4 kids under 4...I Don't Recommend It

My sister went out of town for a week and we stayed at her house to watch her kids.

I was nervous to jump from one kid to four kids, and there was major chaos but it wasn't totally hellish. There was Katie, who actually barely turned 5, Dace: 2 1/2, RJ: 12 months, and Kael: 11 months.

Each age had it's challenge, but here are some highlights:

-changing Dace's diaper only to have Kael's quick hand shoot out of no where, grabbing the diaper and flinging poop all around. Luckily, Dace has reindeer poop pellets so clean up could have been worse.

-just after bath the two babies were playing with toys, I ran up to get pj's for the 2 year old and came back to hear splashing and laughing from the bathroom that is supposed to stay shut. Both freshly washed boys were pulling the toilet paper from the roll right into the toilet

-after shrieking and cleaning up the toilet mess, getting the boys back to playing, I had the daunting task of washing the paint out of Katie's hair. She honestly thinks she's 20 and therefore showers and doesn't need help. So our compromise (I wanted her to take a bath) was her showering as I was leaned in to lather her hair. Just then RJ flagged me from the right, trying to crawl into the shower. I stuck my leg to block his path when Kael darted between my now open legs, crawling into the wet shower in his 2nd pair of clean jammies. At that point I kept trying to keep them out with my legs, and finish getting the paint out of her hair, needless to say, it was messy and the kids were laughing--of course at me.

Here is me looking trashed and Katie getting her hair brushed and hating it.

-Katie getting triple time outs in 3 minutes...sassy

-The second night Katie snuck down out of bed to get a drink, filling a sippee cup with chocolate milk, only to let it drip in the bed all night. The next morning she said a ghost had given her the chocolate milk...discussion on lying and the what ghosts can and cannot do

-babies getting their heads conked because I can't be 4 places at once

There were some fun moments too, one day we went to my mom's to plant corn and the boys had fun swinging in the pergola, the lilacs were blooming and it was a great spring day. It's fun to see RJ have a buddy his age, and so it was not all bad.

So there was some of this.... all bathed, fed, house cleaned, and ready for bed

but there was also a whole lot of this....

Rhett asked me if I thought I could handle this if it was my life. I guess I could handle it, but I now understood when we were all little the occasion my mom locked herself in the bathroom and told us no one could talk to her for 10 minutes. Then when I'd slip notes under the door, she'd promptly slide them back saying "10 minutes!!"

For those that have lots of small children at home, you deserve a medal. A medal and a week long cruise with lots of massages. For those that have one year old twins, you deserve two cruises.

I'm hoping that this babysitting is like babysitting when you're 12, "it's always different when they're your own." But one was my own.... I do like being a mom, I've just decided spacing is important for me with future kids we may have, and I thought this already, but it reinforced the feeling of never wishing for twins...and early bedtimes are sanity maintainers.