Bump Hump Day

Halfway there!  I've already slowed down considerably.  By the end of the day I can't walk, and in the mornings it takes me an hour to quit gimping around- especially days I go to the grocery store.  Woo hoo!  For some reason though, knowing this is the last time I'll ever feel this way makes it considerably more bearable than it was with the last pregnancy.  Also- this time I knew what I was in for... whereas with Kael's pregnancy I was shocked at how I felt, and fear of the unknown made me a little wimpier.

Unfortunately, this time I have an almost two-year-old who is speeding up at the same rate I'm slowing down.

I can't get the girls to clean a completely toddler-tornado messed up house- I can only get them to maintain their own messes.  ("But Kaaaeel got these out! He has to clean it!")  When we left on vacation to Utah last month, we had a completely clean house.  Zach had a day off before we got home and even mopped the entire floor downstairs.  I was determined to keep it up, knowing I'd start feeling the baby-weight soon.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, my weakening hold on damage control has lost control of the damage. Even Zach tries to help, but he's only around a couple hours a day, and one of those is dinner and the other is usually fish-tank or pool or lawn or other awesome honey-do stuff.  (Can I just stop and say- my husband is He-man? Yeah.) 

So we're taking extreme measures for a few weeks.  We're using the girls' ice skating lesson money to hire a housekeeper to get us from disaster-house back to damage-control-house.  I let the girls choose, actually.  Do you want me to pay for help getting this place back to rights or do you want to help me yourselves and keep your lessons?  They decided they wanted help for a while, if they could start back up again once the house is clean.  I don't think they fully understand that they will still have a very big part in that process... but it was getting too hard to tie all those laces anyway, so I can't say I was disappointed with their choice.

What's awesome, and what you'd better not tell the girls, is that we found a bunch of housekeepers on Care.com willing to work for $10 an hour.  Which is going to end up costing half what the lessons did, mwah ha.

We've got two people doing little "trial-runs" over the next week, and hopefully we'll find a good fit.  This will be really weird, having someone else doing the weekly stuff I usually do.

You know how people advertise their weight-loss goals to provide some sense of accountability for their goal? Well, cyber-space, this is my mess-loss goal:  get everything back running the way it's supposed to in a month with professional help, maintain it for another month, but spend the time Miss Housekeeper is saving me, helping the girls form better habits.  By the time school starts, I'm hoping to get down to very minimal visits from our helper until I get my body back.