Does it ever end?

Some days I feel like I am putting out fires from the moment I wake up ...

Let me go back to 6am and share with you what I mean.

We have a great system in place to keep our dog off our furniture. I went through all the trouble of researching and finding this system, and then Isaac comes into my room this morning and informs me that Scrubs is sleeping on the nice yellow chairs we have on our landing upstairs:

Seriously? Can't the dog just accept his fate in his dog bed and make my life a whole lot easier? Now I have to not only cover all the sofas and make sure all bedroom doors are shut each time we leave the house, but I have to cover these chairs as well. 

Fire put out. New fire sprouting up.

For now, I have put a huge stuffed animal in each chair. I doubt this will cut it, but I'll humor myself for now.

Next up. Breakfast. By the time I made it into the kitchen to begin helping the kiddos with breakfast, one of them had already attempted to get into the cereal without my help.

Okay so that's not that bad. But here is the bad part. The worst of it is the horrible, terrible, awful, disgusting fly problem we are having at our house. Here is a picture of just one of our screens. (The flies are all over every single one of the screens on our house.)

This problem is so bad that I called a pest control guy to come out yesterday. We are killing dozens and dozens of flies in the house. Pest control guy gave us a few tips but said that it is just the season and there really isn't anything we can do. I talked to my neighbor who informed me that the problem is just as bad at his house so it isn't anything unique to our home.

We've been dealing with flies since we moved in, and it's been annoying to have to kill 2-3 every time someone opens the door. But this week we have had to kills over 50 at a time? I pay the kids five cents a fly (It used to be 25 cents, but due to ease of the kill, I dropped my rate.) Then I wipe down all the counters and vacuum. This is NOT sustainable, and I am actually counting down the days until our first frost.

This is the first time I have thought, during this farm journey: Can I do this? I don't like this feeling. 

Anyways, so while I was killing flies, I lost Hannah. Couldn't find her. When I did find her, you will not believe what that little chickadee was doing! She had gone into the cabinet, opened our Intern's trail mix, and was eating all the M&M's out of the bag. They were all over her face, and when she saw me, she immediately said, "I no need spanking." 

Sigh ....

So I moved the trail mix higher. Another fire (temporarily) fought.

I noticed we had some Amazon packages on the front porch. I had the kids bring them inside as quickly as possible to avoid more flies coming in. There were boxes of Kleenex which I had ordered for our guest room above the garage. I set one box by the door so I could bring it over the next time I went outside.

Two minutes later I look and Hannah has decided to pull every Kleenex out of the box.

"Hannah!"

"I no need spanking."

A few minutes later I walked into the bathroom to discover she had unwound the entire toilet paper roll. 

At this point, weary of putting out fires, I told my husband I was done. "That's it," I said. "I quit."

He grabbed Hannah and brought her upstairs and put her in her bed for a time-out.

Our Intern Dan then needed my help moving our chicken tractors.

When I returned thirty minutes later from moving chickens, JB was coming down the stairs holding Hannah at arm's length.

"I got pooper dooper," she said.

"And she decided to put her hands down her pants into the pooper dooper," JB further explained.

I looked at the clock.

10am.

And the day had just begun ....