Hi, I am Claire Kenny, and I am a mom
and I think that being a mom is the most important job
in the world and I'm not joking. We have six kids, our oldest
is Thomas, he's eleven, Daniel is nine, Sarah is
seven, Lydia is five, James is two,
and Isaac is almost five months.
"Sarah, Lydia, time to wake up. Good morning."
"You ready? Let's get goin', okay?" Morning is crazy here.
We are up at 6:30 and going.
We have breakfast, we have kids reading, we have kids practicing
their musical instruments,
and then getting dressed and I have no idea why but my kids like
I swear it should only take like 10 minutes to get your clothes on
and like, be dressed, but it's like a 40 minute process.
I don't know, I don't know, it's like come on,
turn the water off in the shower, get out, put your clothes on, why are you lying
on the floor,
get up off the floor. But it's great
it's great. They crack me up and they also
infuriate me sometimes. Every morning
I have a little magazine that I read to my kids from,
"Look at me, I'm a truck. Quack quack," he says.
I really like it. It's a great way to kinda start our morning
with a nice, quiet moment when the rest of the morning is really crazy
their mouths are full of food, so they can't talk back.
And then Phil always comes in with his like, crazy alternate endings that make us
laugh and teach us lessons.
"....he's runnin' around on the train track where his mom and dad told him not to run around on,
the next day all of a sudden, he goes...", In the morning,
when I go upstairs into my bedroom, I have some things
called "tags", and they're things that my
mom made up to do my chores
and stuff in the morning. Once I do one of the chores,
I put the tag to the other side, and
it helps me to remember my chores like to pick up
my toys, or make my bed, "Get your bed made, make your bed,
pick up your clothes." This morning my siblings got their socks,
like all of their socks, and tried to defeat our dad with socks.
We get a big pile, and then we each grab about ten,
or fifteen socks, when dad says go, we start
chucking our socks at eachother. Yeah. Usually at dad.
It didn't help my mom so much because when we were done,
some of the socks fell off of the bed and they were on the ground, and she had to pick them up.
Yeah having six kids, just having six kids sometimes, can make it too much to handle.
That is a hard thing. Feeling a little bit stretched
thin in my abilities to take care of
everyone at the same time and hoping, hoping too
that in doing that, that I am
doing a good enough job in all of those areas. I don't know, I look around me and
I see so many of my friends their kids are dressed
so nicely and I'm coming with my kids, I'm like, whatever they picked out their own
clothes.
But gosh, at the same time maybe I'm a refreshing breath of air for people,
because they're like, "Oh, well,
she doesn't have it together, maybe I don't have to have it together all the time
either.
So. "Oh bless you. Oh bless you, cute guy. Oh bless you again."
That was cute.
Part of our morning routine is singing a song called, "Make It a Good Day",
that was started by my mom. I think it was a song she learned when she was a teenager
and she sang it to us on the way to school every morning, and so now I do
the same thing with my kids, we sing the same "Make It a Good Day" song.