General

I’ve decided I really, really don’t like bedtimes as a “single” parent.  At all.

But I at least have a project.  I’ve been cleaning out the linen closet.  I swear there were dish towels breeding in there, as I don’t remember ever buying them or even receiving them as gifts.  Not to mention the extra-long twin sheets from college, the jersey knit sheets with holes that never actually fit well on our mattress, the curtains that came with the house (and came down just as soon as possible…they were ugggggly)…you get the idea.  There’s several bags of “stuff” waiting to be donated somewhere they might be put to good use.

I should be cleaning out the craft room, but at least the linen closet is going to be quite lovely and organized when I’m done!

Carrie had today off from school, and Denis had the day off from work, so we took a family trip to the Strong Museum. After a quick carousel ride (for Carrie and Denis) we headed to the butterfly garden, where Carrie got to hold a butterfly on the back of her hand and Anna had one land right on her stroller tray.

And then we met Lisa, Henry and Sammy there. The older kids spent a lot of time in the Mr. Potato Head exhibit, and I let Anna crawl around the infant/toddler area. She definitely had a good time!

Carrie loves the museum so much. I need to find a way to get her there more often – since we’re members, we may as well use our membership as much as possible!

(More pictures of our trip are here. Kodak Gallery, requires sign-in.)

We have our annual St. Patty’s Day party coming up this weekend and the house is, well, a mess. A big one. So I’ve written everything we need to do before the party on slips of paper and stuck them in a box. Carrie and I have spent all day pulling out jobs and getting them done – from organizing the mess of coats and shoes in the foyer to hanging pictures to cleaning off the cookbook stand. (One could argue that some of these jobs are not so necessary, but I’m tired of looking at the clutter!) It’s much more manageable to pull out a 10 or 15 minute chore from the box and do it than look over a very long list of tasks and try to decide which one you want to tackle first.

Unfortunately, now Carrie is a little taskmaster, as her very favorite part is pulling out another job to do!

Yep, that’s right, six weeks of posts just suddenly appeared in your RSS reader (all 5 of you still reading this, that is.) I could blame it on the kids, or I could blame it on playing Animal Crossing for a bit each night, or I could blame it on the knitting…

But the reality is that I’m just too good at procrastinating. I could blog on time. Honestly, I do actually write the posts out on the day they say they’re from, for the most part. But then sometimes the posts need pictures and the idea of finding the camera, taking the pictures (if they’re not already taken), finding the card reader, importing the pictures, editing them, uploading them and putting them in the posts? Not so appealing.

And then what happens? I get disgusted with the lack of updates and finally decide to just bite the bullet and do all the posts at once, which involves piecing together which pictures were really meant to go with each post (and deciding that some just don’t need pictures after all) and then all the photo editing, which altogether takes much longer than it really needs to. (And that last sentence was really much longer than it needed to be as well.)

However, since this blog has become my children’s baby books – as the likelihood of those ever getting done is slim-to-none – I need to be better about maintaining it. So, maybe we’ll call it a Valentine’s Day resolution? (Not that it’s Valentine’s Day yet…I’ll just start early for once.)

I dropped Carrie off at school today and then went out for coffee and hit Target for some necessities. Except for driving Carrie to her swimming lesson yesterday – after which we went straight home because I was so exhausted – this is the first time I’ve left the house since Anna’s appointment on the 12th. I could do without being that sick again for a very, very long time! Now I have to play catch up with everything I didn’t do last week (and the week before when Anna was sick.) Where did January go?!?

OK, I no longer have a raging fever. But I still don’t have much of an appetite (the new diet plan: get the flu and continue nursing while subsisting solely on water, gingerale, and the occasional string cheese) and I’ve been getting wicked sinus headaches. If I get a sinus infection on top of this I’m just going to cry.

To give you an idea of how sick I’ve been, I haven’t knit a stitch since last Sunday.

I got home from Anna’s appointment yesterday, and while it was cold outside I didn’t think I should quite be feeling so violently cold. Yeah. My temperature yesterday was 101.5. This morning it was 102.9. I can’t even really control it with ibuprofen or tylenol, so I went to the doctor to get a strep check (I have a sore throat too) and I just have “an influenza-type virus.” Crud. And Anna’s too little to have gotten a flu shot (of course, I did get one and we can see how well that worked) and she’s just gotten over her last illness (and is still on the antibiotics) so I really, really don’t want to give this to her. But I can’t not touch her all day, since I’m the only one here to take care of us all. And of course I don’t want Carrie sick either as I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. (If I had one, which I don’t.)

Um. Blogging while very feverish apparently leads to the overuse of parentheses. I will go away now and curl up in several layers of blankets and hope I feel better in the morning…

We were supposed to drive to NYC today, but the weather reports sounded really bad, so at 7 PM we made the decision to leave as soon as we could get everything in the car. Which was 9 PM.

Actually, though, all things considered it wasn’t a bad way to make the trip. We stopped once to change drivers and managed to get in at 2:30. And in reality, I’ve been up nearly that late for several nights in a row now, trying to get things done for the holidays – although not with the added stress of traveling. The kids pretty much slept the whole way, although it was tough to get them back to sleep once we arrived.

Now we just have to recover before our weekend of partying!

Happy birthday to meeeee! We had a fairly quiet evening in – just ordered pizza, had cake and decorated the tree. Although in retrospect, giving a four year old cake and then letting her stay up late and expecting her to help hang ornaments on a tree without knocking more off than she put on may not have been the wisest idea.

But now I have a Borders gift card and an iTunes gift card to spend on whatever I want. Happy dance!

My little petri dishes, that is. I think I’ve been sick pretty much non-stop since Carrie started preschool this fall, and poor little Anna is going to have the most robust immune system ever.

If you’re looking to buy some stock in a company, whoever owns Puffs might not be a bad investment. Just sayin’.