Yeah I Still Live Here

Have you noticed how I only seem to blog when somebody is ill or something else sucky is going on? Me too. Sorry about that. Hee...

Things have been going well here this week. Everyone is well (knock on wood - quickly!) and Sweet Pea has gone to school every day. She shared one of her books about space (meaning, she took it in and one of the teachers read it to the kids at circle time) and has brought home two cool papers to show me; one showing certain numbers of beads which she had to count. She wrote the correct numbers in the rectangles above the pictures of the beads. This paper showed 11-19 beads and she did darn well writing the numbers, which is very cool. 12 came out as 21 but other than that the numbers were in the correct places. Today she showed me a writing practice sheet she completed for 1-10. She just had to write each number over and over on the line next to the printed number. We've been working on writing her numbers at home because whenever I send mail to anyone (or whenever she does, for that matter), she REALLY wants to write the address. That is not possible yet for her - it would take 3 envelopes and a magician of a postal worker to read it, since she cannot control the size of her letters and tends to just put them anywhere if she runs out of room while writing, which could mean that if she starts writing a word at the bottom right of a page, half of it will end up backward at the top left of the page. I have, however, been having her practice writing zip codes on scratch paper and then allowing her to write those on envelopes once she's got the number shapes down. And I think that's why she chose to do that particular work today at school.

The Bug is doing well too. She's been crankier than usual but is still her fun self most of the time. I think the crankiness may have to do with her two-year molars. I don't feel anything cutting through the gums yet but I know they're hanging out in there just pushing, pushing, pushing. Today she fussed a lot in her sleep during her nap and I thought she was actually waking up. I went up to the bedroom to check on her but when I got there she stopped fussing, eyes still closed, relaxed, and fell the rest of the way back to sleep. But I noticed that her hands were both up by her face, near her jaw, when she was fussing and moving. Can't remember if I mentioned in my Easter post about smashing her finger in the shower door, but the nail finally fell off today. The new nail has only grown halfway out but she will not keep a band-aid on for longer than a few hours and there is only so much I can do. Today she tore the rest of the hanging part of the nail off the nail bed so I had to just cut it off, even though her finger looks very unprotected. Of course I put a band-aid on to help the finger heal more with some protection, but she kept it on for all of an hour. She's got another band-aid on tonight; at least that one should stay on until she wakes in the morning.

Tomorrow is Grandparents Day for Sweet Pea's class at school. My mom, Slipshod's mom & her hubby will come to the house before school and then I'm going to have them take Sweet Pea over (no reason for me to go, after all, and that will give me a better opportunity to get The Bug napping when her body actually needs it). They get to hang out with her in her classroom for an hour and she gets to show them the works that she does in the classroom, show them the classroom pets, etc. etc. They (Sweet Pea included, of course!) are all very excited and looking forward to their time together at school tomorrow. I'm envious, since I had to miss Mom's Night (when she would have shown me around her classroom & told me all about the works she does during school) in the Fall, due to Sweet Pea being ill. But I have been in the classroom on occasion and have gotten to see some of the neat things they get to do in there.

Yesterday the box arrived full of birthday paraphernalia for both girls' birthday parties. They're of course both beside themselves with excitement about their birthdays coming up, so today I gave them a sneak preview of the invitations, plates and balloons in the box. The Bug stuck with her original Sea Life theme, but Sweet Pea changed her theme.

She had chosen a theme called "Glamor Cats" but then began drawing pictures for me of the way she wanted to decorate the house for her 6th birthday, next year. She drew planets hanging from the ceiling and fun space stuff like that. One day I said to her, "you know, I haven't ordered the things for your birthday this summer yet; do you want to have a space-themed birthday party this year instead? She got very excited and jumped up and down, so that's what we're doing this summer: A Space birthday party. The big plates have astronauts on them and the small plates have the Space Shuttle, but her favorite things, which I would not usually get but did because I knew they would be her favorite, is the placemats, because they have a big picture of the Earth in the middle and other pictures around the edges of Saturn and the moon and stars and galaxies.

Sweet Pea has always been interested in the moon and the stars, and I have answered her questions as best I could about them, and have shown her the Orion constellation and looked things up for her. But she gets most of her space information from her Boopa, who is so interested in space that he has multiple star projectors (he even gave her a small one last year to keep) and telescopes and knows more about things in space than Slipshod and I do. Sweet Pea loves - no, LOVES - to see pictures of celestial bodies. She already knows more about space than I do. She tells me about galaxies and nebulas and all kinds of cool stuff. She has added "space scientist" to her list of things she wants to be when she grows up.

A month or more ago Sweet Pea asked me if I would please start recording space shows for her on TV. Of course there is nothing on TV about space that is made for children to watch, so we just started recording anything and everything we could find about space for her, and she eats up all of it. Documentaries, feeds from the international space station, shows about ideas for the future (Mars colonization, etc.). She just loves all of it. Though after watching some of these shows and asking questions and hearing our answers she has decided that she'd like to be a "space scientist" right here on Earth, not an astronaut. I think the thing that bothers her most is the idea of bone loss. Yes, she's 4, but she worries about astronauts' bone loss after lengthy space missions. She's so freakin' cool. hee hee!

One thing I have noticed after watching a number of these space shows is that unless you're watching a live feed from the space station, nobody can make a space show about ANY planet or moon without mentioning and showing digitally rendered footage, at least four times in an hour-long show, of a huge asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out our entire existence. They're obsessed. Though I feel that the obsession probably has more to do with sensationalism to boost ratings than an obsession with the end of the world as we know it. The way they work that scenario into every show smacks of the sensationalism used to get people to watch the news every night. Jackasses.

As for me... well, I have been dealing with ongoing headaches ever since The Bug dropped two FULL Sigg bottles on my head one morning last week. I did see the doctor about it yesterday and she said I check out fine. While the area where the bottles hit my skull is still tender and a tiny bit swollen, the headaches get worse as the day wears on and often envelope the entire right side of my head as well as my neck, which is my old MO for stress headaches. I thought about it yesterday and realized that I do feel very stressed out all day every day lately due to the horrific state of our house. Clutter, clutter EVERYWHERE but it's all I can do to get the bare minimum done every night between the time when the girls go to bed and I do. Our biggest problem is paper clutter and I'm often tempted to just make a big ole bonfire out of all of it.

I've recently, finally realized, in my very bones, that try as I might to just accept that I'm the only one who ever cleans or organizes anything around here (believe me, this is not something I feel is the way it should be, but after 12 years of banging my head against the same brick wall I figured maybe if I could just do it and try not to think about how angry it makes me to be the only one, I'd get more done with less rancor), I CANNOT, NOR WILL I EVER BE ABLE TO, TAKE CARE OF ALL OF THIS ON MY OWN. I'm already primarily responsible for the kids and the cats, 24x7. The dishes, laundry and everything else fall to me as well. 24x7x365. I feel like if I have to do all of this myself, then we need to get rid of 3/4 of everything we own. I just can't fucking do it all. I'm sick to death of trying and failing every. single. day. And yes, as a matter of fact, I have talked with Slipshod about this. Many times. I have asked that he do some stuff too. I have even gone so far as to suggest specific things he can do, which he has always asked me to do in these situations, since we don't see messes the same way (which is to say, I see them and he doesn't, he just steps over or around them). But, nothing's happening.

I really really need to get over my perfectionism, which most of the time keeps me from truly accomplishing anything toward my decluttering goals, and just embrace the idea of doing things 15 minutes at a time. Whenever I do that I am amazed at how much I can accomplish in 15 minutes. And if I did that every day, I would accomplish much more than I do now, and be rewarded with the feeling of actually getting somewhere, rather than fretting about it all the time.

On top of that I've been trying to get to packing for our weekend away this weekend (actually did get probably more than halfway packed for me and the girls today, which is a very good start) AND I've been trying to start planning a Disneyland vacation for August. Haven't gotten very far on that one but I'm feeling stress about it since I know that it's a little crazy to be trying to get rooms at an actual Disney hotel this late in the year.

So, yeah. I've been stressed about that stuff lately. To the point where my head really feels like it might explode. I'd better go mop up the half bath now - Sweet Pea had a pee accident the other morning. Thought I'd cleaned it up but didn't discover it until hours later - she didn't tell me - so part of the mess had dried and today that bathroom is RANK. Lovely. I've also been following one of the cats around tonight cleaning up her puke. Joy.

I guess I sound pretty bummed in these last few paragraphs, but I'm actually not feeling morose or anything. Just stressed through and through.