Saturday, November 22, 2008

Best Laid Plans....




soon crumble when you have little ones running around!


Remember those goals of getting my groceries and doing some once a month cooking?



Didn't happen.


Why? Well, I went to Stillwater to watch my 2 year old great nephew and 5 month old great niece, then brought them home with me. From then on, all planned events crashed right out the window.




I have decided that even though I raised two very active twins, as one gets older it just gets too hard to chase around a hyperactive two year old and attend to a teething 5 month old. I am proud to say that he didn't tear my house up the way he does at home and at his grandma's, but we spent the first day at my house being intensely trained. This is a combination of scolding and praising...anyone with kids knows how that goes.


All said, he did really well. I had to be really careful to keep an eye on him while attending to feeding the 5 month old--I had totally forgotten how much chaos a two year old can cause. We did have one issue with him kicking our beagle on the side, which was quickly dealt with. After that, he left ALL the animals alone completely. Our cats tolerated him, but the screaming from my great niece was really too much for them to handle, so we didn't see much of them the whole time the kids were here. We are looking forward to taking one or the other again so that my niece can have a little bit of piece, but I've pretty much decided that I can't handle both at once.



Besides being completely exhausted from the week, a good thing came from this: My twins have an up close and personal experience with the trials of small children. I can't say they even want to have kids EVER after this...This was much better than the hokey little experiment some schools do by making them carry around a doll or an egg. Dolls and eggs don't scream at ear ripping decibels or need a really bad diaper changed. Yep, priceless reality.


So, no once a month cooking got done. However, I am going to dust myself off and start anew next week. I fell short on budgeting too. After not entering my receipts into Pear until today, I realized I had gone over the budget on several odd and unplanned categories. That sucks since it is so close to Christmas. However, I will keep on plugging through so we can get back on track. My goal to buy a freezer is on temporary hold until after the holidays. With whole turkeys at 77 cent a pond, I wish I could snag several and store, but I just don't have the freezer space in our fridge unit.


One good thing from the trip to Stillwater is that I found a really good loveseat and coffee table at a junk shop and put it on layaway until the end of the month. The loveseat is more of a settee style, but it will be prefect in the library. They did have two other coffee tables I am seriously considering since they were all wood and could be refinished. We need one in the family room and one more in the seating area in our master bedroom, and these were only $20 each, so well within the budget. One thing we are lacking is table lamps, but I didn't see any there that would work in our house, so I'll just keep searching.

No comments: