Wow~ Look what I made! Four beautiful children... and I had to throw that photo of Maeve by herself in since she looks a bit sullen in the group shots. I can only imagine what the fifth would look like.... maybe with some kind of photo technology they could combine the four faces to create the fifth.

I'll never know, will I...

Things are a little more under control here right now. It's hard for me to admit this, because the last thing I want to come across as is an anal retentive neat freak, but I do feel so much better about myself when my physical space is under control. The past few days have been good ones in terms of me getting everybody's things organized. I only have a few baskets of laundry, some already folded, the toys are mostly away, and I even got to make the beds today. Small potatoes, but somehow I feel more in control of things when everything is organized. It seems insane that something like too much laundry could send me into such a tailspin but I think that when I'm managing so many people when I start to feel out of control, the landslide happens fast and I get overwhelmed.

Thank you for all your words of support from my last post. Before I wrote that post, I was composing it in my head and almost started it off by saying, "I am not _____", and would have filled in the blank with another very popular blogging mom of many, whose posts paint beautiful portraits of long sunny days spent joyfully crafting and canning homegrown vegetables while the diapers dry on the line. And then I found, deep in the depths of her archives, a disclaimer which stated that her blog (obviously) chose to focus on those sunny moments, and of course she had her moments of complete insanity. I felt better reading that, more authentic myself, and it made me want to just dump the dark reality on the pages that I was typing on to just get it out there: because yes, this blog does focus on the sunny, but it started with the darkest of the dark, so it's okay for me to go there.

I'm glad the days are mostly sunny now.