Slave Driver

Liz has been learning about slavery at school the last little bit.  At the end of the quarter they had an Underground Railroad Reenactment.  I volunteered to go help.  I didn't know that I would be a slave driver.  The kids had to go out to the playground and pick weeds, then run away from their masters and followed clues to a "safe house".  My job was to go into the safe house once they were there "looking" for runaway slaves.  I was supposed to "find" one of the kids hiding under the desks and take him back to the field.  It was really a pretty amazing experience for the kids, making what they learned really come to life.  Maybe it was a little too real to some though, especially the kid I "found" that started crying as I took him back to the field.  I felt so bad, also because he just happened to be African American, and I for sure didn't want him or anybody else to think I was being racist in choosing him.  He was just the first kid I saw.  As I was trying to comfort him, he said it was just so hard being a slave, he didn't want to go back.  Needless to say, I felt really bad being a slave driver!!

I have felt rather like a slave driver around my house the last little bit too.  Last week I had one of those Mom Meltdowns, where I felt like I was doing everything, that everybody else just messed things up while I cleaned, and just unappreciated.  This resulted in me making a job chart, again.  Yay!  These things usually work for the first little bit, then they get forgotten.  But this time, I'm reforming my kids into little cleaning machines!  (Actually if they just clean up after themselves, I'll be totally happy!)  So, they have the color coded job chart that has jobs for before school, after school and after dinner. 

Maybe another reason I've been on a cleaning kick is because I got these beauties!!!  I'm so excited!  In the almost 16 years that we've been married, we've never bought a washer and/or dryer.  We've always used someone's hand-me-downs.  We're so very thankful for the ones we've had, but the washer was at least 15 years old and smelled like it, and our dryer took over an hour to dry a small load.  These ones almost make me want to do laundry.  They even sing me a little song to tell me they're done. 

Of course things can't be easy though in the switch off.  When the guys came to install them, and also take the 8000 lb old ones away, they found that the water hookup was totally corroded, so we had to have a plumber come out to fix it, and they couldn't take our old washer because it had to stay hooked up or it would leak all over, I guess.  So the new ones sat in my loft for a couple days, while the laundry stacked up.  Of course I hadn't done laundry on my normal laundry day in anticipation of them coming, so adding two days to that meant my girls were all wearing strange outfits by the end. Then Kirk got a friend to help him lug the super heavy washer downstairs, but it ended up spilling out 15 year old smelly water all over our carpet.  Yuck!  But, all the rags we used to clean stuff up got to be my first load!!