How do you get blood out of the carpet?

I got to bed around 10pm last night and at 7am Chicklet came running in to snuggle. That would be great except that she doesn't actually snuggle. She has hug-ADD I think because she always wants a hug and then after a millisecond she is squirming away again. So to keep her still and quiet until baby brother wakes up I get her a sippy of milk. On my sleepily staggering way to the kitchen in the semi-dark of 7am, I stepped on something we 'round these parts like to call goatheads. Also known as puncture vine, these little devils are a seed shaped roughly like the head of a goat/sheep/cow. It had two long straight sharp needle-like thorns coming out of it making it look like the goats horns. Except that the rest of the seed is covered in shorter sharp spines as well. To step on one is to know pain. And then you have to pull it back out of your foot which hurts all over again. Not to mention your fingers get stabbed as you pull it if you're not careful. The spines I have seen have been up to half an inch long. Just the spines on the seed. The seed itself can be as big as a pea only more triangular-oblong shaped. They're not usually quite that big, but it's not exactly RARE to find a behemoth sized one in your foot. Or your flat bike tire. Yes, these little monsters can flatten a bike tire easy as pie. Just go ahead and Google "Goat Head Thorn" and you'll see what I mean. The devil's own weed, I'm tellin' ya! And they come in on my cat's mile-long fur. There's a doggie door in the laundry room which for our current purposes is actually a kitty-door. So this morning as I'm staggering along to the kitchen in the near-dark, the soft tender underside of my toe knuckle gets a piercing. I almost let out a scream. YEEEEOOWWW! It sure hurt! Then I noticed it was uncommonly difficult to pull out; must have gone in pretty deep. I tripped into the bathroom, dropped the thorn in the soap dish (without turning on the light) for later inspection, and went to get Chicklet and take her to the bathroom to pee. Then I got her sippy and lay in bed with her for the whole 30 seconds it took her to drain 9 ounces of milk. We wound up once again in the living room with her playing and me laying on the couch wondering why I'm still feeling run-over-by-a-train tired until Bug woke up.

I proceeded to answer myself, "Self, you are still tired because you are not a morning person. You never have been and you never will be. You can try and try all you want, but if after 3 years of waking up before 8am you still can't function before noon no matter how early you go to bed the previous night, you are just not cut out to be a morning person and never will be! Give up the charade!" So now you know my dirty little secret. Or one of them anyway. I am not a morning person. I think somewhere in the unwritten rulebook of homeschooling it says that to be a good homeschooling mommy you must be a morning person. At least that's the impression I get everywhere I go. So I'll keep on trying but so far... not working. Hey there's evening classes for college, why can't there be evening homeschool? Lol!

But I'm sure you're sitting there wondering what this all has to do with blood in the carpet... I'm getting there! I'm getting there! You're so impatient!

Fast forward to this afternoon. I am playing with the kids on the living room floor and the party moves toward the hallway. From my viewpoint laying on the floor with Chicklet in my face giggling and Bug climbing on my back, I notice a smear of reddish brown dried into the beige carpet. I squinted at it but couldn't figure out what it was. Figured whatever it was it didn't look or smell like poop so I'd get it out when the kids took a nap. Fast forward to an hour later when I put the kids down for a nap and finally got the first chance to use the bathroom since I woke up this morning. I'm sitting there and I notice these little dried blood squish marks all over the floor. I look closer. Yep, blood toe prints. And where my feet were as I sat on the stepstool waiting for Chicklet to pee that morning was a larger dripped on dried blood mark. Niice. So I pulled up my foot to look and the underside of my toe has a nice big hole in it courtesy of that devil thorn. *Sigh* Now I know what the smudge is in the hallway carpet. It's right where I would have put my foot back down after removing the thorn. I think PineSol will take the stain out. I hope. I checked out the thorn in the soapdish too and it's a whopper. It's one of the biggest I've ever seen. It's the biggest I can ever remember having had the misfortune to step on. And it's still got my blood on it. Gory evil thing. I'm gonna save it and show my husband. I should frame it. :p I'm kidding I'm kidding! We don't frame things that have injured us in this house. Just things like potholders and crochet hooks. But that's a story for another time...

The Charmed Life

Have you ever had a day where you had to bathe the kids half a dozen times? Changed your outfit more times than a teen in a mall dressing room? Done 3 loads of laundry per person in one day? Wanted to step outside and have a good scream? Well in the interest of full disclosure I thought I'd confess that I'm not always joyful and life at my house is not always charmed.
In fact, today was one of those non-charmed days. I won't bore you with all the details but it was a rough morning after a night of little sleep. I was so tired and grouchy that I was trying to nap on the couch with the kids playing on the floor in front of the couch, but for some odd reason they kept using me as a jungle gym under the guise of cuddling, and asking me to feed them and refill sippy cups. I mean, how dare they, right? ;) So the nap didn't happen. The closest I got was when Bug went down for his morning nap I put Chicklet (who does not nap) down on one couch and let her watch Dora. I know, I know, so much for No TV. I was desperate. And I lay on the other couch trying to sleep. Through the sounds of Dora and Boots and Chicklet all jabbering away. My daughter cannot ever stop talking while awake for longer than about 30 seconds. She's constantly running her mouth. I think that's a 3 year old thing though... haven't met any 3 year olds who didn't talk nonstop. *shrug* Anyway I kept almost falling asleep before she would start asking me a bazillion questions about why is Boots a monkey and where is the blue sippy cup and is baby brother takin' a nap and can she please have yogurt in her milk and does baby brother have yogurt milk too and mama I haveta pee... So when it was time to get the baby up I gave up altogether on the idea of a nap. I emptied the potty but forgot to put it back in the other room and set the kids to playing before deciding I was going to fall out of my desk chair if I tried to do anything computer related so I'd better do something standing up. So I started unloading the dishwasher and kept almost falling over. Knowing my clumsy self I decided it was safer to do something sitting before I landed in the dishwasher and broke it or myself. As soon as I sat however, I was no longer doing anything noisy. I heard splashing coming from the middle of the living room. I ran to look over the couch and there was Bug with a fish figurine of Dorie from Finding Nemo- swimming her around the potty full of pee. And there were an assortment of other wet toys laying around the potty including Nemo himself. Chicklet had put a stuffed frog on the potty to pee and was holding it in her hands looking at me with a look that said she knew she was in trouble. The frog's behind was dripping pee. I think I channeled some Incredible Hulk because I picked both kids up, Chicklet weighing in at about 36 pounds and Bug at about 25, one kid's shirt in each hand, and carried them dripping across the house and deposited them in the bathtub. All the while biting my tongue HARD so I would not say anything I would regret.
After getting them undressed and drawing the bathwater, I took the pee clothes to the hamper and proceeded to clean up the pee mess. A whopping 3-5 minutes later, having cleaned up the bulk of the mess, I stuck my head in to see what the maniacal laughter was about. The kids were up to their necks in bubbles. I had not put any soap in there... I fished around until I found my NOW EMPTY bottle of bodywash. I should have known by how nice the bubbles smelled. I didn't know Chicklet could unscrew lids. Now I know.
There were so many suds in the bath that I couldn't rinse the kids off in there. I had to turn on the shower to rinse them and then pick them up and hold them over the sea of suds in the shower stream and when it was Chicklet's turn to be showered off, she FREAKED OUT. She is afraid (read nightmare terrified) of the shower for reasons I can only imagine (She's terrified to put her head in the water, period), so she was kicking and screaming like I was killing her. I had to de-soap her though so it had to be done - which I'm sure didn't help the phobia any. :( And I wound up drenched chest to ankles.
Since my kids could obviously not control their driving need to make a mess, I put them to bed so I could finish the pee cleanup and start on the sea of suds in my bathtub. Well it was just one thing after another (one kid after another hollering for me to refill their drinks, etc.) and I finally gave up. I told the kids they'd better stay in bed (meaning Chicklet better stay in her bed since Bug can't get out of the crib), closed the door, and collapsed into bed for a 20 minute nap. After that I felt a bit more equipped to deal with life.

So there you have it, a day gone wrong! Lol! So glad it's almost over...

Giveaway winner is....

Click the "Current Giveaway" button under the header to see who won this weeks giveaway! ;)

Giveaway!

I have a giveaway for some lavender soap, lipgloss, and a cucumber mask HERE! It ends day after tomorrow so you should pop on over there and enter. ;)
If you're looking for some more cool giveaways, click the button above that says "Link Your Giveaways Here!" and it will take you to a page full of links to great giveaways! If you are having a giveaway on your blog I'd be tickled if you would add it to the MckLinky at the bottom of that post.
Also don't forget that there are only 6 weeks until Christmas. I am starting to get a bit stressed and alot excited and would love to have everyone join in with

Check it out! :)

Nov. 8th Featured Bloggy Friend!

It's a new week and I have a new featured blog for you to discover! This week I'm featuring Amy from Raising Arrows. Click the button to visit her blog!

Check out her post While the Mommy's Away, The Toddlers Will Play (for some ideas about keeping the tots out of trouble while you school the bigger kids), and her Creative Writing Crash Course while you're there!

Amy, What was your main reason for beginning to blog? What is your greatest inspiration for what you write? What is one thing you know alot about? Do you have any hobbies other than blogging? If you get a chance to answer in the comments we'd love to learn more about you! :)

Would you like to be my featured friend someday? Remember that I prefer to feature blogger friends who
-follow me
-have commented recently on my blog
-update their blog frequently
-blog things that are inspirational/relevant to me personally
-do not endorse things on their blog that I'm strongly against.