What I did today:

It’s the kind of day that needs a good, old fashioned Success List.  I need to see in black and white what I get done today instead of the ever-lengthening list of things I need to do.  So here goes:

1. Only hit snooze twice, woke all kids up, checked email, sat like a zombie, decided against working out because I don’t want to blow dry my hair again after and because I have so much to get done.
2. Got Lily dressed, discussed at length what shirts possibly go with her wacky hippy pants.
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3. Shower, get dressed.
4. Tell Max to tuck in his shirt and put his shoes on.
5. Look for Lily’s shoes, force her to wear sandals since her other tennis shoe is apparently in Narnia.
6. Tell Max to tuck in his shirt and put his shoes on.
7. Unsuccessfully attempt to sync my iPhone so we can listen to Screwtape Letters in the car.
8. Tell Max, again, to tuck in his shirt and put his shoes on.
9. Give up on iPhone sync, load everyone in car, drive to all schools, return home with only two kids and my favorite McD’s breakfast (Birthday money! Woot!)
10. Switch laundry
11. Remove Molly’s hands from toilet, blockade bathroom.
12. Put away Molly and Lily’s clothes so I will have room to fold more.
13. Set up the laptop and Netflix so that my old buddy Dr Who can fold some clothes with me.
14. Start Shirley Temple Video for Lily and Molly.  Google how to make Shirley Temple’s curls.
15. Take water bottle away from Molly.
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16. Start cleaning my bedroom.
17. Remove water bottle from Molly again, change her clothes since she was soaking wet, nurse Molly.
18. Help Lily find a skirt to wear to dance along with Shirley Temple.
19. Return to cleaning my bedroom.  FINISHED!  It is not dusted or swept, but it is clean enough that I could do either of those.
20. Tidy up my bathroom. FINISHED!
21. Molly pooped. Change her diaper/clothes AGAIN, nurse again, and put her down for a nap.  For the record, it is now 9:30am.
22. Switch laundry
23. Fold clothes, watch Dr Who.  Lily plays barbies for a while until it is time for the…
24. Next clothing change (Lily)
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25. Molly is awake! 45 minute nap, not too bad for her. Nurse and snuggle.
26. Snack time, peanut butter crackers.
27. Change Lily back into outfit #2.
28. Fill dishwasher with last night’s dishes, wipe counters, ignore floor.
29. Molly knocks over recycle bin.  Pick up all the stuff and take to the outside bin.
30. Lil and Mol play with toys and alternate climbing on and off my lap while I check message boards and facebook for a bit.
31. Make lunch, feed girls.
32. Finally get iPhone successfully synced.
33. Switch laundry
34. Read book and nurse, put Lily down for a nap.  How is it possible that it is only 12:30?
35. Fold a little more, nurse a little more.
36. As of 1:05 I have two sleeping babies!  Yay!
37. Well that didn’t last long. Molly only slept in her bed for 10 minutes.  Then I nursed her through the rest of her nap.
38. Molly woke up, I had a nice phone call with Lucy, folded some more clothes and then BAM! It was time to go get the kids – so we were off and running again.
39. Get kids at one school, then at another and another, then to Safeway, then home and snack time.
40. Nurse the baby, make kids put away clothes and tidy kitchen after snack.  It is now 4:15.
41. Fold, Fold, and Fold. Finish Dr Who Season 2!
42. Switch laundry last time, start diapers.
43. Put away ALL of my clothes, a first in a while.
44. 5:06pm – Change diaper, get everyone’s shoes on, and out the door for dinner at Hot Dog on a Stick Family night.  Free hot dogs for the crew!  It may not be a healthy dinner, but I don’t have to pay or cook, so I’m sold!
45. Feed all the kids at the mall at Hot Dog, get to help stomp lemonade.  Molly has her first french fry.  Try to keep Lily from climbing the furniture.
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46. Arrive home, upload photos.
47. Kiss Jay goodbye, head off to Auction Meeting, drop James off at a friend’s house not so on the way.
48. Home at last, nurse baby. Finish post.  Stick a fork in me I’m DONE.

Zoo Week in Review

This past week was a busy one – but then most weeks are – this just had a different flavor of busyness.  There was a storm that blew through the city and dropped a little rain, leaving the air with a cooler feel and the skies darker.  Around here, things just felt stormy as well.

A few tidbits:
There is almost $4000 damage to our van from the recent hailstorm here, but everyone has their car in the shops already so we are waiting a week or two to send ours in.  At least it wasn’t totaled.  Some of our friends found themselves car shopping once the insurance had a gander at their cars.  For now we are just a big gray golfball, hurling through the city.

We endured a fair bit of drama from Ben’s school this week. It seems that my jokester son and a couple of his friends had tried to reach out and include a child they judged as lonely, which can aparently get a person in trouble for “Bullying”.  The school conceded that it was probably more like “Pestering”, which, knowing my son, is not so far out of his league.  To me, Bullying encompasses threats, fear, and physical harm.  Pestering, on the other hand has more to do with unwanted fart noises and other 13 year old boy jokes.  So after many hours of discussions, phone calls, written accounts, emails, and commiserating with other parents, the issue is declared DONE and we can all move on.  But it sure ate up a lot of my week.

My birthday was this week!  (I’m not 40 yet.  That’s all I’ll say!)  A few years ago I managed to finally give up my childish idea that my birthday should be a national holiday and just came to expect a normal day with a few nice surprises in it.  And so it was.  Mostly.  A friend brought me chocolate, my mother in law gave me a little money to spend on myself, and Paisley stopped by with a chai latte and flowers.  Jay took me to lunch and got me more flowers and a card.  (Lest you think that was all he did, he also schlepped all around my favorite mall with me last Saturday and got me a nice pair of shoes.)  So my day was going along swimmingly until I opened my email.

In my email was a notice from the older kids school (yes, the one I was already having issues with this week) informing the families that they had selected a new campus.  Yay for them, Boo for me.  This new campus is two and a half times further from us than the current one.  I already spend 2.5 hours per day just in getting my kids to and from schools and the thought of extending that…  Ugh.  How can I look at my younger children, learning about the world and developing their bodies and tell them that they have to spend 3-4 hours per day strapped down in the car?

For this and other reasons, this just would not be a feasible arrangement for us.  So I proceeded to freak out entirely. (Which involved crying for about 2 days.)

Since then I have calmed down quite a bit, and all is not settled with this move for this school.  There is still quite a bit of time before I will really need to panic (or otherwise figure out what to do) and I am resolved once again to let the future be the future.

In other news around here, Molly has added in several baby signs.  She signs: nurse, eat, drink, dog, thank you, cat, bird, more, shoes, and I think she has done all done and blanket at least a couple times too.  She has grasped this concept that she can communicate with us so readily that she wants to be able to tell us more.  She will fling her arms around trying to tell us something, but she can’t figure out which sign to use.  Then there was grocery shopping. Because she can tell us what she wants now, she is more likely to get it, so she got so frustrated when we walked through an aisle with lots of cups and she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t give her a drink when she signed it over and and over!

She also really likes baths and was on a mission to get one today.  She fell into the (empty) tub once, and then later managed to remove her diaper and try to climb into the toilet while Posy was in the bathroom curling her hair.

Molly also experienced her first oreo cookie today.  I hoped she would get all chocolated and gross, but she was a pretty dainty eater.  She first removed the top cookie, proving she is a genius, and licked at the filling a little.
 Molly's First Oreo

She decided she didn’t like that a whole lot, so she scraped that off the bottom cookie and just worked on eating that part.

Molly's First Oreo

Finally, she got to the cookie part.  She made a little slobbery mess with it, but not too bad.  I guess the real mess with have to wait for her First Birthday Cake.  (Two more weeks!)

Molly's First Oreo
In other news Max and Tessa got rave reviews at their teacher conferences, although Max’s teacher said he has a hard time remembering not to sing all the time.

Jay hurt his back again, and has been hobbling around in pain all week.

And I managed to mess up the garage a little more in and effort to clean the garage.  Which I know sounds counter-intuitive, but is really progress.  I have to dig out all the clutter-infection to clean the wound so to speak.

And that, if you can believe it, is just a small sampling of what went on around here this week.

Checking in

I’m not going to start this post with another apology that it has been so long since I posted and make a bunch of excuses about it.  My whole life is an excuse not to write while at the same time being ripe pickings for juicy blogging goodness.  So here I am, taking a few not-so-spare moments to check in here.

The last post was about Molly’s ailments.  I am happy to report that we have some resolution to a little of those.  About a month ago she tested negative to all her previous positive allergy tests.  She was still having trouble swallowing food at the time and tended to choke and vomit when she tried to eat.  But with the lifting of the threat of an allergic reaction, we were able to offer her a wider variety of foods and came up with some she was willing to practice her eating on.  That was victory number one.  Next she underwent an endoscopy to check for the extent of her GERD, gastrointestinal allergies, eosinophilic esophagitis and celiac.  We just got the results back today that she is clear of all of those, except the GERD.  This was the best possible news we could get from that test. Victory number two.

And while I don’t want to claim it yet as victory number three, I just got her to go to bed without nursing to sleep.  (Silent cheering!)

I would love to say that the rest of my life is boring right now, but it is only boring in the typing of it.  My days are filled with driving the big kids here and there and spending the quiet moments sitting on the floor with Molly and Lily and enjoying their littleness.  It is so tempting to get pulled away from that to go do things that look more important, but given the choice this is still where I want to be.  Getting to the end of the day and finding that my to do list has grown instead of shrunk is not any big problem (although it can be frustrating) and a day will come soon when I have plenty of time to clean my house and no nursing and rocking left to do.

Which reminds me, just tonight, as I rocked and nursed Molly, she stopped nursing, sat up and gave me a kiss.  Then she giggled and went back to nursing.  She did it two more times right after that.  It was very sweet.