Better than I thought

So far, this housekeeper idea is working way better than I anticipated.  I forgot to factor in the tendency my girls have to show off for people they don't see every day.  It hasn't been on my list of desirable kid-behaviors before, since all it's done is raise whine-levels and mess with sleep schedules.

The day after she came the first time, the girls finished cleaning the toy room that she had started helping them with.  And we kept it clean for two whole days!  That's never happened before.  Then another first:  Bree was the one to clean it the next week.  Alone!  I was visibly astonished by what I saw when I went up after an hour- she laughed at the incredulous look on my face and was so proud of herself she didn't stop talking about it all day.

Mia spent an entire morning helping me catch up on laundry.  Granted, she was procrastinating starting schoolwork.  But still...  she was excited to keep going until it was done, and usually these guys poop out after fifteen minutes.

My first hypothesis isn't very generous: they are trying to show up the housekeeper.  They didn't give a hoot about helping me before they saw someone else doing it.  There is a small chance they've been willing to do this all along, but were just too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff they let accumulate on their floors when I let them. 

In all actuality, we're not getting any more done than we did before Zach was in residency and I wasn't pregnant. She is just one person- there's only so much you can do in two hours.  But with hers and the girls' help, we've reached functional again.  Stress-level has gone way down- I've stopped growling and started just yelling "time-out" again.  For an entire week, no one has told me the clean pajamas are all gone, we've had clean dishes when we needed them, and our feet aren't blackened from crossing the famous Nevada dust layer covering our entire ground floor of tile. (Which I can walk across at the end of most days without gimping... bonus!)

I'm crossing my fingers that the girls' eagerness isn't because of the novelty of the situation.  If this mini-trend continues, and the girls are really getting a little neater, then when I've got my body back and mostly to myself, and we don't need help anymore, things should end up better than they started, right? Right? 

Okay, I'm back from a laughing fit.  Kael is now taking his third bath of the day.  I think we might not be going ice skating for a while.

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.

Who knew

We've been trying for years to get the kids into swimming lessons, but weird logistical problems have always kept us from doing it.  Every class I found needed parental involvement, and I was outnumbered.  By the summer I felt comfortable trusting one of the twins by the side of the pool while I helped the other, I had an infant to leave by the side of the pool, and I really didn't want to deal with that. When we moved here last summer, knowing we wanted a pool at our house, we were especially anxious to get them into lessons.  But we missed deadlines while we moved four times and I was trying to find a house.
So this summer we found ourselves with a pool and four kids who couldn't swim a stroke. 
Turns out we didn't need lessons after all.  You throw them in enough times, and they figure it out.  It helps that they can touch the bottom in every part of the pool- I don't think the twins would have been able to get out of their floaties alone otherwise.
In a matter of weeks they've gone from hating their faces splashed to swimming underwater across the pool. Now they're teaching themselves to float and kick and do arm strokes! They're no Olympians, but we were just shooting for not drowning. :)

That's Bree under there!  Even two weeks ago, I never would have believed it.

Same with Mia!  Anya was in trouble, so she missed out this time around... but she's been doing the same.

FAIL

I've been seeing a trend the last few months. My best laid plans are going awry! I'm hoping life doesn't have foreshadowing like novels do, because if I'm supposed to be getting more accustomed to things going differently than I hope- I'll probably end up having a C-section in November or a girl or something.

I tried for months to come up with a cute way to tell Zach about the baby. I've always just showed him the stick, but when I took a test that said negative and found out it was faulty, I thought maybe I'd try something new, since he already thought I wasn't pregnant. A week before I got everything I needed to tell him, he became acutely aware of my "schedule," and guessed. Aw, snap.

We found out our friends from Ohio were going to be in Utah, so we went up to meet them. I thought it was such great timing- we would get to share the baby news with our families in person, escape the first desert heat wave, pick up a huge bin of books for Mia from a friend in Orem to satisfy her lately insatiable reading frenzy.

The week before we went I felt terrible. But Zach had to teach Sunday School and Anya needed to give a talk in Sharing Time, and Kael needs someone to ease him into Nursery, so I got all ready for church anyway. On our way out the door, I acted on a hunch and told Zach to grab me a Ziploc. Sure enough. I got sick in the church parking lot and turned around and headed home. Grrr.

The day before we left, we did a video call with Grandmas. Mia spilled the baby beans, so telling everyone in person went down the drain. Aw, dangit.

All week we had wondered if I had been flu-sick or what. I was already in my second trimester, and hadn't gotten any morning sickness yet, so I wasn't sure. I had been pretty rough on my stomach the night before I fell ill, so when no one got sick, we chalked it up to morning sickness and headed up.
Everyone was just fine until the one day we were supposed to meet up with our friends. Mia and Bree woke up feeling bad and wouldn't eat breakfast. Mim tried to suck it up and have fun when she finally got to see her buddy after a year of wishing she could play with her. We tried to prolong the visit after we attended sacrament meeting together, (of course all the girls fell asleep on the bench and for the first time, I had to leave the chapel with Kael because of his behavior,) but Mia couldn't get out of her chair and then Bree threw up and decidedly ended the visit. Come ON!

I'm actually quite used to disappointments, so this recent trend didn't really even catch my attention until Wednesday, when the activity I'd planned for the combined young men and young women turned out to only take up a quarter the time I'd planned it would, and we all ended up chatting and eating popsicles and then looking at our watches waiting for parents to arrive at the usual pick-up time. The thought went through my head- "I can't plan a dang thing right!"

So of course my failed dinner the next night seemed like an even bigger failure, my plan to keep the kitchen clean after Zach did a lot of work on it was another fail.

  I decided I would do ONE thing I'd been planning- hang the consequences.

Write a blog post before June was over.

Ta-DAAAA! I rock.

Mia trying not to infect her best friend... oh yeah- another fail... ;D

The twins with Grandma Venice

Kael and cousin Wyatt

Hangin' out with Grandpa

We were there for cousin Miles' birthday!