Yes, I Have Five Kids. No, I'm Not Neglecting Any of Them.

"Wow, you have four brothers and sisters? That must be hard for you to have a new baby in the house again," a well-meaning lady in her fifties once commented to my daughter.

Knowing what response was expected of her and not liking to contradict adults, my 9-year-old lowered her head and quietly said, "Actually, I like having babies because they're cute."

"Oh!" the woman sputtered, surprised at her answer. "Well... that's good, I suppose. You certainly have enough of them!"

I have 5 children, and that makes us an object of interest to pretty much everyone. Some of the comments we get are positive, but under many of them there's an underlying assumption.

People are thinking that our kids are somehow not getting their needs met.

That because we have 5 children, we must not have time for each of them.

It's part of a larger double standard for big families. If you don't have a large family you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you have a bunch of kids I don't even have to tell you what I mean.

If you have two kids and one has yogurt smeared on her face and throws a tantrum in the produce aisle, she's just being a kid. Yet if the yogurt-covered tantrum has four or five siblings standing by, strangers will be much harsher judges. "Aha!" they will say knowingly, "Those people have too many children to handle!"

If a mother works full-time outside the house and has two kids, no one bats an eye. But if a mother like me stays home with her 5 kids, strangers assume they're all starved for love and attention — despite the fact that I spend all day, every day with them.

There's something about big families that makes many people unwilling to assume the best, and all too ready to assume the worst.

How about another story?

Nobody expected our fifth baby to have trouble when he was born 3 weeks early, but he spent weeks struggling in the NICU to breathe on his own. Once he mastered that, eating and gaining weight was another challenge. He started working with a physical therapist from Early Intervention at 6 months, and required an outpatient surgery at 9 months.

He continues to make progress, but is usually several months behind in hitting his milestones. When other kids his age were crawling from point A to point B (and some overachieving babies were even walking,) he was lying on his back and using his feet to push himself around.

"Is he still getting physical therapy?" a casual acquaintance asked, watching him scoot across the floor.

"Yes. He's coming along slowly. Verrrrrrry slowly," I laughed.

"Well, you do have 5 kids, so it's not like you have a lot of time to work with him."

I was a little shocked and didn't really know what to say. Why was this person I hardly knew suggesting that I didn't have time to love my son and nurture his development?

Obviously life is busy in a family of 7, but is it so different in a family of 3 or 4? I'm not sure that people with one or two children feel like they're rolling in leisure time, either.

Many parents I know have to juggle working part-time, or even full-time, with the needs of their kids. I don't know how they do that. But they can and do raise happy, well-adjusted children.

So I don't see why it's so hard to imagine that the parents of 5 (or 10 or 15, for that matter) can't do the same. We all have demands on our time.

I know people who grew up in small families feeling that their parents were too busy for them, and others who grew up feeling very loved in their big family. What I'm getting at is, you can't tell what kind of family someone has just by doing a head count.

That particular conversation is over, and I'm sure that woman never gave a second thought to her offhand comment.

But if I could go back in time, this is what I would've said to her:

I think I know where you're coming from. After all, when we all pile out of our van at the grocery store it reminds you of a clown car.

To you, my family looks like a nameless, faceless horde of children in the parking lot.

But don't assume it looks like that to me.

I know and love each of my children. I pray for them by name. Seeing every one of them achieve their full potential is the most important thing I'll ever do in this lifetime.

I see each one of them so individually that, to be honest, I'm sometimes a little taken aback when I look at a picture of our family all in a group and realize: That is a lot of people!

I don't see a big mass of kids when I look at our family in real life. I just don't.

I may not have time to do elaborate crafts at home or be president of the PTA, but my kids don't care about those things, anyway. What matters to them is that I enjoy being with them, that I care to know all about them, and that I love them.

And love, unlike a pie, doesn't mean that the more people at the table, the smaller the slice.

I'm not a perfect mom, but I wouldn't be that if I'd stopped at one or two children, either. I'm just a good mom. And I'm enough for my kids.

Every single one of them.

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Travel the World with Your Kids for Free This Summer

Blame it all on an issue of Parents magazine. Or maybe it was Family Fun. Whatever it was, ruined our summers forever.

Four years ago I was at the library watching my youngest play at the train table, and I happened to reach over and start leafing through a parenting magazine.

My eyes stopped on an article about some lady who decided to do an educational pretend trip around the globe with her kids over summer vacation. Their family ate at ethnic restaurants, learned different languages, and listened to cultural music. It was a way to broaden her kids' horizons and keep them learning during the summer.

I was kind of an overachiever back then, and I thought, "What a great idea!"

I bought a 5-foot wide world map on Amazon and hung it in the dining room. I posted a "summer itinerary" on the wall, listing in a cutesy font the countries we were "visiting" and when, as chosen by the kids. I made them faux passports with a little United States seal on the cover and everything.

If this doesn't scream Type A mom, I don't know what does.
The first page even has their picture and identifying information just like a real passport.

I don't blame you if reading this makes you want to kick me in the head. That's a completely rational reaction. Thank goodness Pinterest wasn't on my radar back then. I would've been unstoppable. (This is why I had more children, I think, so I wouldn't have time to do stuff like this.)

It was a whirlwind summer.

The poor librarians at our public library didn't know what hit them. Their circulation numbers must have gone through the roof that July and August, because we hauled out stacks of books, movies, and CDs about different countries week after week. I mean on top of the stack we usually haul out. just because my kids are total bookworms.

Why yes, my kids always watch videos like this. Why do you ask?
(This was before the demise of our TV, by the way.)

We rolled Swedish meatballs in Sweden; in France, I made my first soufflé and daughter said it "tasted like throw-up." (Not sure if I did something wrong or if she just doesn't like soufflé.)

In Egypt, we went to the beach and the kids recreated the Nile river and built pyramids and stuff along the banks.

My son was a little disappointed at the lack of crocodiles.

We ate with chopsticks in China and I learned that I love making Chinese food. The recipes I used that week are some of my favorites today, 4 years later.

Haven't had a haircut since, most likely.

In Australia, we put together puzzles (just black-and-white maps I printed out and cut up) of the 6 states of Australia and made a didgeridoo out of a wrapping paper tube.

In Ukraine, we made fake pysanky eggs (the unbelievably intricate ones with really deep colors.) In case you want to know how that's done, you color paper all over with crayons, paint black over the top, scratch a design in it with a safety pin, and cut out an egg shape. It's a good activity to take up an entire morning.

When I started, I thought "visiting countries" would just be a fun thing to do for that one summer, but the kids (particularly my oldest) loved it so much they begged me to do it again. Begged.

So it's become a regular thing now.

As the years go on I've dialed it back. That first year I was really out of control — I sewed ponchos for each of the kids when we talked about gauchos (the cowboy, not the pants) in Argentina. I realize I had way too much time on my hands.

By the end of that summer I was completely exhausted. And of course after that I had a baby, then another one, so I've got no choice but to keep it simpler now.

Our loose structure for visiting a country is:

First, we locate the country on the map and fill out a page of our passports. Their passports have blanks to fill in with the name of the country, what it borders, what continent it's on, and other major landmarks they can see on the map. They also make up a visa stamp for that country and color it in.

Not sure why my daughter is wearing a babushka. I don't even think we visited Russia that year.

Then they Google the country's flag and fight over the crayons copy it on a sheet of typing paper.

Leave a comment below if you know what flag this is without Googling it!

We hang the finished flags on the wall and it's actually really cool to see the accumulation of 4 year's worth of them.

The dining room, end of summer 2014.

Then we spend the rest of the week reading, watching, listening to, and doing things related to the culture and geography of the country. I used to make up a lot of my own activities but I find I have less time to do that every year, and why re-invent the wheel? I promise to give a link and proper credit to any websites I crib my ideas from.

World travel starts again on Monday in our house, and you can follow along via my blog to see a recap of each week. Every Saturday night I'll post about what we did that week and how it went.

I don't know how this summer will go, but I can guarantee you funny stories and a few Pinterest fails, with possibly some helpful information in between.

Countries visited in 2015:

• Venezuela
• Japan
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• Oman
• Washington, D.C.
• Netherlands (Holland)

Countries visited in 2016: none, I'd just had a baby and couldn't bear to think about anything other than keeping us alive all summer

Countries visited in 2017:

• Austria
• Greece
• Chile
• Madagascar
• North Korea
• Spain

Countries visited in 2018:

• Sudan
• Namibia
• Turkey
• Hungary
• Turkmenistan

Countries visited in 2019:

• New Zealand
• Poland
• Vietnam
• Rwanda

Countries visited in 2020:

• Israel
• Mexico
• Indonesia
• Morocco
• Thailand
• Saudi Arabia
• Cuba
• Somalia

Countries visited in 2021:

• Iceland
• Ireland
• Afghanistan
• Italy
• Fiji
• Cambodia

Countries visited in 2022:

• Bangladesh
• Zimbabwe
• Colombia
• Iran
• Nepal

Countries visited in 2023:

• Portugal
• Costa Rica
• Pakistan

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7 Quick Takes about English Muffin Bounty Hunters, Begging an Old Flame to Take You Back, and What's Really In Froot Loops

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! Giving you the last 7 days in 7 quick takes. How was your week?

—1—

It's officially summer! I think all of our brains were getting fried toward the end of the school year.

I know because I wrote a check for my daughter's teacher gift and asked her to give it to the organizer's son in class, and she forgot for 4 consecutive days and then lost it.

Then while she was explaining to me that the check was gone, my son came in the room upset that his English muffin was missing. "Well, where did you put it down?" I asked. He showed me and it wasn't there, so I helped him look high and low for 6 or 7 minutes before he remembered that he'd eaten it already.

Like I said, we're pretty ready for summer.

—2—

It took us several days to get through the mountains of paperwork the kids each brought home from their desks at school.

My personal favorite was my 11-year-old's love letter from a square to a rectangle. Apparently this was a math assignment and it had to incorporate as many features of a geometric shape as possible.

Dear Rectangle, I can't stop thinking about your right angles...

Here's an excerpt: "...We grew up together in Parallelton. Can't the rest of our lives be like that? Please reconsider breaking up with me. The four sides of my mind met and no matter which angle I look at you from, they are all the same — every one of them is right..."

—3—

In an effort to add some structure and prevent the house from achieving landfill status with the kids home all day, I instituted a new cleaning policy that I borrowed from Christina at Hands Full and Loving It. It's called 5 Minute Madness, and a few times a day everybody just cleans like crazy for 5 minutes.

Or that's the idea, anyway.

After the first day, my kids started groaning and calling it "5 Minute Sadness," but I guess it's better than nothing.

—4—

Phillip celebrated our 12th anniversary on Saturday by going to a monster truck show while I stayed home.

I like to say that for the reactions.

It was actually a lovely day. We took the family to the pool in the morning, got some things done around the house, and then he took the older kids to see the monster trucks while I put the baby to sleep and blogged.

Oh my gosh, is my posture really like this? Can you give yourself scoliosis?

—5—

Father's Day at our house is all about the food. Although I'm nowhere near the chef that Phillip is, he likes being surprised with yummy food made especially for him.

This year I created a bacon weave breakfast burrito, like this one except filled with eggs, avocado, tomato, and cheese instead of The Yellow Death:




For dinner we had one of his favorite shrimp pasta dishes followed by these easy little strawberry cheesecake bites:

I asked my son to take a picture of me and his sisters making the cheesecakes assembly-line style and I got this picture of my butt looking gigantic. Thanks, son.

Insert your favorite "Yo momma so fat" joke right here.

—6—

When Phillip opened up the grill for the first time this season, there was a wasp's nest inside. Thinking it would be a quick way to get rid of the nest, he just started up the grill.

Turns out that wasps get very angry when you light their home on fire. I've never seen Phillip run so fast.

We ended up frying our burgers on the stovetop that evening because of the homicidal wasp outside. We may never be able to use our grill again.

—7—

With school out we still try to eat a quasi-healthy diet, but I try to have at least a few quick convenience foods on hand that we don't have during the school year. Such as this highly processed sugar cereal:

Generic Froot Loops. I can't believe they like this stuff.

My 3-year-old's commentary was, "This has oranges in it because the monkey has an orange in his hand."

Well played, marketing team. It's health food! Like a full serving of fresh fruit in every bowl.

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My Kids Love to Read and I Hate the Summer Reading Program

Let me preface this by saying I don't fault anyone for liking the summer reading program at their local library. If you love it, that's great! Your kids dig the prizes and logging their reading hours? Awesome!

We do like the summer schedule of events at the library. If there's a free animal show or a robotics demo, sign us up.

But we don't do the reading logs. And I'll be perfectly honest: it's because I hate them.

We did the summer reading program one year, and it was a disaster for the following reasons:

1. Trips to the library = maximum stress.

My kids love going to the library, and ordinarily I love taking them. But when we tried to do the summer reading program, every trip was preceded by frantic running around and yelling, "Where's my reading log? How much do you think I read yesterday?" and of course when we showed up at the library, "I left my reading log at home!"

In our van, someone is almost always crying, bleeding, or having some other minor emergency. We're also usually late for something. We don't need a summer reading program to inject additional stress into our car trips; we're doing just fine in that department on our own.

2. We can never find the reading logs. Ever.

No matter where I kept the reading logs, whether tacked on the fridge or in a locked box buried 5 feet underground, they were always missing. Always. They were lost instantly when we arrived home from signing up for the summer reading program, every time they wanted to log their reading time, and whenever it was time to go to the library.

Even if we did manage to bring them with us (yay!) they were inexplicably lost somewhere between the car and the librarian's desk.

3. Other random tragedies befall the reading logs.

In general, loose pieces of paper don't fare well in our house. Little sisters draw on things. People spill water on things. Random pieces of paper lying around get thrown in the recycling. They just do.

Would an online version of the reading log be better? Maybe. But probably not. Because...

4. My kids can't track their reading.

Oh, they're smart kids who know how to use a stopwatch, but they just don't read that way. They don't say, "Okay Self, I am going to sit down and read a book now. Let me get my timer and set it for 20 minutes!"

No, the way my kids read is like this: I send them to get the broom and dustpan for me, but they get distracted by a book sitting on top of the washing machine. Twenty minutes later when I go looking for them, I find them standing slack-jawed in front of the book, sometimes with one hand outstretched toward the broom as a token of their forgotten mission. Repeat scenario twenty times per day.

If books were black holes, my kids would be the unfortunate stars getting sucked into them. There's no planning ahead for that. Counting the number of minutes they read is like tabulating how many child-sized socks there are scattered around my house at any given time: impossible.

5. I don't want the responsibility.

And it turns out, neither do they.

That summer we learned that reading logs turn me into a crazy person. So the next year I told the kids that if they wanted to sign up, it was going to be completely their project. I would provide rides to the library, but anything having to do with a reading log was no longer my responsibility.

I believe their logs made it to the library once, and after that summer, the kids never asked about the summer reading program again. I think they realized it just wasn't worth it.


The registration period for our library's summer reading program starts on Monday, and we're not signing up. We're not even going to think about it.

My kids will read too much this summer, just like they always do, just because they love reading. In fact I'll have to remind them when it's time to put down their books to go outside and play.

Maybe there's a summer playing program we could enroll in, instead?

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Would You Spend $5 on an Anniversary Gift?

I don't understand traditional anniversary gifts by year. I just don't.

This is what I'm talking about:

Today is our 12th anniversary, which means that we should either be getting each other some swanky new silk undies or a tasteful monogrammed set of linen napkins. (For the impracticality of either gift, please see the 5 small children swinging from our rafters.)

Luckily, Phillip and I have never made a big deal about our anniversary, and sticking to a bizarre gift schedule like this is so not us.

What has historically been us, though, is the $5 gift.

When we got married we were 21 and 22 years old, completely broke and busy college students. By our first anniversary we were just as poor, just as busy, and had 1-month-old baby.

Spending a lot on each other was out of the question, and thus was born the $5 gift rule.

One Christmas when we'd been married for about 5 years, we spent the holidays with Phillip's family. On Christmas morning, we went around the room watching everyone open their gift, one by one.

Next to me, Phillip's sister opened a card from her husband and read it out loud. "Don't be upset that I spent so much. I did it because (a) I love you..." it began,  and what followed was a moving love letter and a digital camera she'd been secretly wanting for a long time.

There were tears. There were hugs. It was epic.

Then all eyes turned to me and watched me unwrap... a new ice scraper.

The thing is, I was just as excited about my gift. I burst into laughter, thinking how this was exactly what I needed, and only Phillip could've known how I'd been complaining about my crappy ice scraper every day.

(He's also the only person who understands that I'd be delighted instead of offended by the gift of an ice scraper from my spouse. I've been told that this isn't the norm.)

So I thought the ice scraper was awesome, but there was more. Every day for the rest of that winter, Phillip got up early to scrape the snow and ice off my car in the blistering cold before he left in the morning.

To say that I love this man is an understatement.

What I liked about the $5 rule was that it forced us to pay attention to some small way we could improve the other's life, and then get creative about it because five bucks isn't much.

Twelve years later, we've gotten a little lax in our gift-giving policy. Sometimes we spend more than $5, sometimes we don't spend anything at all. Some years we go on a trip, just the two of us.

Sometimes we forget about our anniversary completely (we may or may not have been reminded one year by a phone call from my dad wishing us a happy anniversary.)

To be honest I sort of miss the $5 gift policy. But last year we did do pretty well — according to the chart, at least.

We needed a new stockpot for the stove, so went to the mall and bought one. A stainless STEEL pot, for our 11th anniversary. Ha!

That was a complete accident, though, and probably the first and last time that we'll be going according to the chart.

Unless we make a French silk pie tonight.

photo courtesy of Baker's Square

Which actually isn't a bad idea, and the ingredients would probably cost about $5. I don't think we've ever gone wrong with a $5 anniversary gift.

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7 Quick Takes about Playing in the World Cup, Chicken Jockey Madness, and Cryptic Messages from the Kids' Shower

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! Summing up the last 7 days in 7 quick takes. How was your week?

—1—

My 7-year-old's soccer wrap-up event was on Saturday. I don't mean game, I mean event.

They call it 'World Cup Day' and each team represents a country (by random assignment.) They all make banners for their country and march in a parade across the field before playing a tournament that lasts for infinity. I dread it every year.

My son's team this year was Spain, and not only did they have a banner but each kid wore a stick-on mustache and a T-shirt with the Spanish flag and a little sombrero with pom-poms hanging on it from the party store... someone shoot me from all the cuteness.

I don't know. I don't like to sound like a killjoy, but I guess I am in this particular instance. Getting the email from the poor coach asking for volunteers and donated supplies and drivers... it made me sad for her. Why are we doing this? What are the kids getting out of this experience? (Aside from the ubiquitous participatory trophy.)

On the way home, do you know what my son asked me? "What's the World Cup?"

And there you have it.

—2—

After we got home and showered off all the cuteness from World Cup Day, it was time for my son's Minecraft birthday party.

If you're a perfectionist like me, you will have noticed immediately that the Creeper and Ghast paper plate decorations on the door are lined up funny. And it's going to bother you all day.

We tried to encourage some active games, but you really can't avoid sitting around playing Minecraft at a Minecraft party, so that's what the boys did for part of the time.

There was intense debate over whether you need a mod to make Pigzilla. An in-depth discussion on the rarity of spawning chicken jockeys (apparently that's a zombie riding a chicken.) I thought I might see a fistfight over an escalating disagreement on whether or not some bad guy named Herobrine really exists.

To those who aren't familiar with Minecraft, I fully realize it sounds like I'm on drugs right now. That's why I can't stand this game. This is your brain; this is your brain on Minecraft.

—3—

My 3-year-old has been absorbing all of this Minecraft madness from her older siblings for years, but I didn't really realize to what extent.

On Sunday at church I was walking her back to her class after a pit stop when she said, "Bad guys killed Jesus."

"And then he came back to life, didn't he?" I said.

"Yeah," agreed my 3-year-old. "He re-spawned."

—4—

The kids have been having fun playing with a card my son got for his birthday, which plays Get This Party Started by Pink when you open it.

One morning my 3-year-old woke me up by coming into my room at 6 AM and saying, "Do you like this song?" and opening it right in my ear.

That would probably be on my list of least favorite ways to wake up. And why I hate that song now.

—5—

This was our last full week of school, hurray! With three kids in school doing fun end-of-year stuff all day long, the calendar is filled with nonsensical notes like "wear green shirt for camping day," "sunscreen and water bottle for Olympics day," and "bring labeled tennis racket and disposable bag lunch for field trip."

I just can't remember it all, so at this point I'm pretty happy if I only forget one special thing per day.

Today is Red Carpet Day in my daughter's class, where the kids wear their finest clothes and have an awards ceremony. Her brother overheard us talking about it yesterday and was thoroughly confused.

Her: I'm so excited for Red Carpet Day!
Him: What's that?
Me: It's a special day in their class where they get awards and dress up.
Him: [long, disbelieving pause] As a red carpet?

—6—

My oldest daughter came home this week and informed me that they had a fire drill at school. With less than a week left before summer vacation, I asked what the point of that was.

"We're supposed to have two a year and I think they forgot," she said, shrugging and helping herself to an apple from the counter.

And that was the moment I realized that she knew adults weren't perfect. That means she probably knows that I'm not perfect. Next will come the criticism. I'm not ready for this.

—7—

One very rushed morning, my shower was occupied so I decided to cut my losses and use the kid's shower upstairs.

I pretty much stay out of their bathroom at all costs. So I was pretty delighted when I opened the shower curtain and saw that not only had they been keeping it clean, but that someone has a sense of humor.

Do not pass 'Go.' Do not collect $200.

I wonder who that message was really for...


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What Do Real Moms Do?

Do you ever feel like an imposter? Someone posing as a wise parent who knows exactly what they're doing?

Me, too. In fact, I often think there should be a little asterisk below me reading *I'm not the grown-up in charge, I just play one in real life.

Especially when I first became a parent. I felt like I was stumbling through each day based solely on trial and error. The real moms, the ones who had it all figured out, what did they do?

When did they take showers?

How often did they actually mop the kitchen floor?

It's almost embarrassing that it took me several years to realize: I'm a real mom. And though it's a little scary, I'm probably an average mom. The way I'm doing things is probably something like the way it's getting done in lots of other houses, too. Maybe even yours.

I'm doing a Q&A today for the "real mums" series on What Katy Said. Visit me there and you'll learn two things: (1) there's no denying that I'm real, and (2) everything sounds better in a British accent.


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10 Things You'll Never Hear Dads Say

We love the dads in our lives, but sometimes they can get a little... predictable.

In fact, right now I can think of 10 things you'll never hear your husband or father say. Ever.

1. Honey, are we out of cardstock? Oh well, I guess I'll make another Michael's run tomorrow.

2. You know, I was there when my wife did it and I really don't think childbirth looked all that bad.

3. So what'll it be today: plain old French braids or Dad's signature "cheerleader bun with ribbons?"*

4. Well, I've finished everything I need to get done around here.... I'm kind of bored, actually. I wish the kids would break something.

5. You already had the period talk with our daughter? Without me??

6. If you kids don't know what you want to eat, it might help to stand in front of the fridge with the door open for 10 minutes while you think about it.

7. Here, let me show you the best way to wrap your hair up in a towel nice and snug after a shower.

8. I really hope you guys left your bikes lying all over the driveway so I can't pull the car out of the garage tomorrow morning.

9. Have fun on your date with my daughter! And don't worry about getting back at any specific time. Just whenever.

10. I really appreciate the Father's Day breakfast, but next time could you do turkey bacon with my eggs? Turkey bacon blows regular bacon out of the water!

Leave a comment below with the thing you'd never catch your dad saying. But remember, this list is all in fun.

Dads, in all their varieties, are awesome.

*I realize there probably are dads out there re-creating Elsa's coronation bun from Frozen on their daughters' heads, and I think that's fantastic. In fact, can you please come do my kids' hair next?
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This Is Why I Don't Post Crafty DIY Tutorials on My Blog

This weekend my 7-year-old had a birthday party and wanted the theme to be Minecraft. Pretending to care even one iota about anything related to Minecraft is like, physically painful to me, so this was a real labor of love.

It was also really difficult to plan, because I don't understand a single thing about that game. My son sometimes makes weird noises and says he's a Villager, but that's not really enough information to plan an entire party around.

So I did some Googling and was pretty pleased at what I came up with. And then I thought to myself, Hey, I'm a blogger so I should document making all this stuff and put it on the blog!

Soon after, I discovered that I'd be the worst DIY blogger in the world.

1. I have no original ideas. 

I've been known to put together a decent themed birthday party in my day, but most of my ideas are cribbed from somewhere else.

I stole was inspired by "knock over the Creeper" here, the birthday cake scavenger hunt here, and the paper plate decorations here. I also used this YouTube playlist of Minecraft songs.

Boom. Minecraft party.

Maybe I should be a DIY blogger, after all. That was easy!

2. My house is too dirty.

When you visit a how-to blog, you're supposed to be greeted with lovely images of the project being completed — without irrelevant crap in the background.

I'm just not sure how that's supposed to work. Do I have to clean my house and then make a bunch of crafty stuff? Because I don't have time for both. Actually, I don't have time for either.

So what you get on this blog is pictures of me making a Creeper on a dirty counter wedged in between a halfway cut-up watermelon and the butter dish.

3. I can't figure out how to take pictures.

On real how-to blogs, you get shot after beautiful shot of two hands sewing, pinning, painting, or cutting the project... how are they taking those pictures? Are they holding their phone in their teeth and taking pictures with their tongue or something?

The only person home with me during the day is my 3-year-old, who isn't very helpful as far as photography goes.

I know that because I figured what the heck, I might as well ask her to take a picture of me decorating the Minecraft cake and see what happened.

A tasteful close-up of my farmer tan.

Actually, she did improve and ended up getting some pretty good shots.

For months now she's been stealing my camera and photographing random objects around the house "for her blog." So she was thrilled to know that these pictures were actually going on the blog and told me about 300 times that she's available to take pictures of me whenever I want:

I think I created a monster.

4. I've got too many photo-bombers kids.

One reason I don't get creative and crafty very often is that there are always small people hanging on me. I'm rarely at liberty to focus on something and use both hands to do it.

For example, gluing together the decorations did not go well when the baby kept diving into my lap and wiping his nose all over my chest.

Keeping a steady hand while being used as a Kleenex: not as easy as it looks.

In summary, I'm regretfully not the blogger who can be trusted to bring you a Pin-worthy illustrated tutorial of... anything.

But I can tell you that after all the research that went into this party, I still can't stand Minecraft.

Gluing toenails on a freaking Creeper. Someone kill me now.

I think through this experience I've learned two things: one, that no matter how hard I try Minecraft will never be my thing, and two, that I should leave tutorials on how to make stuff to people who actually know what they're doing.

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