 12:33.  Put one baby in a carrier, tuck the other in your arm, head to get the kids.
  • Awesome.  Your kids are both the last ones in their classroom.  Awesome. You’re such an awesome mom.
  • Instead of “hi” your children greet you with “You weren’t there to see us do our performance on stage.  When I realized you weren’t there, I almost cried in front of everyone.  Everybody else’s moms were there.  Why not you?”
  • Try to explain about groceries, realize you’re just making them sadder, and apologize.
  • Return home.  Head back upstairs.
  • Let Artemis out to go potty.
  • Start cooking lunch.
  • Realize you forgot Artemis outside – HOORAY!  She was waiting at the back door.  Good dog.  Very good dog.
  • Put babies back in high chairs.  Swipe uneaten Ritz crackers to the floor.  Good thing you have a Labrador, huh?
  • Feed everyone.
  • Ignore the “Now can we go to the fair?  Now?  When we’re done eating, right? Right?  Then we can go?  Remember, today is fair day?” coming from the kitchen table.
  • While they’re eating, finish putting away groceries.
  • Glance at clock – 1:14 pm.  Oh, Lord.  It’s only halfway through the day.  I’m only halfway through the day.

 

Things still to do today:

  • Take all four kids to the fair
  • Cook dinner
  • Take care of horses and settle them in for the night
  • Shower
  • Exercise
  • Meal prep, so I can eat healthy
  • Laundry, so I can go to work tomorrow and smell gross
  • Sweep?  Maybe dishes?
  • Evening baths
  • Get kids in PJs and in bed
  • Find pencil sharpener and sharpen pencils.
  • Track down the creators of those inspirational “nobody’s busy, it’s just a matter of priorities” quotes you keep seeing on Facebook and stab them in the eye with a pencil.
  • Sleep?  Maybe?  Pretty please, babies?  Can this be the night you two both sleep through the night?

If anyone knows the address of the person who first said this, send it to me in an email. I’ve got a drawer full of pencils just waiting to meet them.

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How to Fence a Horse

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I’m really good at daydreaming.

Like, if you need someone to just sit there and daydream, I’m your man.  Or girl.  I guess woman?

Eh, whatever.  If you need someone to daydream, pick me!  I’m super good at that sort of stuff.

But real life stuff?

I mean, it’s one thing to say “One day I’m gonna have a great big horse who is allllll mine, and I’m gonna get up in the morning and look out my bedroom window and see him grazing in the fields….”

Only now it’s for real.

 

That’s a screenshot of what is going to be my new backyard.  Actually, the yard is even bigger than that, but that’s the area that I get to do what I want with, for Caspian. We are going to have funds from the sale of the house to fence it in, and also build a run-in and an area to compost manure.

Speaking of the sale of the house, I think we have someone.  We still have to pass inspection, and even if we do pass inspection we will still be in our current house for a couple of months because escrow takes a while right now..

But I think this thing is actually going to happen.  We have found a house we all agree on, they’ve accepted our offer (contingent on the sale of our house), we found a buyer for the new house, and I might have my pony in my yard before summer.

It’s one thing to daydream…. it’s another to actually sit down and do it for real.

“Yaaaay!  I get a horse in my backyard!  Oh. Wait…. Uh, how do you safely house a horse in your backyard?”

I’ve decided to go with 5 foot no-climb horse fence with a strand of hot wire on the inside, but what kind of posts do I use? The t-posts or the wood ones? How many feet of fencing will I need? How many posts per feet of fence?  How far down do you sink the posts? How big of a sacrifice area do I make?  I’d really like to plan it out so that it can house two horses eventually – I see two horses in my future at some point, so there’s no sense doing it twice.

The back 2/3 of the pasture is slightly sloped – less than it looks here, but still something to take into account.

Do I put the sacrifice area at the bottom, since it’ll be muddy anyways?  Do I put it at the top, and then have the pasture be sloped?  Do I just do long paddocks with shelters, and then one big turn out area? The rule is one horse per acre, but they never say how best to make that work.

I mean, in a perfect “I have all the space and all the money” I would do a gorgeous paddock paradise setup, but all the ones I’ve seen online require a ton of fencing.  Fencing costs money, and I’m not sure we can swing that.

Also, just to make things more complicated, I think I want to include a small riding area somewhere, so there’s a safe place for the kids to ride without having to trailer anywhere.  Of course, if I do that the amount of pasture I have to work with is even smaller.
Sigh.

Do I cut back on the pasture or the sacrifice area, or forgot the riding area?  Where would I put the imaginary riding area – at the bottom, or at the top?  Do you cap wood posts? What do you set your posts and/or t-posts in to keep them stable and sturdy? What kind of electric fence should I get?  Where do I store the hay?

 

 

Can I just go back to daydreaming about the pony in my backyard, without having to do so much math, please?

 

Yes, I understand that my “complaining” is the very essence of #FirstWorldProblems

 

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