I grew up with three brothers and I never remember it being as loud and crazy with them as it is with my two boys.

The only time it is quiet at our house is when the boys are sleeping and perhaps the first ten minutes into a TV show.  After the first ten minutes they lose interest and start bugging each other and the screaming and wrestling begins again.

In fact right now Cameron is crying/screaming in the living room and Jace is yelling, "JUST GO DOWN THE SLIDE!  DO IT!"  I don't know what the "slide" is.  I'm afraid to look.

Over the past few months since I've had not as much energy or patience or I've been sick I've been really picking and choosing what things I care about.  Here are the things I don't care about:

Messes.  The house is constantly a mess.  Toys, books, Legos, crumbs, shoes, and baskets full of clean laundry that will usually never find a drawer before it's used again are everywhere.

Screaming.  The boys are always screaming and yelling and crying.  Sometimes at each other, sometimes at their toys, and sometimes at me.  Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're mad, and most  of the time they're just being obnoxious.  I'm pretty impressed with my new found skill of deciphering the actual cries for help from the random-for-no-reason-screaming.  We often have hard days on the weekends when Daddy is home all day.  He's not as tolerant with the noise as I am.  I try to cut him some slack, because before I gave up on having a relatively quiet home I was a little more uptight about it as well.  It especially annoys him when instead of making the boys stop yelling I just turn the radio up louder.

Food in the living room.  Lots of crumbs and spilled juice means nothing to me when it also means I'll have thirty minutes of peace while they watch Word World while stuffing their faces full of food.  On really bad days I think I give them food and snacks all day long in exchange for them being zombies in front of the TV.  That's good parenting, right?  

But I'm not completely lazy and lame.  I do care about some things.  Like:

Dirty dishes.  Especially because I can smell anything and everything and it's magnified.  If the dishes are left in the sink for too long, then when I walk by the sink I gag and almost puke.  So I have to do the dishes a lot.  Same with the trash.  It gets emptied a lot. 

Bedtime.  But this has always been precious to me.  I don't mess around about bedtime.  I start counting down after lunch.

And I thinks that's pretty much it.  I hope I can start being a better mom again after I'm done being pregnant.  And in my defense and maybe to make me feel better, I think the boys are enjoying this new style of parenting a little.  They definitely have been using a lot more imaginative play because instead of being annoyed about the mess I encourage them to do whatever they want as long as they're being nice to each other and not whining to me. . . I think there are five or six different forts built daily throughout our house.  Sometimes you can't walk through the living room but that's cool, right?