I feel like I’m in a rut lately – like this blog is all wah wah wah all the time!

What it comes down to is, I started my new routine a week before school started - and I don’t feel like I have hit my stride yet.  It hasn’t become natural, and I hate that feeling.  I mean, barring nights with no sleep, I am back in the swing of things, getting up at 6, getting breakfast and lunches made, keeping up wtih cleaning and laundry, and keeping my 2-year-old reasonably educationally entertained through the day. 

The thing holding me back is my older kids, and I hate to admit it, my husband.  While I planned out our new schedule, and posted it for everyone to see, it has not been embraced by everyone!  Hubs still gets moving whenever he feels like it, which throws a wrench in the morning transportation plans since we have three drivers and two cars, and everyone’s needs have been SCHEDULED, PER MY SCHEDULE, but others are not following it. 

The ‘middle kids’ also aren’t getting up when they are supposed to, even when woken up, and that causes problems.  On mornings when I am baking or making a more involved breakfast, I do plan on their help for making lunches, or watching BonBon, or helping out with other things.  When they don’t get up, I get no help.  I also have stated the expectation to them that before they leave for school, they are to bathe if necessary, dress in CLEAN clothes (I ask SOOO MUCH), tidy their bedroom and make their bed.  Given that they are all SUPPOSED TO BE up at least an hour and 15 minutes before they leave, this should be no problem.  Alas, it is. 

So I have been really, really frustrated by this, and today, I kind of exploded.  I got up at 6, showered and dressed for the day (make-up and all!), and went out to the kitchen to make pumpkin scones for breakfast.  I needed help.  The trash was never taken out last night – which is NOT OK when it was overflowing the can, and we’ve had a mouse running around.  As the morning ticked past, and nobody got up, I got more and more steamed. 

At 6:45, kids started showing up – you know – once they could smell the pumpkin scones baking.  I decided at that moment – everybody who got up late did not get scones, and I wasn’t making their lunch!  (I am such a big meanie.)  That meant two kids had to scramble to get their lunches put together, and one didn’t eat breakfast.  I feel bad, but at the same time, I am struggling with how to get through to them that I am serious.  Their continued choice to ignore not only the schedule I have set, but also my expectations for what they get done before and after school feels like complete disrespect.

The thing is, I know they don’t MEAN to hurt me by what they’re doing.  They don’t really MEAN to be disrespectful.  They just don’t care. 

SO, I unloaded on Hubs this morning, and I think he gets where I am coming from.  He has set his alarm for tomorrow, and will be getting up on time. (I have explained to him that he IS setting an example, and it does make a difference when he doesn’t get up when he should.  Obviously, there are allowances for when he has to work all night, but on a day-to-day, he’s going to make a better effort to follow the schedule.)

Tonight, the kids will be putting together their cards which explain what they are supposed to do every morning before school, in the afternoon, and before bed.  Hubs thinks having flip cards, which they can go through and remind themselves, will help.  (He did this in the past when I was working out of town, and had success with it.)

So I am optimistic.  I want this house running like the well-oiled machine I dream of.  Will it be perfect all the time?  Probably not.  But…I just keep hoping we can get there.

If not, this rut is gonna kill me!

(PS, the supermommyness category was used just to counteract Ren’s dislike of the FAILMOM category!)

Today marks the real discovery of Yo Gabba Gabba in our household. We’ve gone through different phases…first Blue Clues, then Dora the Explorer, then Go Diego Go, and to be honest, we have all watched nearly enough Diego to throw up . This week BonBon had been recycling Dora, but this morning I coaxed her into watching Yo Gabba Gabba. She is LOVING it!!

I have been trying to get her on video dancing, but every time I try, she notices and stops dancing! Argh!

Aaaaand….she just took her diaper off while doing a full on Elvis pelvis dance.

(How many songs can they put in one 30 minute episode with “I’m so happy” in the lyrics?)

I’m writing this, knowing my husband is probably going to read it, and in some ways, it’s unfair.

God keeps telling me to write, though – and I’m not sure how to do it other than here. I have this vague longing to write a book, but…ideas, they aren’t coming. Well, that’s not true. I have ONE idea, so I might start with that.

I am struggling today, and have had a good long cry. Hubs and I are going through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. To give you a picture of our financial situation, I quit working three years ago, so that we could have BonBon. The decision for me not to work removed a hefty almost six figure salary from our income. It also meant that rather than travelling 4-5 days every week, I would be the primary caregiver to our (now) 5 children. We have always struggled with our finances – even when I was working. We’ve lacked the discipline to pay the right things at the right times. Sadly, when you have two incomes, it’s a little easier to catch up when you get behind.

Since 2008, our financial picture has gone downhill, culminating in the foreclosure of our house in January of 2011. It wasn’t the end of the world, the way it seemed at the time, and it actually ended up feeling like a burden had been lifted in some regards. I am sad the first house I was able to purchase on my own is gone, but I had been praying for God to get us into a bigger house that fit us all better, and we do have that now. It’s not how I would have liked it to happen, but alas – we do love the new house and the new neighborhood more than the old one!

That brings me to where we are now. Budget-wise, we’ve cut out a lot of the extras we could have. We don’t have cable or a land-line phone. We do have an expensive cell plan, 2 gym memberships, and about $100 in entertainment expenses that could go. We also have a food budget that is fairly expensive – but it’s difficult planning 3 meals a day for 7 people for the amount that is suggested we budget for food.

We also have a lot of bills that are yet to be paid. Thankfully, our credit card debt is less than $500, but our school loan debt is near $30K, and our collection accounts are not small. Pretty ugly, huh?

The obvious solution for this is for me to go back to work. I can earn a fairly substantial salary that would allow us to be out of debt within a year or two. Easy, right?

The problem is, I have a two year old I wanted to be home raising. I have (almost) 3 teenagers (17, 15, and 13 next week). I have a “tween” with a massive ADHD issue who could test the patience of Mother Theresa. As much as they may drive me batty from time to time, I love being home with them. I love hearing about their day as we drive to or from school. I love watching Ponyo for the 8 billionth time because BonBon loves it. I love every little thing about being a stay at home mom.

The other issue is, I know that if we don’t develop the discipline to live within the budget we have now, we won’t live within that budget if I get a job. That means, it isn’t really a matter of having that extra income for savings and paying off bad debt. It means we WILL eat out more, because neither one of us will feel like cooking. It means we will both feel more stressed out, and that will take it’s toll on our marriage.

I know, if I have to work, BonBon will be in great hands. My mother and bestie have already offered to watch her so I can work – so it’s not a matter of her suddenly having to go to daycare. I guess what it really comes down to is…I won’t be the one home with her, or with the other kids, and that’s just pretty selfish on my part.

I need to fix up my resume, and start looking. There won’t be a job here in town that perfectly fits my skillset, so I will find one that imperfectly fits. I know the peace of being out of debt will be worth it, but for now, I just need to cry for a little while. How overly dramatic of me.

I think I finally managed to kill the shamrock. Well, I am not certain if it was me, or a collaborative effort, but I think it’s nearly dead. See, I see it wilty, so I give it water. Somebody else sees it wilty, gives it water, etc…’til we have killed it with kindness, so to speak. But hey – 2 months is kind of a record for us, so that’s good.

Spent the evening learning how to run the powerpoint with the lyrics for worship at church. It’s not new, but I will be added into the rotation for Sunday mornings, so that’s a lot more pressure than the prayer gathering I have done it for in the past. Plus side, however, is that the set list is determined ahead of time, not on the fly, so that makes it a little easier. I am looking forward to it. I love serving at church, and each new thing I try gets me a step closer to finding what I love doing! LOL

Wednesday night was Financial Peace University. We just finished our 3rd class of 13. This week the discussion was on creating an in-depth workable budget, and really mapping out your cash flow each month, so that you know when money’s coming in, and when it needs to go out, and exactly where each dollar is spent. This is something Hubs and I REALLY need to get under control, because we tend to try and keep the running total in our heads, and we are ALWAYS wrong. I am so tired of going to the store, and standing their praying while the debit transaction goes through – or worse actually having it delined. We are too smart to have this trouble, and we are going to get it under control.

We’re also discussing the possiblity of me going back to work. While we are doing really well at limiting extraneous spending, our expenses are still just a little too high for comfort. We’ve discussed me finding a job I can do in the evenings and weekends, so the BonBon doesn’t have to go to daycare, but we’ll see what happens. Part of me feels like, if I am going to go back, I might as well go back full time to my regular career. It pays better, and then a lot of the things that are hanging over our heads debt-wise could be paid off. That would be a great feeling.

Still waiting to get back into working out – I miss it, and discovered today that my gym changed it’s name!!! Weird. It’s blue moon fitness now, which I think is odd – because that makes it sound like you work out once in a while…?? Anyway – my plantar fasciitis is still making me nuts, and I really want it to go away. The stabbing pain in my feet is SO not fun. I really did enjoy working out too. Doing the workout makes me think twice before eating stuff that makes the workout pointless!! I also want to get better about drinking water again. I’ve gotten into the habit of always having coffee or diet soda, and I really don’t need all that.

The other thing I really want to do is break this blog down into separate blogs – one for our financial make-over, one for the physical make-over. But who am I kidding…I barely write here as it is!!

That said, I also want to write more. We shall see. I’ve got 3 different books I am reading right now, and that is keeping me fairly well occupied. However, with the kids getting out of school, I will have 4 additional helpers at home to keep BonBon entertained, so it may happen.

Today, my baby…my itty bitty baby….climbed into her crib all by herself. It is the beginning of the end. The end of the “baby” phase, that is. This means transitioning to a toddler bed, and the fight to keep her in her bed when she’s supposed to be, and…ugh…

I just want her to stay little awhile longer!

She woke up this morning, soaked from another night where her diaper didn’t keep up with how much she drank yesterday. It’s cool in the house, so I stripped her down, and pulled her under the blankets with us while she drank her milk. I cuddled her close, and sang ‘You are my sunshine” to her. She stayed cuddled up in a little ball at my chest, just listening.

It was a precious moment. I look at her big sister – who would still stay cuddled up to me for me to sing to her, but she’s BIG now. Well, moderately big, in a short-ish sort of way. But my girls – they will grow up and leave someday. And I’m just not ready.

Nor will I ever be.

I am blogging just so Ren will have something to read!

Ok, so this is what is on my mind this morning.

I noticed when I got up this morning that my husband had left without taking one of his cell phones (he has 2 – the work phone and then his regular phone). So – he had one, he would have been fine, but I felt like taking it up there anyway. As I was driving, I thought about all the times he’s asked me to run something up to him, and I got annoyed, because I had something else to do, but today, since it is Friday and I didn’t have anything we HAD to be doing, I did it with a cheerful heart. I wish I could do that every day. And I wish I was saying I WILL do better – but we all know how that goes. When I have five children needing my attention, I need to get dinner going, and the dog has gotten out of the yard again, it’s unlikely that I will be very good at remaining cheerful if something my husband has once again forgotten needs to be delivered. But it did make me think – I want to feel that way all the time.

Also as we were driving, two things happened. First, we drove past Lake Zorinsky, and BonBon shouted “In da tubby! It da tubby!”. Tubby is what she calls a bath – so apparently Lake Zorinsky just looks like a big bath tub to her! She hasn’t really been swimming since she was big enough to understand what was going on, so, I guess we need to do that, so she can differentiate a bath from other water activities! Goofy kid.

Then, as we were driving, I looked in the rearview mirror at her, and the sun was hitting her hair just right, so I could see the strands in her hair that just look like pure gold. I was just slammed once again with how much I love her – and how thankful I am that we decided to have her, despite financial woes and time constraints! She is just so awesome. (As are all our kids, but today she got the focus!)

I was reading a blog post yesterday about “sighing as we serve our children”. In other words, when your children need you to do things, do you sigh about having to do things for them? I KNOW I do. As I pointed out up above, I do the same thing with my husband. When I am busy and trying to accomplish something, and have to stop to do something for kids or Hubs, I often sigh. It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or don’t want to do it for them – it’s just an expression of my frustration with not being able to complete one task before moving on to something else.

I realized, though, that I’m overly sensitive of when Hubs does it. He will often sit at the table and sigh heavily when he is tired or thinking about something. I always tend to take that as frustration with me – even though it frequently has absolutely nothing to do with me! For a moment I wondered if my husband or kids take it the same way – and I know our oldest is sensitive to my sighs of frustration. My husband, occasionally, does notice….but most of my children? Don’t notice! Even so, it’s probably a silly thing to do. So I’m not going to do it!

Also? I learned that “Empujen” means “Push” in Spanish.

We have watched A LOT of Dora this week. BonBon is OVER Blues Clues, and is now in love with Dora.

Ok, so when I took BonBon in for her 18 month checkup, the doc asked if she had at least 4 words. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

This child, she has so many MORE than 4 words, I’ve been trying to make a list so I could count her vocabulary, but there’s always something new. SO here’s a quick list:

ball
brrrr
cold (goes with brrrr)
hot
doggie
puppy (buppy)
bear
book
Mama/Mommy
Dada/Daddy
Sister (Sisser)
Shoes (shooooos)
drink
milk
Juice
eat
cake (gook)
cookie (gookies)
up
Jazz (dog)
Moe (Moemoe)
MINE! (typed that way because that’s how she says it)
Night-night (ni ni)

I know there are more – those are just the ones I can think of atm….

Also, since I don’t think I posted it, she was 23.4 lbs at her check-up, which was less than half a pound over her last check-up at 15 months. The doc didn’t seem worried, but I worry – because she hardly eats anything some days. But, she’s in the 90th percentile for height, and the 32nd for weight, so I guess she’ll just be a supermodel!

…seeing an expression your husband makes all the time mirrorred in your baby’s face!

I was noticing this morning as I was driving that BonBon kept furrowing up her brow, and frowning a little. As we drove along, I kept glancing back, trying to figure out if something was making her mad. It wasn’t – she was just focusing on something, and as she did, her little eyebrows drew together, furrowing up her brown, and she frowned a little.

I realized, looking at her in the rearview mirror, that it’s the exact expression my husband makes all the time. Each time he does it, I worry that he’s mad about sometime, and frequently will end up MAKING him mad by insisting he MUST be mad about something, because he’s making that face.

Apparently, however, it’s just a look they both get when they’re really concentrating, or thinking about something! Funny that it took the baby to convince me my husband isn’t really mad about things!

Well, once again I haven’t updated in awhile. Things have managed to get…hectic! Our moms group started up last week, and since I’m in charge of Publicity, I had a few things I needed to get organized before the meeting. Sadly, as this is similar to the things I used to do for work, my perfectionism kicks in, and I want to have everything JUST SO. Also, since it was the first presentation I had done for this group, I wanted it to look nice so they didn’t regret giving me the job! LOL

We also have several other activities (between us and the kids) that have started up at church, plus a play, two different sports, and scouts that have all started. Literaly, there is not an evening this entire week that we don’t have something planned.

Which is good…just…busy. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging!

I’m going to put my homeschool updates in separate posts from now on. I want to be able to look back and actually have our journey documented!

Yesterday Cheesecake and I joined several other members of the moms group steering committee, and went out to pick apples at the farm of our leader’s grandparents. We have a “craft” in a couple of months where we will be making apple pies, so we needed roughly 400 apples. After we had those, they basically just let us pick what we wanted for ourselves from their apple and pear trees for ourselves. I loaded up! The apples were so wonderful – crisp and sweet – and I can’t wait to make something with them! The property is also home to one of the bigger local vineyards, so they showed us their grapes, and some of the cool stuff about the winery. It was really interesting, and I just loved having some time with Cheesecake. She and I used to have special time together every Sunday, before BonBon was born. Sometimes now BonBon goes with us, but most of the time we don’t manage to have that time.

Speaking of Cheesecake, I realized last week what I have done to her this year in school. When we registered her for the school year, I was thinking ahead to college, and thinking about how great it would be if she could get some of her college classes out of the way by taking Advanced Placement classes, but the AP classes, in addition to her honors classes and higher level science and math are a really heavy load. Hubs and I decided that there will be no getting a job this year for her, because I don’t know how she could work AND do everything she has to do. As it is, she’s coming home from school, spending until dinner in her room working on homework, and then usually after dinner and her chore, she goes back and does more homework. UGH. I didn’t really mean to jump her into that heavy of a workload so soon!

AND….the baby just woke up, and I discovered that at some point last night she barfed all over herself. SO I GUESS I AM DONE FOR THE DAY!

I’ve been noticing something over the last couple of weeks.

I don’t want to turn this post into a gripe session about some of my children, because that’s not really what I want to talk about. However. Let’s just say that some of my children…well…being tidy is not a skill they have in their arsenals, despite my attempts to teach that skill for the last six years. I could go into detail, but then I WOULD be complaining.

The reason this is notable is because I have noticed something with Baby BonBon.

She picks up after herself. She picks up after others. She will take her diapers after she is changed and throw them away. She will pick up scraps or other things off the floor, if they are trash, and throw them away. She will sometimes throw away things that didn’t actually NEED to be thrown away. She will put back her crayons after using them.

BonBon is just a little shy of 18 months old.

My older children, between the ages of 10 and 14, just don’t seem to care to do those things. Granted, they are my stepchildren, but I think it’s possibly evident that what they see at home at an early age determines to some extent how they will be when they are older. It could be noted, as well, that my stepkids seem to have even more of a tidiness problem when they visit their biomom, who has recently complained that they just leave their trash wherever they choose, and don’t pick up after themselves. She asked Hubs if this was allowed at our house. HAHAHAHAHA. No. No it’s not.

So I’m stuck wondering….did my bio-kids get genes that just like cleaning up more, or is it purely nurture rather than nature? Because seriously? My stepkids have been around me for 6 years. In my opinion, that’s plenty of time to have learned the survival skill of not trashing my house. And yet….it still happens.

It’s just so interesting to see how BonBon picks up things, you know?