Company's Coming!

Tonight was exhilarating, exhausting, chaotic, busy, laid back and exciting.  In short, we had company!  My sister in-law is getting married in the fall and so two other bridesmaids and I threw her a shower at my house tonight.  It was really fun; I loved being able to do it and the matron of honor did a fabulous job pulling it all together.  But, I am now very tired and upon reflection of the evening, I have realized that having company is not just the time slot I have allocated for the actual presence of guests in my google calendar.  Truthfully, it has consumed most of my week.  For whatever reason, when I know that people are going to be coming over to my house, I tend to go into my OCD mood and everything needs to be scrubbed and sparkling just so we can make it dirty again with our party.  Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?  But, my kitchen is very very white and shows every speck of anything that has ever even just been in contact with it.  My cabinets, counters, backsplash and half of the appliances are all white.  And while it does make it very bright, it also takes a lot of bleach to stay that way. 

Enter the coffee maker.  Not all that long ago, I made coffee and was letting the pot cool on the counter so I could make ice coffee without diluting it with too many ice cubes to get it to arctic temperatures.  Being the multitasked that I am, I called the adoption agency that we are looking at for a potential adoption to talk about the process and so I could ask some questions.  While I was doing this, Luke, aka Gremlin, came along and pulled all the chairs out of our dining room and lined them up in the kitchen facing the counters so with the seats all adjacent to each other, he created a nice little platform that allowed him to walk the length of the counter at the height an adult could thus giving him access to the now cooled coffee.  Let's just say that the first word out of this child's mouth when I came in after finishing my phone call to the adoption agency was "Paint!".  Stephen decided that the new preferred medium for finger-painting is coffee on white laminate countertops.  He had gotten really enthusiastic with the quantity of the coffee needed for his artwork and he used about six cups of coffee and it dripped down the cabinets leaving dark brown stains all over the lower doors. 

This incident has been flashing through my mind all week as I scrubbed, comet-ed, and bleached that section of counters and cabinets trying desperately to remove the not so wedding shower festive stains from my kitchen.  After several days of working on them, I finally found the magic formula to make it barely noticeable and I was ready to sing the hallelujah chorus.  Ironically though, the coffee incident did occur when I was trying to convince people that I would be a great parent for another child and that I can definitely handle a third baby... I think God might have been not so subtly telling me that I need a teaspoon more humility... or maybe six cups worth.  But, nobody noticed the stains tonight and the shower was so fun so I can go to bed knowing that nobody knew, unless of course, they decide to read my blog.