Category Archives: Management

About doing and coordinating

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Movies

Well, we’ve still got a long ways to go before we have as many movies as books, but we’ve still managed to accumulate a nice collection.

I spent part of the morning organizing them, and the girls were just all over me–hovering. I can’t decide if the word I’m looking for is unnerving or annoying. They just wouldn’t go off and play while I had the movies out.

I have this picture of Tilly (the dog I grew up with) watching my dad and his hunting partner butcher and package a moose on our dining room table. She knew she had no rights or access to the meat on the table, but the whole time she sat, slightly forward, tightly coiled: if anything dropped it was not going to hit the floor.

That’s the best illustration I have for what happened today. The girls already had their little movie for the morning, and knew they wouldn’t get another one, but they continued to ask for and hold the movies (They asked names of people on the covers, stacked them in little pile like blocks, told me I couldn’t put stickers on them).

I was labeling the movies. We’ve “flubbed” quite a bit up till now, assuming a lack of awareness that is no longer applicable. So I wanted to go through and thoughtfully decide what ages I think a kid needs to be before they watch each of these things. Continue reading →

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I Made It.

(Posted simultaneously at Untangling Tales.)

Can’t say I’m done, ’cause I’m not, but I did make the 50,000-word “finish line.”

Two nights ago, actually. And yesterday I spent much of the day cleaning house because we were having company for dinner, so I didn’t write anything before “validating” my 50,267-Word document this morning. (You are such a nice little document!) It came in as 50,116 words.

Good enough for me. I did what I set out to do (make word count) and have had a “highly educational experience” that was not frightening or humiliating (I understand many highly educational experiences are one or both). I now have more words on a single story than I ever have before, and I spent more consecutive days on a single project (excluding marriage and children and eating) than I have before in my life.

Since it’s still not done I’ll have to spend some more hours on it before it’s complete, but I’ve got those penciled in for January or February.

The plan for December is to create order in my physical world (this was already manifesting itself toward the end of the month as my word-count slowed and my house got pretty) and enjoy Jay’s time off.

The whole month. *WooHoo!*

I’m hoping to have some time in there to create a semi-formal “pre-school” lesson plan for Natasha. She it just chomping at the bit right now. She has loved poetry since she was 2 1/2 and fell in love with that rabbit poem. We read them between chores this morning, and she was never ready to let me get back to my clothes-folding. Then she went off “playing school” and “reading” both by herself and with Melody.

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Cleaning Service

I am a little disappointed.

Jay and I talked and had managed to get over the “weirdness” of paying someone to help with the house (with me being home full-time), and then we find that what we want/need, a cleaning service doesn’t do.

How weird is that?

It’s like this:
Jay is thinking about getting a snowmachine, which I don’t particularly mind, except it represents a monetary outlay that nothing I desire can match. What I want to do are mainly time-intensive (writing, reading, music lessons, etc.) and More Money won’t give me more of that.

Then mom pointed out having someone else clean would give me more time.

Getting past the weirdness of having someone else clean my home, I called, only to make the connection (“we clean every surface you require”) that what I really want, they don’t do.

Let me tell you, when I get my living room floor clean, it get’s vacuumed. That’s the only way it gets vacuumed, and it’s only an extra five minutes on top of the *real* work of clearing it all (folding gobs of laundry, for example). I’m not paying for somebody to come do that.

*sigh*

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We’re growing up.

We’ve been wading through the living room for more than a week now, so last night I sat down before bed and made a schedule outlining what would get done today.

I got all the clothes folded, a load of dishes run, the cabinet doors washed and bread made.

The girls each put away their own clothes (Melody and I shared a “carrying” lesson: one hand on top, one on the bottom, watch where you’re going and don’t get side-tracked), they worked together to empty the dishwasher (I’d already put away what they can’t reach), and rag-mopped the kitchen floor with me.

It was a very productive day. All those things needed very much to be done, but since none of those things was clearing a space (living room floor, kitchen counter) it didn’t feel like we’d gotten done as much as we did.

Elisha woke right after they went down, so he/we worked on his sitting up. He wants it *so* bad!

We had dinner with the Weisensels, and it was nice not to cook after working all day. Elisha sat in Thomas’s highchair and just loved it. the sides are high enough that he can pull himself back up to sitting even if he falls over.

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Elisha’s eye

We took him in to his appointment this morning (yes, on a Saturday), and after a great deal of fussing, squirming and enforced immobilization, the eye doctor told us the “deformation” Jay observed a couple months ago was completely benign.

It has a name, and the fellow wrote it down for us, but somewhere between then and now I misplaced it. Along with the appointment card for his follow-up in April.

Found it. The name: Nodular Flocculus. “Prominent pupillary frill” another scrawl seems to be saying.

Dr. wants us to come back for a second look, to make sure it hasn’t changed, then we can wait until the “normal” toddler check-up, “around 3-yrs-old.”

I asked why a child needed to be seen at that age (feeling like this was asking a salesman why I needed his brand), but I really wanted to know. Doc (I honestly don’t remember who we saw– he even had to write on someone else’s business card, said he was out of his own) said the reason is to try and catch a type of one-eyed far-sightedness.

This can sometimes cause an eye to cross, because the brain shuts-off receiving from that eye. The dr. said that if this isn’t caught by about age 6 and a half the brain-induced blindness (it’s not using that eye anymore) is permanent. He said they like to do at least one appointment around age three, in case the eye didn’t cross, so they can catch it. Called it the leading form of preventable blindness.

I can remember seeing younger kids with glasses and an eye patch when I was in high school. Don’t know where I picked it up, but I told the kids I was babysitting that the patch was over the “good” eye (counter-intuitive, I know) to make the crossed eye work harder.

Putting that together with what I picked up today (seems to make sense) it’s all very interesting, and seems a compelling reason to get the kids checked as toddlers. Or, at least, as little kids. I’m beginning to tell the difference.

I signed Natasha up for an eye exam the same day Elisha gets his follow-up. She’ll be four.

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Flu shots and more talk

We have a new plan for family-wide shots (if we ever do them again):

The biggest child goes first. That way, if the remaining child(ren) is(are) distressed by the reaction of the first it’s a smaller body to restrain.

Natasha told the story to Mom this way: “Dad, and Mom, and I, and Muddidee all got shots. Elisha was too young.”

The two things that caught me out of that description were her use of I and calling Elisha young, rather than “little.”

There were free flu shots at Pioneer Park (I still want to call it Alaskaland!) as part of a emergency/disaster preparedness practice thingy. Anybody over 6-months could get a shot, and Jay came home over his lunch hour to help the whole family go over for it.

Jay went first, as we had (as a family) discussed. Then Natasha held back, and Melody was willing, so she went first of the girls. Of course she cried (I observed to another mother that somebody offering doses of children’s Tylenol for 50-cents a pop would make good money here. We sure didn’t think to bring any).

Natasha continued to resist, and ended up having to be restrained, and was teary and (I’d dare say) resentful for quite a while afterwards. That is, until nap, and then again after nap until dinner time. She wanted us to know her displeasure.

Fortunately she lightened up by bedtime, and we had a sweet snuggletime.

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Fish tank

We moved the fish tank from the yellow room into the master bedroom Thursday night.
Jay (accurately) saw it as a reasonable way to prevent me from getting a little tank for my desk.

He cleared my dresser after dinner, took out more than half the water in the tank and said he was ready for my help.
I knew before we started that there was nothing in that room I was going to be able to do to help. He made like he was going to try and carry the thing himself (which was a little frightening. Honestly. That thing was *heavy*).

I begged him to give me a chance to go ask a neighbor for help, and was surprised/thankful when he didn’t object.

Three doors (and a discussion of knocking etiquette with Natasha) later, Jim, from sideways across the street, grabbed his hat and came over to our house to help Jay get it across the hall.

On Friday morning the kids and I picked out a frisky catfish-like thing, and an small school of neons.

The tank has definitely livened up (the shark doesn’t continually hide out in his rocks anymore), but we have only one neon left. We didn’t even find any bodies. If they’re dying of “natural” causes, the Pleco is finishing them off before the autopsy’s back.

Too bad, really. They were really fun to watch schooling on the first day. *sigh*.

Jay says we’ll give it a week, and then we can see about getting a little more color.

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Getting organized

I just wrote a very informative e-mail to my sister (her b-day was on the 5th), and decided to add it here, because I’m so excited about it all…
I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I think my house might actually be organized (as in, have a home for everything– at least for the girls) by the end of the week. To borrow Gma’s phrase, I can’t hardly stand it. It’s amazing. Every wall in the yellow room is coated with dressers and other furnature and storage units of varying types (If I had a habit of illustrating my blog posts I would include a pix of it.) I seriously could not buy one of those corner toy-keeper nets to help with storage b/c we do not have a single open corner in this house. That was an odd revelation…

We reassembled the crib and I began my digging away at the yellow room to get it against the far wall. It’s a floppy thing I only bought for the looks (I like light wood.) It replaced NJ’s dark crib when it was Melody’s, and has to be a against a wall to keep it from creaking w/ movement. It’s not in danger of collapsing or anything, just loud.

We moved Elisha’s Rubbermade into the crib last night to get him used to the new room, and in a couple more days I’ll make up the crib and we’ll pack away the Rubbermade. Feels *totally* different to have him out of the room.

I bought new fitted sheets today (that I was able to force the girls’ mattresses into), and now that we should be able to keep the beds from falling apart on a daily basis, I’m going to add bed-making (and putting away of pajamas) to the morning routine. My theory is that if we can hold the beds in order that’s half the room right there. Add the books to that and we’re soaring.

Part of the deal was, I think, finally finding a way to categorize their stuff, so I had an orderly way of putting it away. Now that it looks like we’ve got that I think corralling their stuff will be much easier. We’ll be down just to figuring out Jay’s and my stuff.

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Grandma’s house

Mom and Dad do plan to continue living there.

They moved-in back in October, and spent the next several months moving their stuff over, and finding ways to consolidate two households into one.

In May, Mom and Dad sold their house, and Gma’s place was officially their home. Now they are going through the steps of buying the house and making it theirs. An element of settling Gma’s estate is selling the house and dividing the price among the three children, so an appraiser came over last Monday and looked over the place.

The last time I spoke with Mom (Thursday) she still had no idea when he would get back to them. Then questioned whether he had the information necessary to do it.

Mom hopes the quote will come back low enough for them to buy out-of-pocket (from the sale of their last place) so that they have some money in the budget (i.e., not going toward house payments) to begin making the many improvements Dad says a house that old needs.

Jay said once (years ago when I was feeling nostalgic and not wanting to lose the house in the indeterminate future) that he never wanted to live in the place. There was the boxy shape, the old wiring and so on.

I asked Mom if Dad didn’t feel the same way, and she said they do plan to make some improvements, but the big shop out back makes up for a lot of the inconveniences of the house.