It feels like a Monday - because I took yesterday off from work. After doing this for a few weeks it's going to be torture to get back to a full schedule! lol
We've had three nights in the new house now, and we finally have a bed. I slept well last night. I've got three of the six window treatments up - the rest are on order and are being shipped. The plumber comes tomorrow to put in my toilet and vanity so that I won't have to shower downstairs and then go upstairs to pee and brush my teeth. I ordered new towels. I bought lamps for the bedroom and shower curtain stuff for the upstairs bath. All the animals are in - we moved the cats in yesterday and they're actually coming out of hiding now. Amanda is having a friend sleep over tonight. Mike had his first baseball game tomorrow. Normalcy is approaching.
We got our third dumpster dropped off yesterday. This will be the LAST one! All the construction debris, boxes, and stuff from the old house that we don't want will tossed in and hauled away. A friend of mine is coming to look at the trees that we want taken down - he wants the wood, and I told him he can take any or all of them and haul it away. We've marked about 15 big ones.
Working today - gotta make the most of my time because I have a lot to do and not a lot of time - so that's my entry for the day. It's sunny and I'm happy.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Monday, April 17, 2006
Looking back and looking forward
I have to do this every now and then. This is one of those times. As I read back over my posts, I can see why I'm exhausted. The events of the last few months have drained me of every ounce of physical and emotional strength that I have (well, ALMOST every ounce). Now the tides are starting to turn. It's like the feeling of riding a wave and knowing that it's almost crested, and when it does you'll start to move forward faster.
My wave is cresting - my house is nearing completion, meaning that we've crossed off almost everything on our to-do list. It will always be a work in progress, as every home is and should be, but we needed to do lots of things to bring it up to our standards and make it home, and those things are almost done. The other thing is that we've actually started sleeping there - I can't say we're moved in yet, because we still have a ton of stuff at the old house - but we're in, and it's starting to feel like home.
NOW, I need to focus on getting back on track, with food and exercise, getting my head on straight, and getting organized. I feel like a marshmallow peep in a microwave - time to cut the power and regain some control.
The temps are rising this week, and sun and warm weather always make me feel better. So as of today my wave is cresting. :)
My wave is cresting - my house is nearing completion, meaning that we've crossed off almost everything on our to-do list. It will always be a work in progress, as every home is and should be, but we needed to do lots of things to bring it up to our standards and make it home, and those things are almost done. The other thing is that we've actually started sleeping there - I can't say we're moved in yet, because we still have a ton of stuff at the old house - but we're in, and it's starting to feel like home.
NOW, I need to focus on getting back on track, with food and exercise, getting my head on straight, and getting organized. I feel like a marshmallow peep in a microwave - time to cut the power and regain some control.
The temps are rising this week, and sun and warm weather always make me feel better. So as of today my wave is cresting. :)
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Made me cry
On Being Mom
by Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author
2006
If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin.
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.
Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.
Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.
When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1.
And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their trueselves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.
The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.
by Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author
2006
If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin.
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.
Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.
Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.
When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1.
And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their trueselves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.
The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.
Checking in
Need to ground myself for a moment and remind myself of how far we've come.
(1) torn up and replaced flooring in three bedrooms and dining/living room.
(2) cleaned existing carpets in weight room, foyer, stairs, and mud room
(3) Knocked down wall in kitchen and closet in bedroom
(4) Installed exterior french door in bedroom
(5) Installed wainscotting and trim in bedroom and bathroom
(6) Painted three bedrooms, living/dining room, kitchen, weight room, and one bath
(7) Had lock changed
(8) Purchased new washer/dryer & dishwasher
(9) Started installing bathroom floor
(10) Purchased vanity and sink for one bath
(11) Arranged for installation of 2 new toilets and one pedestal sink
(12) Installed water softening system
(13) Measured for new deck
(14) Arranged for replacement of shower/tub
(15) I'm sure there's more...
Still to be done:
(1) Finish painting weight room
(2) Finish flooring in downstairs bath and install hardware
(3) One more coat of paint in kitchen, and inside cabinets
(4) Install doors on old wood bin to make closet
(5) Replace flooring and paint in laundry room
(6) Paint mud room
(7) Paint hallway/stairs walls
(8) Install curtains & shades
(9) Get help with scary upstairs bathroom
(10) Install doors on old closet in weight room
(11) Major yard work (where to begin?)
(12) MOVE IN!!!
(13) Then there will be more, I'm sure.
(1) torn up and replaced flooring in three bedrooms and dining/living room.
(2) cleaned existing carpets in weight room, foyer, stairs, and mud room
(3) Knocked down wall in kitchen and closet in bedroom
(4) Installed exterior french door in bedroom
(5) Installed wainscotting and trim in bedroom and bathroom
(6) Painted three bedrooms, living/dining room, kitchen, weight room, and one bath
(7) Had lock changed
(8) Purchased new washer/dryer & dishwasher
(9) Started installing bathroom floor
(10) Purchased vanity and sink for one bath
(11) Arranged for installation of 2 new toilets and one pedestal sink
(12) Installed water softening system
(13) Measured for new deck
(14) Arranged for replacement of shower/tub
(15) I'm sure there's more...
Still to be done:
(1) Finish painting weight room
(2) Finish flooring in downstairs bath and install hardware
(3) One more coat of paint in kitchen, and inside cabinets
(4) Install doors on old wood bin to make closet
(5) Replace flooring and paint in laundry room
(6) Paint mud room
(7) Paint hallway/stairs walls
(8) Install curtains & shades
(9) Get help with scary upstairs bathroom
(10) Install doors on old closet in weight room
(11) Major yard work (where to begin?)
(12) MOVE IN!!!
(13) Then there will be more, I'm sure.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Make it STOP!!
This seems to be a theme in my entries. This has been the longest, most stressful week I've had in some time. Work is nutty, my boss has no clue how long it takes to complete the projects he's giving me, the puppy is adorable but demands constant attention, my other dog is trying to play the big brother. We still have lots of work to do on the house and limited time to get it done, and the clock is ticking. I'm exhausted, stretched, overwhelmed, and I feel like crap. Maybe this was the wrong week to stop taking my anxiety meds...oy.
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