Thirteen Things That Deteriorate When Mom Isn't Home.

To be fair, things could have been a lot worse. With Claye at summer school and Elijah working 16 hours a day, and only males in the house for three weeks, things could have taken forever to repair, but they handled it well. Babystepper and Claye were able to pick things up in a hurry and make everything tolerable the day I came home...actually I was so glad to get home I didn't care. I'm not the most organized person; in fact I would call myself a "relaxed houskeeper"; still, the house takes on a unique sense of fuzziness when I'm away.

1. Toilet Paper--We have four bathrooms.
The toilet paper is supposed to go on the handy little holders.
You figure it.
















2. Laundry Piles
Everybody tries hard to wash what they have to have,
but the non-essentials pile up.














3. The carpet--Because nobody is around to say
"leave the food and drinks in the kitchen", or
"Wait! you are tracking something from the Coop
all over the den and into the bedroom!"











4. Mail--Why does nobody ever throw away any junk mail when I'm not home?
Do you think we need 25 credit card offers, 5 political party solicitations, 12 sales fliers, and 3 offers to join my college alumni association in funding an endowment for gymnasium upkeep? It's like a sacred stack or something.












5. Bookshelves--Books reproduce themselves, divide like amoeba or paramecia. They were hanging out of every one of our eleven bookshelves. I had to do major surgery-getting rid of all the appendices and spleens-- to make room for such new essentials as Stephen Colbert's "I am America and So Can You"












6. Music--The stack on the piano has grown to balance the Moses statue;
maybe it's modern art versus classical.
Surely we can manufacture some
deeply significant significance here.














7. Nintendo games--there is a little puddle of them at the feet of the great Nintendo idol in the bedroom.
I'm assuming that it was born of a rainy evening and
several tired harvest hands unexpectedly released
from their labors by a downpour and the accompanying thunder/lightening storm.










8. Flower beds--The back yard is soooo far away and it's so "momish" to weed.














9. Healthy food--I have to give Turtle credit for keeping the cabinets well stocked with food. He also made gallons of tea. Still, the quality of the stuff was a little different from what the cabinets are used to. Turtle's four food groups are: the potato chip group, sorghum and molasses group, popcorn group, and sugared cereal and milk group.

















10. Refrigerator Space--Claye was home on the weekends, to temper the decidedly "male" aspect of the house. She used the opportunity to make unique recipes, so I found Scottish oats and a cup of Caledonian cream in the fridge.
Thank you Celtic Thunder.







11. Vegetable Bin--Yesterday, I found an onion in a zip-loc bag. It looked like yellow mush; need I say more?











12 Light bulbs--Hmmm. I wonder. How many of these lights were ever turned off, and how many men does it take to put in a new light bulb?








13 Grandkids--I'm sure they were sick
because they missed their grandma,
so I'm glad to be home.



















For more Thursday Thirteen check here.