My House is Mobbed With Children

I am currently in charge of three of my sister's four children in addition to my own two. The grand total, in case you didn't major in math, is five. Five kids + ninety-degree heat= ok, I can't do this any more. They are installed in front of a Harry Potter movie, all thoroughly wilted. The culinary angle on this - there always is one - is the snack I have been preparing them for the past hour straight. Apple slices, trimmed of seeds and any evidence of core, spread with peanut butter and sprinked with miniature chocolate chips. Plate after plate of apple slices. I feel like I'm catering hors-d'oeuvres for a wedding reception attended exclusively by kindergarteners. Because I am compulsive, the slices are arranged in a nifty pinwheel on the plate, but my design lasts for less than fifteen seconds. Every time I think they can't possibly consume another apple, the plate comes back to the kitchen empty. My kids are as culpable in this mass consumption as their cousins are, if not more so - the addition of chocolate chips to an otherwise-healthy snack is a real novelty to them. I'm sure there is some way to add chocolate chips to, say, cauliflower, that they would love. Maybe Jessica Seinfeld plagiarized something like that in her annoying cookbook.

Having many kids around the house is not that unusual. Some configuration of the four cousins is over here from time to time as payback for all of the times my sister and brother-in-law have provided child care for my own maniacal and often-destructive kids. I would feel less guilty, in fact, if the cousins were over here more. BUT while I was spelunking the interweb for an amusing picture of a large group of children, I stumbled across the most car-wreck-fascinating blog I have ever encountered in my entire life. It is called "Lady of Virtue" and is illustrated by the picture above with the gal cheerfully feeding the horse with its head in her kitchen. When I first saw this picture, I thought, HA! Somebody else has a super-dry and sarcastic sense of humor and is blogging about their family. But no. This is a dead-earnest blog by a woman who is homeschooling her FOURTEEN children. Now I feel like a real whiner. I think I'll go cut up another apple.