The Best Outdoors Day Ever

What do you get when you combine almost a foot of snowfall last week with heavy rains last night with a high of about 74 degrees today?

You get a lot of standing pools of water in our back yard and a couple of children as happy as wallowing hogs!

John's digging pit was full with water about up to the children's knees.

To be fair to them . . . I was resting on the couch in the sun room (trying to get over this cold, making me so tired) when an emissary was sent to request permission to get out the swim suits. I answered, "No, it may be warm today, but we're still in the middle of winter so I'm not going to get out summer clothing."

They asked me!

By the time I saw them essentially swimming in mud pits fully dressed, it was too late. Whether because I was too tired to fight it or because I melted when I heard their peals of delighted laughter, I can't say. I just let them play.

Mary's and John's outfits are completely soaked with muddy water, nothing left is dry.
John is wearing a white shirt.

Margaret and Joseph disliked the mud, so stayed relatively clean.

And then they took mud and painted their faces.

Listening to the joyous laughter for an hour of this play was an experience!

Joseph tumbled into a mud puddle on accident and hated it, so I stripped off his wet clothing.
That's mud on his nose.

When I knew we had to begin cleaning up so I could get dinner on the table, I gathered my meager sick-mama energy and procured supplies.

1. Take off most clothing and put it in bags to transport to the laundry room.

2. Rinse off muddy hands and legs in a bucket of soapy water while still on the back deck.

3. Wrap children in big, dry towels and instruct them to go to the bathroom and wait for me there. Take the baby up last.

4. Send the children through the shower in an assembly-line fashion, dirty children remaining ensconced in towels, sitting on the floor of the bathroom while I wash one child at a time.

5. Send now clean children to their rooms wrapped in fresh, clean towels with instructions to get dressed. Finally nurse the (clean) baby who has been crying for the last half an hour, poor thing.

6. Clean the bathroom floor and make a mental note to scrub the tub (so muddy!) later.

7. Gather up remainder of muddy clothing and towels, put in bag, and carry down to the laundry room. Run the load of laundry for the first time.

8. Have a child use wet wash cloths to wipe clean the trail of muddy footprints from the back yard through the kitchen.

And when that first load of laundry was completed, I discovered that mud stains. Yes, seven years and four children of parenting, yet I didn't know this li'l fact.

Mud really stains.

So I hopped online and searched for "how to get mud out of clothing." The first step of every list was "Do not wash the wet clothing! Let the mud dry, then scrape it off with a hard-bristled brush."

Too late for that!

Apparently rubbing alcohol (or Purell--which is alcohol in gel form) is a good stain remover for mud, but how could I treat the stains which encompassed every square inch of the clothing, plus much of the towels? This was a large load of laundry and I was pondering if I could soak them in a bucket of alcohol! I ran the second load treated (every square inch of it!) with Oil Eater DeGreaser diluted to a spray. Then I removed all the colored items, and ran all the whites a third time with bleach. They're not perfect, but they're no longer ruined.

Mary (5) declared this "the best outdoors day I've ever had in my whole life!"