Family Pictures and Weekend Fun?

 This weekend was one of those weekend where you start off thinking you’ll just do a few small things around the house and then spend the rest of the time on the couch watching movies on Lifetime. That so did not happen.

Saturday morning my husband asked me what I planned to do for the day. “Ah just some simple cleaning in the kitchen and then I’m going to work on getting the steam cleaner to work so I can clean our bedroom carpet. After that I am not moving off the couch for the rest of the weekend,” I replied. HA!

It was one of those days where I just kept seeing the dirt multiply. So while just simply cleaning the kitchen I had to wipe down all the cabinets, which lead me to having to wipe down all the baseboards and then the walls. While I was on the floor cleaning the baseboards I saw how gross the tile grout was so of course then I had to scrub that with bleach. If I already have the bleach out with gloves on, why don’t I go ahead and clean the whole floor and all the doors while I’m at it?  Apparently I need to read the definition of simple. The good news is that my kitchen floor is so clean you could eat off of it. Want to come give it a try?

Then I decided to fix the steam cleaner so that we wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to buy a new one. I took the entire base apart using a butter knife and one screw driver. I think you could solve world peace with a butter knife. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong so I put it back together, threw the extra screw I had left over away (seriously who needs extra screws?), and then after taking it apart and putting it back together decided to google how to fix it. The problem was simple and all I needed to fix it was a butter knife. Go figure.

Five hours later the kitchen floor was spotless and our bedroom floor was missing it’s spots. Win, win situation for everyone but tired mommy. Saturday night Damion and I both willingly went to bed at 11pm because we could not keep our eyes open any longer. We are both night owls so 11pm is usually when it’s just getting started.

Sunday I woke up extra early to run over and do some pet sitting duties for friends. I may have hopped out of bed and into the car a little too fast. I never looked at the mirror and it took me three attempts to back out of our driveway without hitting the rocks that line it. oops. An hour later when I got home and was awake enough to really look in the mirror, it was just scary. I feel like I should take a condolences bouquet to my local Starbucks employees that had to witness that.

When I got home I once again told Damion that I had plans to veg out. Wrong again. Because of a pet issue we wound up having to use the newly fixed carpet cleaner to clean the carpets in our home office. But why stop there if I already have it out? So I did a few other floors too. Then I had to run to Petsmart to pick up some over the counter meds for our zoo. By then it was happy hour at Sonic and my couch was calling my name.

But when I walked in the door Damion asked if we could try to go take family pictures that evening.

Sure. Why not?

Shower and sudden non planned wardrobe changes later and we were out the door to the park with the camera and tripod.

Let me tell you how family pictures with a tripod goes. Set timer. Set settings. Set people. Beg children to cooperate. Offer promises of ice cream. Candy. Cell Phones. Whatever you can. Wait for strangers to walk past the background of your picture. Check settings again. Press shutter. Run and jump in the picture. Get up and do it all again, and again, and again. Because taking pictures with three children requires a lot of redoes.

That earthquake in California? It might have been caused by me running. I can’t make any promises.

The kids were great though. There was no whining for the first time all weekend and really they did mostly always look at the camera and smile. That picture right above is all their personalities to a T. Goofy, Goofy Jr., Princess Pretty, Attitude Newbie, and me… just me.

I think we got some great shots, I’m just too tired right now to really look at them. Something tells me that I need to go wake Mr. Byrd up out of the office and drag him to bed. Have a good, hurricane safe, back to school Monday.