Distracted

Our moving date is currently this Saturday the 19th. So far, B has been the hero of the move, progressively packing and taking a couple loads of stuff over the new house every night for the past couple weeks. Of course, this is because he has time to do this, whereas between homeschooling every day and working every night, I have approximately 15 minutes of spare time every day. And I will probably to the lion's share of the unpacking. But he's still heroic.

Equally heroic are his parents, who are paying for movers to come this Saturday to move all of the furniture and really heavy stuff. Yippee! Although the price we were quoted was reasonable enough that if we do another in-town move in the future, I think we will do the same thing even if we have to spend our own money, because it would be worth it.

I am going to be so thrilled when we reach the point in our lives where we feel confident that we can just buy a house and stay there for the next 50 years. We're not there yet because we don't really want to stay in Philadelphia, and even if we stayed in the area, we want out of the city. But someday on that glorious day, we will move our stuff in and gleefully start accumulating stacks in the basement that our children will be forced to excavate someday when the time comes to move us assisted living.

If we did decide that it looks like we're not going anywhere for quite a while, I think we would strongly consider putting an offer in on the new house. I could burble on for quite a while on all of the things I like about it, and not just the ways it improves on our old house that you would never think to look for, like kitchen counters that haven't been painted (I'm all agog at the thought of what the counters must have looked like for them to decide that house paint would be an improvement. No, not even some sort of enamel paint, just flat white). It's more things like the walk-in closet in our (huge) bedroom. I think 3/4 of the reason I started wanting to move is the lack of closet space here - we have a tiny closet in our bedroom taken up entirely by 's work clothes, and my clothes are in the similarly tiny closet in Alec's room. Or the ample number of grounded outlets, which is something you don't truly appreciate until you've lived in a few old houses and worried that the electrical system would rise up and kill you someday in revenge for the abuse you have to put it through to power our modern lifestyle.

*****

Oh. My. God. I don't think I ever could have dreamed how badly Daylight Savings Time would affect us this year. One of the things I love about homeschooling is that we don't have to haul K out of bed in the morning for school. The fact that she is both very slow to wake up and is not at all a morning person is how I know she's certainly our child. But the downside of this is that if she stays up too late, like, just to pull an example out at random, her body thinks it's an hour earlier than it really is, she doesn't have to get up in the morning and doesn't have anything forcing her onto the new schedule. Thus began the pattern this week of her staying up too late, then sleeping in, falling asleep for a brief time in the evening and using that to have the stamina to stay up half the night. Last night, she was up past 3 AM after a half hour nap earlier that evening. Then we both slept until noon today. Insane. Not that I mind being able to sleep in, since I was also up that late working, but we can't keep that schedule.

Thankfully, she fell asleep at a relatively sane 10 tonight, and will have to get up to go to the babysitter's tomorrow morning and then the movers are arriving at 9 Saturday, so that will give us a couple days of forced rising to get her back onto a better schedule. Because even though she's such a big kids that she lost her first tooth last night and got her first pair of shoes in kid sizes instead of toddler sizes today (what can I say? For such a tall kid, she has teeny tiny feet), she's not ready to keep teenage hours yet.

*****

And finally, we didn't get to have corned beef and cabbage today, because getting up at noon precluded getting it into the crockpot on time, but we'll do that tomorrow. Astonishingly, I managed to get both myself and K dressed in green today despite completely forgetting about St. Patrick's Day, even though K has very few green clothes. But even if we're too distracted to do a proper celebration, here's a little something to honor St. Patrick's Day:

Last Monday's schoolwork delaying tactics:

Sharpening her pencil to the Platonic ideal of a sharpened point.

Writing secret notes.

"I need a break!" After a whole five minutes of work.

Wearing her coat as pants.

"You know who's my friend Mom? You!"

Aw, that's sweet honey. Now get back to work.

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A week ago Friday, I worked at the library, and worked another four hours that night. Saturday, I was alone with the children while B worked. Then I worked at the library Sunday before starting the weekly grind over again on Monday.

It used to be I felt quite put upon by weekends like this, because of how tiring they were and how long I had to go to look forward to any time off again. Now, however, Saturday was positively relaxing because instead of K going to the babysitter with her brother friday, she stayed home with B and they did schoolwork. So we don't have to do any schoolwork Saturday.

I suppose it just goes to show, if you're feeling tired and overworked, take on another huge obligation and you'll feel so much better when you just don't have to do that.

*****

K found a pair of Elmo slippers in a closet last week, a pair my mother gave her when she was two that are now long outgrown. They fit her brother just fine though. We put them on him this afternoon and he walked around with them, utterly pleased and intrigued by the sudden appearance of fuzzy red monsters on his feet. He would take a couple steps and then pause to look at them with a pleased little smile on his face. Step, step, lift foot carefully for inspection, grin.

Before we put them on him, he was carrying them around lovingly in a big armful along with his stuffed Big Bird. I'm very pleased about the Big Bird. For the longest time, his only interest in stuffed animals was in how far he could fling them. But once he hit 18 months, he made a huge leap forward in imaginative play and began playing with them along with dolls in fairly typical baby care-type play. So when he started lavishing a lot of attention on the stuffed Big Bird at daycare, I went out and bought him one and it's definitely been a big hit.

I've been hoping to get him attached to a lovey, in hopes that it will help in the process of getting him to be able to get himself back to sleep. And a stuffed Big Bird is ideal, because they're all over the place and easy to replace (particularly when you live ten miles away from Sesame Place). K decided to imprint on a stuffed rabbit that had been mine as a child, so it was basically irreplaceable. As an added bonus, it's a mother and baby bunny, so in addition to the danger of losing the mother rabbit, there's a much greater danger of losing the baby, which happened for six months at one point. Part of the joy I get when I see Alec asleep with Big Bird clutched in his arms is how frigging cute it is. But another part of it is knowing that there are a thousand replacements available if anything happens to it.