Little Girls, Little Girls, Night And Day I Eat Sleep And Breathe Them

It's been a busy week even though everything was supposed to get back to normal and I'd given myself permission to take the week off. Except for starting piano lessons. And cleaning and cooking and sewing and laundry. I guess I mostly just took the week off of working in the basement.

Before Katy and Matt and their five children came for their week long visit, we finished the bathroom. Just like all the other necessary projects that we did in the basement, the plumber finished installing everything and walked out the door as Katy and Matt were walking in. It turned out to be a bonus because Katy helped me hang the fiesta shower curtain and Matt hung the mirror and both towel bars. (It still chokes me up a little to think of my towel bars being up already. I had a shelf I wanted in our master bathroom above the toilet, see. I'm just a little girl and I didn't know how to hang it correctly, so I left it on the floor for Brian to hang when he got the chance. For three, maybe four months it sat on the floor. Yesterday I dusted it off and took it down to the storage room, my dreams of having a place to put extra rolls of toilet paper dashed. Last night Brian got it out of the storage room and put it up. It's out of my reach, but still. Love feelings.) I kept an eye on a vanity/sink at Costco and a similar one at Lowe's for six months. The day I went to buy the sink - the day we had money to buy the sink, the one at Costco was sold out and the one at Lowe's was $100 more than it was a few weeks ago. Booooo.

I realize I grew up in a house full of girls, but I was on the kid end of it and it never occurred to me that anyone lived any differently. The difference between one little girl in the house (Bridget) and six girls (Bridget plus Eliza, Vivien, Evie, Helena and Anya) is:

1. 12 bowls - I don't know how, but we washed all 12 bowls every single day.

2. 12 rolls of toilet paper. I don't even want to know why.

3. 1 hour earlier in the morning. Also, no naps.

4. 1000 more questions - my favorite, from Helena, "Why isn't she saying 'ow'?" I was doing Bridget's hair.

5. 24 more shoes. (Make that 26 - Katy took pity on Bridget and bought her some ruby slippers like Anya's since she would otherwise have to pry Anya's pair from Bridget's cold, dead fingers.)

6. 1 billion more socks.

7. Hours and hours more dancing, running, sliding down the stairs, singing, laughing, fighting and making up.

It took about three days for Bridget to be convinced that they really weren't coming back. For six wonderful days she had her pick of partners in crime. The older kids let her get into their stuff and the younger ones ran with her until they all collapsed at the end of the day. How wonderfully strange to be in my house with my little sister watching her five girls play with my one girl. It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment - I'm so glad Katy and Matt made all kinds of sacrifices to make it happen. :)