Ch-ch-ch-changes

We’ve been putting in a lot of work on the house.  Matt & I took two days off last week to clean and get some work done. I think we got rid of half the stuff in the basement, most of the stuff in the upstairs “den” (I’ve never been sure what to call that little room on the back. Library sounds too pretentious, but it’s where we kept our books and the computer).  We brought several loads of stuff to Goodwill, took three bookcases to the pawn shop, and got rid of a whole bunch of garbage bags of stuff.  And we still have a lot to do.

We also had a handyman come over and fix a bunch of stuff. The floor in the entry closet had some water damage, there was a hole in a bedroom ceiling from before we got a new roof a couple years ago that I’d been avoiding fixing, and there was the hole in the bathroom wall from the plumbing issue that had also become the hole in the bedroom wall on the other side.  While he was here, we asked him to fix the living room ceiling. Our house has a lot of decorative plaster and the living room ceiling (right under the upstairs bathroom) had suffered some damage two owners ago.  Someone had fixed it in the meantime, but it wasn’t looking very good, so we had our “guy” fix it again.  He didn’t replace the decorative pieces, but we did get him to do a whole lot of repair to the flat surface, plus he painted the whole thing when he was done. It looks soooooo much better.

We’re almost ready to call the realtor. The dining room and kitchen need some cleaning, I need to paint some of the wall patches upstairs, the front entry needs to be painted, there’s a little painting outside, and we have to do something to the half-bath where we took out the wallpaper a few years ago, intending to redo the whole bathroom before the kids came, and then ran out of both time and money.  We hope to have everything done or almost done by 11/15.  It’s a stupid time to put the house on the market, right before the holidays, but if we wait, the house’ll just get messy again.  This gives us some motivation to keep cleaning and purging.

I’ve got the afternoon off today to get some painting done and then go to the kids’ daycare Halloween party.  The painting may or may not get done. I’m exhausted.  Jessie was sick last week (the doc thought it was h1n1, but since they aren’t testing anymore, we don’t know) and Sam spent a few nights sleeping poorly (meaning the adults also slept poorly) and now I’ve come down with something and feel crappy.  The kids are doing much better, but they were a little crabby this morning when we brought them to daycare.  Hopefully they won’t get sick again before tomorrow night.  Maybe I’ll just go through some stuff in drawers and decide what to keep and what to toss rather than paint.  I can do the sorting and tossing sitting down. Or, a nap on the couch sounds really good, but I’ll feel guilty, knowing how much needs to be done on the house yet.

There are quite a few changes going on at work, too. We’ll be hiring two new people soon.  The Dept of Energy has a lot of stimulus funding for weatherization and we’ll need to review those projects – they could be almost as many projects a year for three years as we normally review already.  It’s been pretty stressful lately, not knowing if we’d get the funding for extra staff, or if we’d get stuck doing all those reviews with the already-overworked staff we have.  Now we’re scrambling to figure out where to put the new people, and who will be doing what, and all that.  Plus, it looks like we might be hiring a couple of other people in the office (although not as fast as people to review the weatherization projects). After all the moving we’ve been doing at work for the last two years, it looks like we’ll do it again soon to reconfigure our whole office space.  That’s a good thing, but some days it feels like our hamster wheel is spinning way too fast. And some of the new projects are already coming in, so we’re swamped already.

Cute kid story for the day:

When I picked the kids up at daycare yesterday (they were the last ones left), the daycare person came over with a plate of freshly-baked cookies.  The kids had made cookies and they’d baked them up in the kitchen.  She let Jess and Sam each pick one (so much for eating supper right when we got home) and I got one. Jess got a cat-shaped one and promptly started devouring it. Sam got a bat-shaped cut-out cookies.  I told her it was a bat and she carried it all over on her way out of the building, showing everyone that she had a bat.  She pestered the heck out of the daycare owner’s mom, trying to get her attention and show her the bat.  When we got to the outside stairs, Sam had her hands full with the cookie, so I picked her up and set her down at the bottom of the steps (she’s not quite there with the balance yet for going down stairs without holding someone’s hand) She took two steps and fell down. Broke her bat in two.  Oh, the tears, the grief.  She just wailed. She was so proud of her little bat, and just like that it was gone. She was the picture definition of “bereft.”  I tried to comfort her as best I could. Finally I told her it would still taste yummy.  She calmed down and ate the bat halves on the way home. I was quite relieved because the way she was distraught initially, I though we’d be dealing with bat fallout for the next week or two.

Enough stalling. Off to clean the house (I decided it was too dark and rainy to see what I was doing to paint).

Messie Jessie

Jessie lives life to the fullest, consequences be damned.  Everything is a big laugh to her (getting into the car after daycare involves a chase around the building, getting into bed involves multiple laps around and under her bed.) She eats with gusto. She’s probably more coordinated with hand/spoon/fork action than I am, but she still ends up with food all over the table, her clothes, her face, and her hair.   She’s a little like Charlie Brown’s bud, Pigpen.

The kids’ daycare is right next to the former GM assembly plant.  GM abandoned the plant shortly after we moved into the neighborhood and began disassembling it a couple of years ago.  They made great progress in getting the building down, crushing the materials, separating the various components apart into separate piles and recycling most of it. Then came this little thing….um, bankruptcy.  The machinery just sort of drifted away and the site sits there with massive mountains of crushed asphalt.  We go right past it on the way to and from daycare.

One of the kids’ earliest words was “mess.”  They’ve come to apply it to just about everything that is disorderly.  Given the amount of stimulus-funded road work going on in Lansing, we hear it a lot from the back seat of the van whenever we run errands.  We’ll come up to the inevitable orange barrels and torn up streets and the kids, in unison, will exclaim, “Mess. Big mess.”

They also mention that as we go past the old GM remains.  The last two days Sam has said, “Mess.  Jessie mess.”  Upon further questioning, it’s become clear that the little neat-and-tidy one blames her sister for the state of the property adjacent to daycare, not the global economic crisis.

Wow. I hate to think what Jessie will be capable of destroying when she’s a little older.

Making Progress

Matt had the morning off today and I had the whole day off. We spent our time cleaning out the house – packing up stuff, sorting through to see what could go to daycare for sale at one of their monthly sales, figuring out what could go to Goodwill (a LOT!), and generally seeing how much of the crap we’ve accumulated could be given away, sold, or thrown out.  We’re digging deep on this move – I’m even getting rid of the beer steins that I’ve had since the trip to Germany in ‘85.  If we end up selling the house and not being able to find a rental house with a basement and/or garage, I want to be prepared.  It’s not easy getting rid of almost 40 years worth of stuff. (We’re both taking two days off next week to continue cleaning and packing and fixing. We’ll also be carting furniture off to Dicker and Deal)

One of the projects for this morning was to install the programmable thermostat I’d bought back sometime in August. I’ve been afraid to install it.  The instructions were pretty easy and it almost came out and said that any idiot could install it in 15 minutes. I knew that if I tried to do it, something would go wrong and it would end up taking all day. So, while I was tempted to install it when I got home from work some evening, I resisted. Good thing.

The instructions expected one to find about 4 colored and coded wires coming out of the wall.  It told you exactly where each wire had to go, depending on the letters on the wiring.  I got our old round thermostat off and …. there were two copper wires coming out of the wall covered in cloth.  The instructions said nothing about that.

Three calls later and we found a heating company that could come out today rather than later next week (which was good, because the old thermostat was in so many pieces there was no way I could put it back onto the wall).  Took the guy about half an hour to hook up the new one.  Now we don’t have to worry about forgetting to turn down the thermostat before we go to bed (I hate running back downstairs for that!) and it will get up to a normal temperature BEFORE we haul our lazy butts out of bed in the morning.  Life is good. Although we might have spent as much paying the guy to install the thermostat as we were supposed to save in heating bills this winter.

The kids are talking up a storm.  Every day they get a bit clearer and can put more words together. It’s really wild to watch them develop more language skills and be able to suddenly tell us what they want, instead of just sitting there grunting until we figured it out.  This morning Jessie made it clear that she wanted to wear the shirt with the dinosaur rather than the football shirt I’d picked out for her.  It’s her favorite shirt, and she and Sam both roar like dinosaurs when they see it.

Tuesday Mom called while we were on our way out for pizza.  Towards the end of the call, I put mom on speaker phone and held the phone up towards the kids in the back seat so she could say hi to them.  What did the kids say as soon as they saw the phone?  “Hi, Nan?”  Nope.  They said, “CHEESE!!!!!”   I think the ladies at daycare must take a lot of pictures using their phones.  A couple of little hams.

Good news – they still fit into last year’s winter coats!  One less thing to buy this year.  Hopefully the snowpants will fit, but I almost think those might still be too big.  The coats and pants are size 18 months.  The kids are two.  They’re very shrimpy. I’m not complaining, because they’re also still fitting into all of their pants from last winter, too.

Work’s still crazy. It’s even gotten busier in the last week, although that just doesn’t seem possible.  A couple of state agencies that got some federal funding found out that their projects would need to be reviewed by our office. The number of projects they’re planning to do in each of the next three years is far more projects than we review from ALL the federal agencies on an annual basis.  Job security.  And maybe a new co-worker or two.  It’s just insane how busy we’ve been lately.  Plus, the transfer to the new department took place 10/1 and that’s made things pretty crazy, too.  You wouldn’t think it would be that big of a deal – change the letterhead and move on.  But it created a whole new layer of bureaucratic paperwork.  Just opening the mail has become a nightmare because of all the new restrictions. On the bright side, it has been bringing some good things, too – mostly an inflow of funding so that we can actually do the jobs we’re being paid to do and have been trying to do without decent equipment.

Work’s busy, the kids are getting more and more busy, and then we’re trying to get the house ready to sell.  I suspect the blog posts will become even more rare as I try to maintain some semblance of sanity. Plus, once the house is listed, we’ll be spending every free minute dusting, picking up toys, and trying to keep the cat fur off the floors and furniture.  What kind of idiots try to sell a house with two two year olds?????

Ta-Da!!

Big breakthrough tonight.  Both kids put clothes on All By Themselves tonight.

It started with Sammie and socks.  The kids take their shoes off after supper if they’re sitting on the couch.  For some reason they have it in their head that if their shoes come off then their sock must also come off.  No amount of arguing dissuades them from the firm conviction that that’s how the world works, so for now we’ve given up. At some point between supper and bedtime Sammie sat down with her socks and put one on.  They’ve been wanting to do that for ages, but just could never coordinate the hands, feet, and a floppy sock all at the same time.  And then, Poof! Sam managed to put two socks on with almost no effort at all.

Jessie tried to do it, too, but just couldn’t get her foot into the sock hole.  She’s easily frustrated if something doesn’t work by the second or third try, and then she just loses it.  I went over to show her how it worked, and in demonstrating convinced her that she’d just put her socks on. It was a bit of cheating, but got her past the meltdown stage.

Then she spied her jammies.  And tried to put the bottoms on over her pants.

For fire-retardation purposes, most kids’ pajamas are very tight things.  Her jeans are very big.  Putting the tiny, skinny pj bottoms on over the jeans just did not go well. So, I suggested she take her pants off. She did.  Then she proceeded to put both legs into one leg of her jammie bottoms. And I went back over to demonstrate the one-leg-per-leghole technique that most of us use.  Then she moved on to the tops.  And promptly put the top on upside down. Makes sense from a toddler perspective – if your head goes through the neckhole, then you should of course start by sticking your head into the neckhole, not the hole where your belly is.  A bit of advice later (and some hands on help) and she had her head in.  Then she stuck her right arm over the top through the neck hole and into the sleeve.  And the left arm went up under the shirt and through the left sleeve.  One side (left) was on just fine, the other side was, well, just not “right.”  Some more talking and showing, and the next thing she knew, she had her pjs on.  And then off again. And on again. And off. And on. And so on.

Sam also managed to get her pajamas on with some advice, assistance, and just a wee parental cheating.

More or less, the kids can now get some of their own clothes on.

A fabulous thing on one hand, because soon we’ll be able to hand them their clothes and tell them to get dressed while we do other useful things.  A not-so-fabulous thing, since I’m sure that will slow down our finely-tuned morning routine which allows us to get out of the house and to daycare less than 45 minutes after I get out of bed.

And, bad news: Matt got the stomach bug that Sam and I had earlier in the week.  Poor guy had a rather miserable day. Hopefully he’ll be feeling somewhat better tomorrow.

About the Kids…

Man, are they growing up fast.  We used to see big changes every 4-6 weeks, when they’re reach a new stage. Now it seems like they can do something new every week.

Like tonight.  Sammy was playing with a thermometer, sticking it under her arm and pretending to take her temperature (daycare sent her home early because she wasn’t feeling well. Turns out she had gas and a couple of {big, wicked} farts later she was fine) under her armpit. Cute as all get out, most of the time she’d just get it stuck in her belly button. Anyway, Matt went to pick up Jessie at the usual time and I stayed home with Sam. I saw the thermometer and realized there would soon be one thermometer and two little people. That’s always a recipe for disaster.  So, I calmly explained to Sam that we should put it away before Jessie got home because Jess would want one to play with and then she’d cry because we didn’t have one for her.  Sam refused to put it away.  Then suddenly, she said, “All done. Jessie.”  Jessie got home about 10 minutes later and Sam went running to the door then thrust the thermometer at Jessie.  I wasn’t sure whether to be more impressed at her ability to follow my discussion about putting it away and Jessie not having one, or by the fact that she gave her favorite little “toy” to Jessie when she came home.

Sam’s big thing lately is to spread her arms out wide and say, “Huck!”  meaning she would like to hand out a hug to you.  She’s a great little hugger.

Jessie has Uncle Marv in her. Really.  She doesn’t take anything seriously.  It’s fun, fun, fun and giggles all day long. Diaper changes you have to catch her to change her. Then hold her giggling, wiggling little self down to change her. She refuses to settle down to go to bed…there’s too much horsing around to do. She doesn’t walk anywhere when she can just as easily get there by running or jumping.  She’s a fabulous jumper.

They both repeat absolutely everything that comes out of our mouths. Especially the last word we say.  The conversations when we drive around in the car can be rather comical when the last word out of Matt or my mouth is repeated in stereo from the back seat like we have backup singers.

No pictures yet, sorry. The dvd drive on my computer is still broken.  Still no photo software.  Trust me, though, they’re still cuties.  We’ll try to have something working by Halloween for those pics.

Happy New (fiscal) Year!

October 1 arrived and the legislature managed to get a budget out without shutting down the state. Of course, they didn’t get THE budget out, so we’ll possible (probably) go through the whole drama again in another 30 days.  Same old, same old.

At least there wasn’t an unpaid day again.

After much consideration, and six unpaid furlough days, we’ve decided to put the house on the market ASAP.  The discussion of state employee concessions for FY2010 are not ones that make me expect good things will come our way.  We were barely getting the bills paid before this summer.  The furlough days amounted to a 10% pay cut over the summer.  Things were so tight that I paid most bills with my eyes closed.  I remember doing that as a grad student when I was trying to live off a $7,000 stipend for 9 months out of the year.  I had thought that with a real job, I had moved past that.  Nope.

Besides being barely able to pay the regular bills, we just don’t have money for “extras.”  Like clothes for the office.  Since I had the kids, the body has rearranged itself and none of my pre-baby clothes fit.  And there’s no $ for new clothes. I’ve got a couple pairs of jeans, but that’s it.  Someone at MSHDA (our new agency as of today) commented on my wardrobe today when I ran into him and I gave him some lame excuse about our “home office” being across town, so we figured we could get away with it, but seriously, it’s just embarrassing to say you don’t have pants. And my legs are way too short to ever find anything at the used clothing stores, which is where we get all the rest of our clothes. I get the jeans because I can custom order them from Lands End at the right length and they’re pretty cheap.

So, we need more wiggle room in the budget. We’ve cut back on everything. No cable or satellite, no phone, just one car and we bike to work, no going out except on special occasions, no ice cream in the grocery cart (this one’s killing me!), etc.  We have too many fixed bills (mortgage, student loans, daycare) to really make any more of a dent in our budget, and since daycare and student loans aren’t all that negotiable, we’ll sell the house.  How bad can renting be?

So, we’re trying to give away as much furniture as we can (most of it was either given to us or bought at the thrift store, so it’s not like we’re giving away antiques) before the house goes on the market, and then getting rid of a lot more after it gets sold so we can fit into an apartment for a few years.  We’re making a bit of a dent, but not as much as we’d like.  We’re also making some repairs – there’s a hole in the wall from some idiot plumber who took a sledge hammer to our pink tiles in the bathroom and knocked a hole right through to the bedroom.  Unfortunately, we had to tell the guy who was going to come give us an estimate on that to come back some other time, as both Sam and I got the flu on Tuesday. (I thought I had bad food when our office went out for breakfast before a day-long training session. Turns out no, it was the flu. Most miserable afternoon of my life, trying to sit through the training without yacking.  If I’d known it was the flu, I’d have just left.  As it was, I called Matt to pick me up with the van b/c there was no way I could bike home in that condition.  He took forever to pick me up – daycare had called him to pick up Sam, who had yacked a couple times that afternoon.  And again on the way home.  Poor Matt had a very bad evening.)

If you know anyone in Lansing looking for a house that’s walking distance to downtown, send them our way.  I’m hoping it sells before we have the $300.00/month winter heating bills.  Hopefully the new programmable thermostat will help with that.  Plus, the last couple of years we kept the temps higher than usual with the tiny babies in the house. They’re bigger now and we’ll toughen them up with some colder indoor temps. Realistically, though, the market around here isn’t that great, so I expect we’ll be keeping it clean and ready for people to look at for months on end.  Just the challenge we were hoping for with two two-year-olds.

Donnie

Dad died 10 years ago today. I can’t believe it’s been that long already.  It seems like just yesterday.

One evening this week, as I was biking home from work, an El Camino passed me.  I was <this close!> to whipping out my phone, taking a picture, and calling Dad to tell him.  Yeah.  I’m guessing he doesn’t have a cell phone.

Sometimes I still miss him so much.

If there is a heaven, I’m sure his has a riding mower.

Barely Treading Water

Deep breath.

We need more than 24 hours in a day. That’s just not enough any more.

Things have been insanely busy at work lately.  The work volume has increased exponentially. I feel like the teapot just before it starts to scream. At least the furlough days are over for now, although I expect to have Oct. 1 & 2 off, because I just don’t think it’s possible that the legislature and administration will get their acts together and get a budget signed before the government shuts down. Seriously, you’ve had how many months and you somehow think in the last few days before the deadline you’re going to somehow come up with something?  You’re so concerned about saving your own little party and having soundbites for the next election that you’re going to let the State shut down?  I’ve lost faith. On the bright side, we’ve gotten used to living on the current budget, so we’ll just buy less food.  Kids aren’t growing that fast anyway these days. And then that’ll save us the cost of buying bigger clothes. And on top of all that, we’re moving to another department administratively, which turns out to be far more complicated than it sounds.  It’s going to take our little section of the office a couple of days just to update all our letterhead for the zillions of letters we have that have to be sent out.

Whether or not the house goes on the market immediately or later depends completely on how many furlough days we’re given for next year. Above a certain number, and we just call the realtor when the number of days is announced.  Within a middle range we’ll wait and see how long we can hold out.  Below that, we’ll hang on until at least next spring or summer.  But it turns out that with two kids in daycare and a reduced salary because of furlough days we can’t make the ends meet.  We stressed about having one kid because we weren’t sure we could afford it. Finally, I was getting too old to wait any longer, so we took a chance and just had one. One turned accidentally into two and the budget went kaplooey.  I wear jeans to work because I can’t afford to go out and get real clothes. The couple of pairs of shoes I have left are falling apart and I don’t know if I can afford new ones. We’ve got two little kids who thankfully haven’t yet outgrown their spring clothes so we’ll see if we can make those stretch through the fall.  We’re hoping their winter coats from last year still fit – I bought them big with no idea of how fast they’d grow over the winter and that might work in our favor this year.

I’m so sick of stressing out at work about getting all the work done and then coming home and stressing about how we’ll pay the bills. It’s not like we’re living in the lap of luxury here. We’ve got one car and can’t afford another one, so we’ve been looking at renting along a bus line and trying to figure out how we’ll get the kids to daycare and still make it to work on time.  We were talking the other day, and the last time we had a babysitter was last December for Matt’s office Xmas party. We’ve had a paid babysitter exactly twice in the last two years (seriously, do you know how much it costs to have a babysitter for twin infants????!).  A trio of Matt’s co-workers have babysat on a Saturday for us a couple of times so we could get out.  We counted the number of social activities we’ve participated in in the past two years since the kids arrived and we came up with 5, two of which the kids attended. So, all that stress at work and at home, and we get no time off for fun.  And right now, even if we could afford a babysitter, we couldn’t afford to go out and do anything anyway.

Yes, the recession has definately arrived here. And then to make things worse, my laptop has been acting up lately.  it ended up having to use the “recovery” disc which means that very little on the computer will recover.  That was a couple of weeks ago and I still haven’t been able to get the dvd drive to work, which means that getting all the pictures of the kids that are on the hard drive off of the computer has been a long process involving a couple of thumb drives and a patient Matt.  On the other hand, with all the stress at work, the last thing I want to do when I come home is sit on a computer, so sorry if the blog hasn’t been updated much lately.  Not enough time, too much stress.  And since I’m not loading the pictures onto the laptop, it’s more of a pain to try to put pics onto the blog. Maybe sometime in the next couple of days I’ll give a kid update.  They’re really growing. I’m just so tired when I get home from work, and so completely frazzled, I just don’t feel like I can do the “cute kids” thing justice.

Calgon, take me away.

Size doesnt matter

Jessie’s shoes and Sam’s sandals. Sizes 7 & 4, respectively.

We haven’t told Jessie yet that she has hobbit feet.

Miss Manners

Last night’s supper was apple and toast with hummus.  Sam was only eating the apple, not the toast. At one point when she asked for more apple, we told her she had to eat some toast first. She said no.  We said yes. She got that defiant little look she gets when she just doesn’t want to do something (no clue where she might get that from).

It was a battle of wills.  She threw her empty bowl on the floor and was told “no!” She whined. She pouted. Then she threw her milk on the floor.  That’s an automatic time out around here.

Time outs are given upstairs, in a crib that’s in the spare bedroom, with the door closed.  Carted her up there, explained that she wasn’t allowed to throw her milk, and put her in the crib.  Let her cry (scream, holler, pout) for a minute or two, then went back in.  Asked if she was ready to say she was sorry for throwing the milk. “Sow-ee”  Asked if she was ready to be a good girl and she nodded her head.  Picked her up and headed out of the room. She turned around, looked at the crib, waved, and said, “bye-bye.”

That kid says goodbye to everything.  The playground equipment when we go home.  The car when we walk out of the garage.  Of course, she says goodbye to people too, but she’s always saying goodbye to inanimate objects, too.  But the crib where you were just punished?  The kid’s just OCD.

[for the record, she did have a couple of bites of bread after that, like a very good kid, but then she was all done with that nonsense and just wanted some apple.  Jessie ate everything...as she always does.]

Ants!

So, the other night after we picked the kids up at daycare, we took them to the “park.”

There’s a school we go past just about anytime we go somewhere that has three different big playground thingies.  Swings, slides, and climbers galore. We’ve taken them there three times.

Thursday night after work we had to pick up a few things at the grocery store.  We went past the school without thinking.  As we went past, Sam said, “Park.” (their word for the playground equipment) Then, “Park!” and as we went right on past it it became a very frantic, “Park, park, park!!!!!!!!!!” She realized we weren’t stopping and she just started sobbing. It never occurred to us that she’d think that was our destination – we’re not toddlers any more and it’s hard to read their minds.  It broke our little hearts as she sobbed all the way to the store.

To make up for it, Friday night after work we went to the “park.”

As we approached the playground monstrosity of choice, Jessie leaned into the woodchips and started hollering, “Ann! Ann! Ann!”  It took us a few minutes, but we finally figured it out. “Yes, Jessie, those are ants.  Big girl!”

Jessie’s reaction to our confirmation? Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!

We were horrified. Not at the loss of a few pesky ants (heck, I hate to think of how many I’ve obliterated), but at her eagerness to kill the little buggers. It’s kinda disturbing in someone less than two.

“No! No, Jessie, no! You’ll give the ants an owwie!” (Trying to instill a little empathy for another life form)

So little Jessie bent over, looked down at the scrambling ants…and started kissing the little critters.

Fortunately, in her world, a kiss doesn’t necessarily involve contact with the recipient. And we think she has the empathy part down.

Make my day…

I was biking home today after work, trying to sort out what-all I needed to do tomorrow – we have a furlough day – and trying to keep track of what all I needed to get done at the office when I get back in on Monday.  Off to the side I saw a cute little kid. She was maybe about 7 or 8, and was wearing a really bright pink tank top and little shorts, and I could see she was debating about whether to run across the road in front of me or wait until I passed. And I was thinking, “Gee, she’s a little cutie.  Look at those skinny legs and arms. I’d give anything to have those back again!”

And I smiled as I rode past her.

And she said, “I really like your dress.”

Made my whole day, bless her little heart.

Self Image

I took the afternoon off today.

Things have been crazy at the office the past few weeks. I stayed late last week helping with the move from one building to another (and yep, we’re still unpacking the boxes) and had a few extra hours, so I took them off this afternoon.

Since we’ve got a lot of furlough days this summer I made a list of things around the house that need to be done.  I thought I’d tackle one of those jobs today – cleaning the closet in the spare bedroom.  It’s the closet that everything gets shoved into when I don’t feel like dealing with it.

Backing up to the office move for a moment – we were in a temporary location for almost two years.  We left the old location in a hurry, expecting to be gone for only a couple of months. I think most of us left a lot of stuff behind, thinking that we wouldn’t probably need it in the next couple of months, so there was no point in packing it.  A couple of months stretched into almost two years.  When we moved back and and came across all of the old paperwork that we hadn’t seen in two years, we were all quite eager to just get rid of it.  There’s a possibility that sometime in the next couple of years we might be moving our office again, and I think that factored in to our eagerness to unload a lot of useless stuff that might need to be moved later.

Something similar is happening at home.  Since Matt and I got married 10 years ago, we’ve lived in 3 different states.  Each subsequent move saw us unloading more and more stuff.  After moving a truck full of books from Kansas to Indiana, we decided that perhaps we could do without all that weight.  We sold most of our books, keeping only the ones we were most attached to (still, that was quite a few boxes of books), put a lot of furniture out on the curb before we moved up to Michigan, and generally lightened our load.  Then we moved to our current house and vowed never to move again.  We acquired more furniture.  More books. More dvds.  A few books.

And then we had kids.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. We had three bedrooms, surely this house would work for a kid.

Not as much as we had thought.  The house is rather formal and there’s no place to just hang out with the kids. The closets are really small. The basement is small and icky.  The local school district sucks.

So, we thought about moving to another school district and finding a house that’s a little more kid friendly. Downsizing to something smaller and less expensive (we had two kids rather than the one we were planning on.  Baby B stretched the budget quite a bit!)  Unfortunately, the housing market crashed and we owe more on the house than it’s worth.  Between the mortgage, daycare, student loans and such, things are really tight.  Did I mention the furlough days Jen gave us?

So, we’ve given it a lot of thought.  In about a year and a half we’ll be putting the house on the market and moving to an apartment once it sells.  Renting will be cheaper than our mortgage. By then the kids will be in school and we’ll have less expense for daycare.  There’s no way we could afford to buy a house right away, so renting would allow us to send the kids to the other school district and save up for a down payment at the same time.

With that in mind, we’re trying to clean out the clutter and fix up the house.  That brings me back to the closet.

I found a receipt from 1992 for about $6 from a pharmacy.  I have no idea what the receipt was for.  Why on earth did I keep it all these years?  How many different addresses did I move that stupid receipt to? Along with the crazy old receipt, I threw out a good large garbage bag of other crap.

And then there are the clothes.

Most of the clothes in that closet were from the late 1980s and early 1990s.  For those of you who didn’t know me back then, I weighed about 80 lbs less than I do now.  I had a waist.  A little one.  I “girlish” figure.  And I had dreams for the last several years of getting it back.  Having twins did horrible things to the waistline.  Trying to keep up with twins has not done a whole lot for my figure, either.  I keep saying that once we start getting some real sleep, I’ll cut back on the calorie intake and drop the weight.  I held on to a lot of those clothes with the hopes of getting back into them. Zena jeans that were cut just perfect for my (old) figure – narrow in the waist, a little more room in the hips, a tapered at the ankles (ok, so a couple of the jeans were still “pegged.”) There were even two or three pairs of stirrup pants in there. Who knows – they might come back!

Today was the day I had to admit that I will never have the figure back that I had about 15 years ago.  Short of a magic wand, I don’t think the post-twin waist will ever match the itty bitty waist I had years ago.  I doubt I’ll ever lose 80 lbs.  I’m way too fond of Hudsonville’s Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream.

It’s hard to admit.  We don’t have a whole lot of mirrors in our house. The one full-length mirror we do have is in a place I never spend any time, so I don’t get to see myself below the chin except on very rare occasions. In my mind, I am still that skinny younger me.  Anytime I see the larger, matronly me in a mirror, I have to take a moment to come to terms with the fact that that’s how I really look.  And I look away quickly.  I know it’s a mistake and that tomorrow I’ll wake up the same size I was in 1992. I’ve been sure of that for years.

Until I had to confront the closet today.  If someone is looking for a retro wardrobe full of Zena jeans and stirrup pants and short little cute dresses, it’ll be at the Goodwill on west Saginaw.

Getting rid of the paperwork, the books, the furniture, the clutter – it’s been refreshing. It’s cleansing.  It unburdens the soul.  It makes one feel like moving forward, like we’re getting ready for a fresh new start. Getting rid of the skinny clothes, the younger, healthier me – that’s been painful. That feels like I’m giving in, like I’m admitting that I’ll be fat forever.  And I don’t want to be a fat, old lady. But most days I’m just too tired to try anymore.

On the bright side, once we move to East Lansing, the bike ride to work will be longer and more of the weight should come off.  If I could just get the chocolate and the ice cream to stop following me home from the grocery store….

What’s New?

Sammie

Jessie

Just a couple of quick pictures so y’all don’t think we’ve vanished over here.

The kids are getting big.  They’re starting to talk more.  The big word lately is “helicopter.” One flew right over us the other night when we picked them up from daycare.  It sounds more like “keliloper” when they say it, but at least they have the right number of syllables.

Work’s been nuts. We packed up our office and moved it from one building to another. Still have most of the files in crates and the printer hasn’t been hooked up yet.  We’re limping along.  This happened just a week after the governor issued an executive order abolishing our department.  Initially most people expected it just to shift the various agencies around to different departments, but now it looks more like some of the parts will be shrunk considerably.  It’s painful to see so many people probably lose their jobs in the next year.  On the other hand, our little section is going to a department with more money and we don’t look like we’ll be too bad – we’re even hoping we might be able to get an extra printer or two (right now we have about 15 people using one 13-year-old crappy printer) and some upgraded software (we’re using Office 2000 and our maps are all paper & highlighter, rather than computer based).  So, we’re feeling the pain of our coworkers, eager for our own department, and totally chaotic because only half our stuff (if that) is unpacked after a week.  And all of this comes at a time when our workload (at least for those of us reviewing federally-funded projects) is increasing exponentially.

I had a furlough day yesterday. Matt took the afternoon off. The kids went to daycare, we went to see Harry Potter 6. The last movie we’d been to was Harry Potter 5, two years ago when I was pregnant.  We don’t get out much anymore.  We even had enough time after the movie to go out for supper (sans kids!!!) before picking up the little darlings at daycare.  It was like a little one-day vacation.

Our tenth anniversary is coming up in a couple of weeks. The only “vacations” we’ve taken were a one-night stay on our first anniversary in a small town in Kansas and a one-night stay in Indianapolis about 3 years ago for a friend’s wedding reception.  That’s really lame, but in that context an afternoon movie and dinner out (even if it was at 4pm) is pretty exciting.  And something tells me with the cost of babysitters, we probably won’t be getting much more than that until the kids are in high school and babysitter age themselves.

Ni-night.

Our little girl – all grown up (sob).

Jessie put herself to bed tonight.

All by herself.

Usually each of the adults takes a kid and reads a few books to her, gives the kid a sippy cup of water (they don’t usually drink the whole cup, just a few sips), and the kidlette sits on our laps until they’re asleep.  They’ve gotten too heavy for me to stick into the cribs without dropping them and waking them up (I’m pretty short and can barely reach over the side of the cribs. I have to climb a stool and then I’m too high to lower them in) so Matt will put his kid to bed then come stick mine in bed (if she’s asleep ).  We’ve been thinking that sooner or later they’ll be able to climb out of the cribs and we’ll need to do the toddler beds, but it’s nice to have them contained and not have to worry about them, so at 22 months, they’re still in cribs.

More than the whole bed/crib thing, we’ve been wondering how they’ll deal with the transition from falling asleep on someone’s lap, reading a book, to getting tucked into bed and having one of us sit in their room reading a book to both of them.

My guess is it might go smoother than we anticipated.

Tonight Matt took Jessie upstairs to go to bed. (Jessie goes to sleep upstairs in our room on the green recliner. Whoever has Sam sits in the living room with her. This week Matt has Jessie and I have Sam at bedtime.) They got upstairs and she went right into the nursery, climbed the stool that I had sitting by Sam’s crib, flipped herself into Sam’s crib, held up her hand to stop Matt from picking her up, said, “niiii-niiii” and waved good-bye to him.  Matt asked if she wanted to go read a book and have some water. She said “no, niiii-niiiii” and laid down.

Matt waited outside the door for a while, didn’t hear anything, and finally decided that he would put Sam to bed and I could do the dishes and make our supper.  Jessie never made a peep after she kicked Matt out of the room.

Sweet.

I’m sure that won’t happen on a regular basis, but it was nice to get a break and have just one of us putting a kid to bed for the first time in almost two years.  I don’t know about Matt, but it makes me a whole lot more eager to reach the point where one of us tucks them into their little toddler beds and reads a book to them while the other adult does the dishes. (And, hopefully by that time, we’ll have figured out how to eat supper with them on a more regular basis, so that the dish-washing parent doesn’t also have to make supper.)

Niiiiiiii-niiiiiiiiiiiii.