Saturday night's alright... I guess..!! :D

Today was lovely!  Charlotte had spent the night so the kids were up at the crack of dawn and playing. Well, the two BIG girls were anyway.  Jack slept in until 8:30 which is unheard of for him.  We had to go in and make sure he was still breathing.  Millie did her usual up and then sleeping and then up and sleeping some more...  I did my best to get some extra sleep this morning but it just didn't work out that way.  Hubby and I spent some time together looking at stuff online, Mary arrived to collect Charlotte and we conned her into staying for a cuppa and a chat!  After they left the boys went to play Wii and I made us some lunch  heated up some soup from a box.  !!  We sat in the living room and dozed in front of a fascinating show about Egyptian Pharaohs.  It was kind of neat to look back and recall when the kids and I were studying the Egyptians....  we built pyramids and a model of Egypt and the Nile... all that stuff!!  Jessie said she remembered some of it!! :D  It was pretty interesting!  After lunch we pretty much just putzed around!!  I folded some laundry... I remember taking it out of the drier and thinking "Oh!  I can watch an episode of Frasier and fold laundry!!"  LOL!!  Meh, I just folded it quick and took it upstairs  ( full disclosure, it's still in the basket....!! )

I made a breakfast casserole for dinner tonight... the same as the one I made on Christmas Morning.... but THIS time I remembered to put in the eggs.  All twelve of them.  Yeah.   They make a difference, those eggs.
Sigh.

We had a bit of drama where we thought we'd lost the cat.  We searched high and low and finally found him in our tornado shelter under the stairs.  I guess he must have gone in there yesterday because no one remembers opening the door today!  Crazy kitty.  I guess he'll be more careful next time..

My pretty kitty, Herman. 

Well I'm having a little drink of Bailey's as I type and I have to say I'm getting a nice warm feeling.  Think I'll stop now and go snooze watch TV for a while!

Toodles!!!  **insert finger wave**

OMG it's Friday again! What a fun day!

Busy fun and full day today... !  Started early enough ( not too early, just right! ) and I needed to get the house ready for company arriving at 11.  First problem arose when I stepped on the top step of the stairs to find the dog had puked on it.  I cleaned that up and manhandled the baby and a basket of dirty laundry down to the top of the basement stairs to find the CAT had puked on THAT one.  Sigh..  I cleaned that up, went into the kitchen and realised the dishwasher had not run last night.  Oh it was all ready to go, powder in etc, just no one pushed start.  And by no one, of course I mean ME.  Tsk.  So there ya have it.  Great start eh!?! :D   Ah well.  The day improved!!  My friend Michele was coming to vist with her kiddoes and a friend of hers.  The house was ready, cookies were baking, kettle was hot.... no Michele.  They said they'd be here at 11.....  11:30....... nope..... 12:00.... nope....12:30.... nope... Jack was sitting by the window asking me every 5 minutes where they were!!  Finally around one they arrived and we were all very pleased to see them!! The kids had lots of fun playing together and Michaela and I had a lot of fun trying to stop her little one from doing a header down the stairs.  Guess I'm not ready for a crawler yet!!  Uh oh!!!  Mary and Charlotte arrived about an hour after Michele so there was more fun, tea and cookies to be had.  Michele had to head back to Omaha after a short while but Mary stayed longer and Charlotte decided to spend the night!!  Dinner was easy and the kids are all busy doing something upstairs!  I'm about to go and get Jack into bed and get myself ready too.  Phew! Busy day!!  I DID do all my basic Flylady stuff BUT haven't yet cleaned the bathroom baseboards.  Won't take me a minute though so I'll do it when I go up to shower.  It's also Boogie Your Backpack, purse and car day today!  I didn't do that either, though it's one of my favorites!  My purse is in good shape and the car is pretty tidy.  I'd like to hoover it, but it's toooo cold for that.  It will be pretty in the summer time! ;D

Toodles y'all!!  Family Fun Day tomorrow!!! ;D

Thursday... Flipping good fun! :D

WOW it was FOGGY out this morning!!  I could barely see the house across the street... and of COURSE hubby had to go to Omaha at 6:30 am.....   yikes... I was a wreck until I knew he'd got there ok....  At 9:30 I had to pack the kids up and go out myself.... it was still horribly foggy so I drove as carefully as possible too.  We went to the homeschool co-op's registration day where we said hello to some old friends and met Mary and Charlotte who was also signing up for drama.  ( yes, the fact that I am PAYING MONEY for a drama class when I already HAVE a thirteen year old girl has NOT eluded me!! :D LOL!!  )  Anyhoo... after registration we made our way back home and Mary and Charlotte came too!  We got to drink tea and chat whilst the kids went bananas!!  There is always a lot of screaming and running around when Charlotte comes to play!!!  :D Whilst Mary looked after Millie for me I put a roast and veggies into the slow cooker for dinner.  I LOVE slow cookers....!!  They make life sooo much easier!! :D   This morning I had done all my Flylady stuff and after Mary left I did my mission which today was to inventory the things most used in the bathroom.  I made a list of everything we used regularly but we weren't out of anything so there was nothing else I needed to do.

I've been looking at some great blogs lately to help teach reading to kids.  Jack can read ( a lot more than he lets on I think....) but his reading level is not as high as we would like, so I had a scan over this blog this afternoon and decided to play a game with him....  The blog is called www.playdoughtoplato.com and it's excellent.  ( I may have previously mentioned it...!) The game we played was Flip the Eggs!  I made some "eggs" with paper and a yellow sharpie marker.  I wrote some words I'd like him to read on the eggs, got him some props and away we went...

He had a heap of fun!! :D   The neat thing about Jack is he really gets into games and playing with me so he will want MORE and MORE and MORE....!!  I like to end with him wanting more so always quit before he's had enough, that way he's super keen to play again another day!!  We also did some math using our Math U See manipulatives and some number cards.  He had to read the number on the card then "build" the number using the blocks.  After he'd done that a few times he then got to do some addition by building both numbers and adding the blocks.  Again he wanted more and more but I made him stop!! ;D  Jessie and I made up another game using the Periodic Table and scrabble tiles... we actually had quite a lot of fun playing it, naturally Jack wanted to play that too... and so he did!!  At one point today Millie was sleeping, Jessie was doing Math on Kahn Academy's website and Jack was playing a physics game on my iPad !!  I didn't say a WORD incase I ruined it!!!

Anyway, again all is quiet now... showers have been taken, kids are sleeping ( actually I think Jessie is in her room working on writing another book...) and I should go and sit with hubby for a while.  Catch you on the Flip side!!!!  ( get it?  Flip??  Eggs?!?!? LOL!!!)

Sheesh... it's Wednesday... I swear time is starting to go faster.....!!!

Is someone out there spinning the earth a bit faster these days?!? Time is WHIZZING by and needs to SLOW DOWN please!!  I looked at my TINY (Pah!) baby today.. ( well.. hang on,  I look at her all the time of course.. but I really NOTICED today ) and saw how HUGE she is getting!!  She just turned 5 months ( and if I was a GOOD mother I'd have pictures from her photo shoot to share...!! ) ... Oh look!!  What's this!!???  LOL!!

Anyway, yeah, time is going so fast....   yikes....

But... today.... Wednesday... a good day really!  Did my usual morning routine, a little slow starting but I've decided to not let that bother me.  Flylady is all about family and being nice to your kids and all that stuff... she wouldn't want me to get all het up because I haven't done my morning chores yet and allow that to get in the way of my parenting.  Oh no, that is not what she's all about.  So I took it easy on myself, got everything done, got a load of laundry done, got the mission done.. ( actually it turns out I accidentally did today's mission yesterday so I just did yesterday's mission today!!  See how flexible I can be?!? :D )   I got to chat on the phone for an hour with my Best Bud, sat and drank a coffee with my best big girl and watched Frasier and also managed to find time to meet Hubby in town over lunch.  Once I got home I made Leek and Potato soup for dinner!  I also sliced open my thumb with the bread knife and discovered that one of the cats had done something nasty on my bed... which soaked through to the down comforter.  Which meant more laundry.  yeahy.   LOL!!  Ah well..!!  Kids are again sleeping, dishwasher is ready to go, kitchen is clean, I'm showered and ready for bed.... ***contented sigh***  ..... ain't life grand?! :D

Hmmm... let's see.... Tuesday, right?!? :D

LOL!!  I honestly don't know what day it is most of the time!  The only reason I knew it was Tuesday was because I know the recycling guy came and picked up today!! LOL!!  Thank heavens for the recycle and the trash guys...  I'd NEVER know what day it was otherwise!! :D

Anyway, today I did my Flylady thang.  Today's mission was to wash off the fronts of the bathroom cabinets.  It didn't take me long to do, which is good, because I didn't FEEL like doing ANYTHING today!!  I did all the basic Flylady chores, make up on, dishwasher emptied, load of laundry washed, dried and put away yaddy yaddy yaddy, but didn't feel like doing much of anything else.

SO I got out the world map, US map and the Periodic Table of the Elements poster and the kids and I came up with some new games!! :D  We played three different games with the periodic table and two games with the US map before Millie got fractious and her noises started to freak me out a bit! We decided a little while on the couch with Frasier and some milk would sort her out... and it did!!

I began to get a sneaking feeling that hubby would be coming home early today and, sure enough, when I called him he was already on his way...!!  We did an emergency clear up and I'm amazed at how much got put away in so short a time!!!  I mean the place was a TIP!!!  It looked great when he got home!!  Jessie was a huge help, bless her!!!

Well, baby is calling...  apparently she's busy freaking out Daddy .... crying, laughing, yawning, crying, yawning, fussing.... bed time much?!? :D

Night all!!

Phew... another Monday over with!

Yow.  Why do Mondays stink so much?!!?  This one got off to a shaky start when we discovered it was FOUR degrees outside.  That coupled with the fact we had lit a fire last night and thus the flue was left open all night... as a consequence any heat that HAD been in the house was flying out the chimney at a rate of knots. It took a good while before I felt supple enough to move around the house it was so chilly!!  I eventually got moving and tackled the Whole House Clean (stripping and remaking the beds etc... )  I didn't get the windows washed but got just about everything else done.  The mission today was to clean the extractor fan in the bathroom.  I remember doing that a while back with Flylady so pretty much dreaded doing it today BUT to my surprise it was still in excellent shape.  A quick wipe off and it was clean.  I decided then, since I had extra time, to take the globes off the overhead lights in the bathroom and wash them AND to take apart the glass light fixture on the landing and wash that!!  It was amazing how much BRIGHTER the place looked with all that clean glass!! :D

The rest of the day was taken up with baby care, laundry ( laundry, laundry and some laundry ) a bit of Frasier here and then when I was nursing... oh.... and I made some more cookies.   We just needed some more cookies....!!

On a related note....   I decided to try and see what Millie weighed since we haven't taken her in to the PD for some time.  I stepped on the scale..........     yeah.   There's quite a lot more of Mama than there used to be!!!!!  Oy.

So.  The cookies.  Uh huh, I'll be leaving them for the children.  *hangs head.*   *sighs*

Sunday is renew your spirit day. I think I missed it.

Hmmm.  Went to bed too late last night.  Millie woke up a dozen  three times and Jack ended up in our bed around 3am.  He's 10 years old, BIG and wriggly.  It Does Not Work Well.  Hubby went out with his buddy around 9 and then every thing went downhill.  The fire would NOT start.  I got it going enough that I couldn't then shut the flue and be done with it so I had to sit there and basically watch all the heat in the house disappear up the chimney.  It was FREEEEZING today too.  I tried and tried with the fire, no luck.  Millie would NOT nap.  No sir.  5 minutes?  Sure.  Ten?  Nope.  That couple of hours I'd planned on.... hahahahahaaaaa  are you kidding me?!?  AaArrrgghh.  I had hoped to "Do Something for Myself" today....  Flylady suggests "read a book, take a hot bath, watch a favorite movie...."   Hah.  I had hoped to redo my nail polish on my toes ( TMI? ) and maybe henna my hair.  But noooo.  Millie said Noooooo.  LOL!!  ( well, I wasn't really laughing to be honest. )  Then the other two would occasionally spat with each other. Which I didn't take well.  At all.  It was basically a powder keg.  Then poor Rex got home.


BOOM.


Poor guy.

He wasn't entirely sure what hit him I think.   He DID get the fire going, first thing.  Then he made me a cup of tea since I had started making one about 3 hours ago and hadn't got beyond putting in the milk.  He made me lunch... The big kids had eaten thanks to Jessie...!!  I finally managed to get my nails and hair done but it was a struggle I tell ya.  That baby didn't sleep all dang day.  I finally knocked her out with some milk at 5 ish.  She woke for her 8:30 feed and then played for a while on the blanket.  She's SOOOO close to rolling over.. any day now!

It's now ten pm and I'm ready for this day to be over.  I've been a crotchety old bat all day long and I'm not proud of it at all.  Somehow I feel I am owed this day to myself and I'm just not going to get it at this time of my life!  Having Millie has thrown me for a curve... I couldn't love her more but I'd got used to sleeping through the night and being able to go out by myself once in a while....  it's still a culture shock to me and I'm taking a long time getting used to it!!  Ah well...she's worth it!!

Night all!