There's no crying over spilled coffee.

This morning, at exactly 7:02, I spilled the entire contents of my coffee cup onto my bed, soaking through seven layers of bedding, saving only my bare mattress. This one mistake changed the course of my entire morning, much like giving a mouse a cookie or a moose a muffin (or a cat a cupcake) will take all of your day and leave you in need of a housekeeper and a nap.

Because I then had to get up and get dressed, stain-treat and drag my coverlet, blanket, quilt, top sheet, bottom sheet, and mattress cover in my all-terrain bright blue collapsible wagon to the laundry room across the campground. But since I was already doing laundry—and heavy bedding at that—I decided this was as good a time as any to wash the kids’ bedding. It had been an embarrassingly long time since we’d washed their sheets for no other reason than because it’s a hassle to re-make their beds on the curved RV mattresses.

And since we were washing that much laundry anyway, I might as well wash whatever clothes were in the laundry basket from the weekend.

Did I mention I’d already washed my sheets just two days ago, on Saturday? So they were clean, except for the giant coffee stain. But I digress.

Liam then decided that since all the bedding was being washed, he would vacuum the mattresses—and under the mattresses—and while the vacuum was out, he’d vacuum the floor, too.

And since their bedding was getting clean, all the kids proceeded to clean out and organize the baskets of trinkets and suitcases of clothes they keep on their bunks.

While the six washers of laundry were at work, I stain-treated and spot cleaned my mattress topper (not to be confused with the mattress cover, which was machine washable) and dried it with a blowdryer.

After that, the dog threw up, so the floor had to be cleaned…again. When I took him out, he jumped all over me in an attempt to play, and my clothes got mud on them and I twisted my ankle. Too bad my coffee-soaked bedding had already eaten all my quarters. Oh well, into the hamper my clothes went for the next laundry day…

Four hours and $20 of laundry later, we were done.

Thankfully, since we homeschool, I pivoted and called today a reading skills lab day, rather than trying to dive head-first into our curriculum halfway through the day. We just weren’t feeling it.

We are now all sitting on our clean, cozy beds, the interior of our RV draped in battery-operated fairy lights, reading the books we picked up this weekend at the library. This is our comeback.

Two things about today: First, I knew my cup was going to spill. I knew, and I did nothing to stop it. When Kelley handed me my hot coffee, I set the cup (a travel mug with a lid, to add insult to injury—it had a LID, for crying out loud!) on my bed rather than on the stable, sturdy shelf next to my bed. And when I did, I had the quiet thought of it possibly tipping over and spilling. It was such a delicate, non-intrusive thought that I brushed it off and set my cup on the soft covers anyway while I reached for my glasses and put away my earplugs and mouthguard. (Yes, I sound like an old woman, and I care exactly none percent.)

I didn’t even notice my cup tipped and was spilling its contents all over my bed. It had plenty of time and did the task with excellence, unhurried. And that’s what I get for ignoring my intuition. Or maybe that small voice was the Holy Spirit trying to warn me, and ignoring him cost me $20 and four hours. Let that be a lesson for all of us.

The second thing to mention is that I met a new friend in the laundry room while I was babysitting the dryers and adding 15 minutes of more time through the quarter slot as needed (which is cheaper than having to start the dryers over on a new cycle, and I’m not a chump). She has four children, and her husband is a government contractor in AVL, of all things. (See my most recent work history.) She used to homeschool, and may return to it in the future, but for now her kids are thriving in public school locally. We talked for almost an hour over the hum and radiating heat of the commercial dryers.

I’ve been praying for us to meet some new friends, as the pool of candidates isn’t super promising at this campground, and we only have the one car at the moment, reducing our opportunities to get out and meet people during the week. I wouldn’t have met her had I not spilled my coffee. And so the second lesson of the day is that God works in mysterious ways. And He can work all things—even spilled coffee—for our good.

I also feel I should mention that today is somehow a public school holiday, so our neighbors’ kids are home from school, which has changed the atmosphere of our day almost as much as the laundry situation. These are the neighbors that begin yelling at each other at about 6:45 in the morning, every morning. Every morning, they step out of their RV volleying expletives back and forth like tennis balls and continue their argument into the street as they walk their kids to the school bus stop, their youngest (who isn’t in school yet) trailing behind, releasing her blood-curdling screams whenever her siblings look at her funny. I actually noticed this morning that I didn’t wake up to obscenities, and it’s because they all slept in.

Today, they have erected a creepy life-size doll at the corner of their site as a Halloween decoration, and it perpetually talks and moves while holding its own creepy little doll. Imagine if Chucky and the black-haired girl inside the television from the movie The Ring procreated. Their evil spawn is now pointed at our site like they are trying to send us a message. It’s going to be a loooong month and a half. Geez, I really hate Halloween.

One of the kids at their site is currently practicing her cello (which is as tall as she is) out in their little yard, and it somehow makes the Halloween doll that much creepier, like the discordant, ominous background music in a horror movie. They are entertaining and terrifying, all at the same time.

In other, brighter news, we may get to move sites soon, and the new one is larger and quieter than this one. I can hardly wait.

Happy Monday, everyone!