Why haven't I posted for a month?

disclaimer: Please know that I love my boys... I'm just doing some theraputic venting, because I know one day I will be able to look back and laugh... but right now, it's just not funny!

Today I decided I wanted to catch some news before lunch. I go downstairs to the basement family room and watch the weather, and soon Jacob comes down to hit a ball around with this plastic hockey stick thingy. After 10 or 15 minutes, I think out loud, "I wonder what Levi is doing?" I could hear his little feet pitter-patter across the floor above me, so I wasn't too worried about him. Jake casually mentions "He is feeding our Thunder-fish."
"HE'S WHAT????!!!!!!"
Now, you have to know, our fish, named Thunder (don't ask me why he's named Thunder ~ the boys named him) was a door prize that the boys got to bring home from a pack meeting back in February 2007. I was told by a scout leader, "Don't worry, it'll only live a few days...", so we took him home, named him, fed him (I'm told this was my mistake), and loved him. That was over 2 1/2 years ago. He gets excited at his mealtime, and even comes to the glass and wags his tail-fin whenever we go look at him. Ask my dad - this fish has personality! And we've grown somewhat attached to him.
So I run upstairs, and discover the whole bottle of fish food has been dumped in the tank. Thunder is barely visable in all the disgusting gooey mess, and I start racing to get the punch bowl filled with clean water and treated so I can get Thunder into a place where he can breathe, and where he can chill out while I scrub out his tank. (yes, he's grown big enough to need the punch bowl as his temporary home.) Meanwhile, I go ballistic on my boys and put them in their room while I scrub plastic plants and castles. About an hour later, after the filter is de-gunked and finally reassembled, I go to the boys' room to check on them. They've taken all the folded, sorted, clean laundry out of the room next to theirs, dumped it on their bedroom floor,

emptied out their dresser, and every thing off the top of it, un-made Jacob's bed,

and to top it all off, they've gotten a little neck-pillow-thingy that has all of those itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny foam beads in it out of my "to be repaired" pile (of course, it needed to be repaired because there's a HOLE IN IT that causes those afformentioned beads to fly all over whatever room they may be in and stick to everything with that lovely static cling that they have)... Ugh!!! So then I put Jacob and Levi in corners where I can keep an eye on them, and try to do some damage control. I find the neck pillow stuffed in the vent in their room (I guess Jacob started to realize that he might be in deep doo doo when those beads started flowing out of the pillow), so I pull it out and mention that "WE DON'T EVER TAKE THE COVERS OFF OF OUR VENTS!!!! STOP DOING THIS!!!"

"But mom," he says, "my little ball went down there and I needed to get it."

"IT WOULDN'T HAVE GONE DOWN THERE IF YOU WOULD HAVE KEPT THE COVER ON!!!" Yeh, I've kind of lost it at that point.

Now here we are, 3 hours later, it's time to pick Jordan up from the bus stop, my kitchen is a mess, I need to vacuum out the vents - the same vents where Jacob said his ball is, but I've found no ball, just kleenexes and granola bar wrappers -the few batches of laundry that have been done have now been voided out, since I have to shake the foam beads out of them and re-fold them, Levi has another poopy diaper (we can get him to pee in the toilet, but not poop), and they have the gall to ask me when they get lunch!!! Really? Are you Serious? Did I mention I just went to the bathroom and sat down on a seat covered with PEE?!!


So if you ever wonder what Christie is up to and why she hasn't posted recently, just remember, I'm the mother of 5 boys. Let your imagination run wild.