Party in the Hizouse!

Dear Jen,

So usually when I come home from rehearsal the house is dark and silent. Brad is upstairs in his office studiously working on some homework assignment and the children are peacefully nuzzled all snug in their beds, with no evidence whatsoever of whatever chaotic goings on no doubt transpired when Brad first put them down.

Tonight, however...

Well, immediately upon entering the house things seemed normal enough. Quiet. Dark. But as I approached the stairs my ears began to pick up a faint vibrating sound. Standing at the base of the stairs I realized it was coming from the floor vent. I thought, "Sounds like heating." But I was pretty sure we hadn't turned the heat on yet. The only other explanation was "power tools", but as I peered up the stairs I saw lights on, as though Brad was where he always was, working away in his office. Confused, I called out, "BRAD?" to which I got the gleeful response, "MOMMY!"

"Uh oh," thought I, "Trouble."

So I cautiously ventured upstairs, and you know what I found? Evelyn hanging out in the hall with an excavator toy talking my ear off, and Gavin sitting in Brad's office, bare bum, colouring on a note pad with a pink pen.

"Gavin pooped in his potty, mom! Gavin pooped in his potty! See? Right there! He pooped in his potty! Isn't that good, mom? He pooped in his potty! Right there!"

So, I gathered what happened here, is that Gavin pooped in his potty. I dumped the thing out (poor kids, it was stinking up their room!), then spent five minutes repeatedly asking where his pants were before Gavin finally was so kind as to retrieve them for me--with more poop in them. So I went to dump that out and returned to the hallway to find Gavin had magically procured a push toy out of nowhere that he'd begun running along the hallway, and Evelyn, clearly the Queen of the Upstairs, led me into my bedroom to show me the slippers she'd left on my bed as she was freely roaming her domain this evening. Well, I finally convinced them to get into their room, and to get Gavin's pants back on, when I noticed that their curtain had been pulled off the window. WHAT KIND OF PARTIES HAVE THEY BEEN HAVING UP HERE??? Aaanyway, so I fixed that, got them into their beds, gave hugs and kisses, said goodnight, shut the door, and went straight to the basement to find Brad working away at some wooden toys.

So it was the power tools after all.

Kids are nuts. Good thing this scenario didn't play out at like 3 in the morning or something or I might have actually been a wee bit annoyed!

Oy.

Mini Muk Luks

Dear Jen,

I've decided that if our money-saving heating tactics are going to be successful this winter, the entire family must be fitted with cozy slippers. This morning I completed my first set--Gavin's. He loves them! He is pretty much as excited about a pair of hand-made slippers as a two-year-old boy can get. He wore them all day long; wouldn't take them off. So of course he peed all over them.

I mean, what else would you do with newly-completed hand-made custom slippers? Of course you would urinate all over them. Don't be silly.

I shouldn't make this sound worse than it is. To be fair, it's not like he singled them out. He also peed all over his pants and underwear, and then it dribbled down to his newly-completed hand-made custom slippers. Because, you know, walking five feet to the potty is an outrageous thing to expect from a two-year-old boy who has purportedly been going pee in the potty for nine months.

Outrageous.

I was going to take a picture of them, but of course now that will have to wait. I have instead provided the sample picture from the pattern so that you can comprehend what a true tragedy any sort of abuse of these too-cute-for-life slippers is. Try not to cry.


 

Life Double

Dear Jen,

Every time I think about how your baby was born on his due date that was the same due date for Gavin which was also the day he was born, I cannot get over the awesomeness.

Seriously, I just cannot.

Love, Jacqui

ps I don't think I have ever been so excited about someone else having a baby before! Maybe it's because this time I had the advanced pleasure of having my own baby to love these past couple months and I'm just so excited for you to enjoy your own little guy too! It must be like when I was a kid and I would get so excited for other people's birthdays I'd get sick to my stomach. True story. Anyway, hope you're getting lots of support so you can really love it!

Fly Lady

Dear Jen,

I have come upon a new and exciting idea, and I thought I'd better write it down somewhere, so I have selected here.

Yes you should feel honoured.

Okay so this morning, at some random point of thinking about who knows what, a solution to my house tidiness problem came to me. It's actually a slightly more complex problem than that. The other component to it is that I've started feeling a little bad about how many days we spend just hanging around the house. Wednesdays we go to the park, and Tuesdays we go grocery shopping. Aside from that, I will on occasion take the children to the library, and actually starting probably next week I think Maggie's Place playgroups will be started up again. But anyway, probably too many days we lounge around, eat a slow breakfast, take a long bath, and I fret about the filthiness of the house, tidying here and there until suddenly it's lunch, and then naps, and then we're practically at supper and the day is virtually over.

So do you remember how this one time you lent me that Fly Lady book? I'll bet you thought I was horribly offended by it and never picked it up except to angrily peruse and then hand it back, didn't you? How wrong you were! She's got some good ideas! I'll admit, I mostly skimmed, and skipped over the parts I thought didn't apply to me--like, I am capable of cleaning my house, and I do clean my kitchen on a regular basis, and I don't get so depressed I can barely pull myself out of bed, and I am moderately acceptably skilled at motivating myself to tidy, you know. There are also a few things in her system that I already naturally do--like wiping out the sink. But I read enough to get the gist of what her system is, and I applied one or two things right away: remember my room basket? I had this wicker basket in my livingroom whose entire purpose was to deposit mess that would be dealt with later. It was actually a very effective tool for that space. Doesn't work so well for this very broken up space, however.

Anyway, the other things I picked up from the book I stored somewhere in the back of my brain as interesting information I felt didn't apply to me at the time.

SO, that information turned out to be the root of my epiphany. I am experimenting on a new system and I am very excited about it! Just started an hour ago. In a few weeks I'll let you know how it went. Here it is: Every day just after Gavin goes down for his nap I'll put the timer on for ten minutes, and do a quick tidy of the whole main floor. Then after supper we'll start doing our "After Supper Cleaner Upper" again, and that will finish up whatever I didn't manage in the afternoon. Hopefully it will create this beautiful cycle of general tidiness, in which the afternoon clean up makes it so there isn't too much to do in the evening, and the evening tidy makes it so that I can actually get most of the mess cleaned up in just ten minutes. And hopefully all of this makes it so that there is no need to look around at my house in the morning and think, "Guess this is going to be a stay at home and tidy up day", and instead I can think, "Nothing to do here--what can the kids and I do together this morning?" Extra bonus I just thought of: the more mornings we spend out of the house, the less mess there is to deal with in the afternoon!

See how it all could work together symbiotically to create a CLEAN environment forever after? See how this system, if it is successful, could revolutionize my life???

I'm kind of pretty stinking excited about it.

Doesn't solve the upstairs, or the playroom, and doesn't clean my bathrooms, but lately I've been having trouble ever getting to those issues because I'm too tied up spending the entire day tidying this stinking house (side note: I mean "stinking" in terms of an expression of my disgust, not "stinking" in terms of actual smell), so this should actually improve that situation too.

So just an hour ago to kick it off I did a special extra clean up. I gave myself ten minutes per room and did the kitchen (which I cheated to about 17 minutes), the dining room, and the living room. It was encouragingly successful. And in about an hour's time I'll have another ten minutes to do a bit more, and let the fun begin!

Be excited for me. I'm just dying for this to actually work out.

Love Jacqui

Cancer Research

Dear Jen,

You know how they tell  you to boil soothers before using them?

...yeah...they should tell you not to boil them while you're sitting down to feed your baby. Actually there should be a warning label on all products that new mothers might buy, telling them not to try multi-tasking EVER. I'm also pretty sure I have cancer from all the toxic fumes I inhaled while trying to bring the disaster under control. Fortunately Brad had temporarily removed the fire alarm last fall when something we were cooking kept setting it off, so we didn't notice the problem until the stench began permeating our living room--at the other end of the house.

Yup.

Oh and also I ruined a pot. I mean the plastic is mostly scraped away, but I'm just that picky, I refuse to eat food cooked in a pot with even a little bit of plastic in it.

I know--I'm crazy.

Worst part is, now I have to go out to the store again to buy soothers.

Life...

Love,

Jacqui

What's Brown and Sticky?

Dear Jen,

I don't know whether it had been established before I moved how challenging lunches are for me.

I have developed a hatred for lunches.

I'm just not interested in anything lunch-oriented, and incidentally, neither are my kids. I have three staples that I know they'll eat, none of which I really want them eating on a regular basis: hot dogs; Kraft Dinner; grilled cheese sandwiches (alright that one's not the worst. Still--not enough protein for my liking!). Above that, I have struggled to find anything that they (or I) will actually put in their mouths.

No more, Jen, NO MORE! I have discovered the answer! And, as they usually are, it was so simple. What is it, do you ask?

TOOTH PICKS.

Fun like you wouldn't believe. Evelyn has pretty much written off cheese. And today, she was crying about how she didn't want ham because she wanted hot dogs. But then, in a moment of pure inspired genius, I got out a tooth pick, stacked a cheese square, a ham roll, and a pickle slice onto it, and presented it to her. Eagerly she popped it into her mouth, and miraculously proclaimed that she liked it. Double bonus: Gavin loved them too! (although to be honest, first of all he generally just loves cheese and also ham, and above all pickles, and secondly his current favourite activity is copying everything Evelyn does)

Tooth picks are the answer, my friend. I'm just rubbing my fingers together thinking of all the things I can tooth pick! I'm thinking PB&J may be getting a new look in our house!

So excited! For the moment, I am saved from the lunch-time drudgery.

...that is until Madamoiselle Master of the Universe decrees that tooth picks are passé...

Is there a class on post-partum breathing techniques?

Dear Jen,

Can you believe that it has already been over a month since the last post??? I don't know if your life has been as incredibly crazy, although considering you at least had a one-week vacation on Thetis Island in that time, it may very well have been. My how time loses all meaning when something like this:

(this is him sneezing--he did not love that gavoche tube)

comes into your life unexpectedly early!

I realized today that it has been almost four weeks since our family has been on our own--almost four weeks since I've done my own dishes or taken care of my children alone. It passes quick, and yet it seems like it's been a lifetime! Today I drove my mother to the airport to catch her flight home, and that was officially the end of our official help. I said to her, "Now I have to take care of my own family!" and wondered how I am going to manage that.

One day at a time, right? Not to brag to a still-pregnant lady or anything, but it is truly incredible how much energy my body can have after a night of constantly interrupted sleep. It's probably the number one thing I love most about not being pregnant: human levels of energy! No no, SUPER human levels of energy. For the first few weeks, anyway.

We'll figure it out, I suppose. Deep breaths!

Plus this looks like a pretty good start, right?

Love,

Jacqui