-B- eing a Bit Negative Today!

OK, so I'm into week 6ish of giving up my job to stay at home full time and I have to admit, I'm getting a little squirmy.  I never thought of myself as a busy body before kids, but I guess taking care of three little guys so close in age has made me be in fast forward for so long, that I forgot how to slow down.

I thought when I quit working that I would be doing projects every day around the house and drinking coffee and reading magazines on the back porch just soaking up the inspiration for lots of home renovation type stuff. 

I thought I'd go running every morning  before the kids and Husband woke up and then take a shower without being interrupted and get some chores done early in the morning. 

I thought we would go to the pool a lot and I'd work on my tan while doing swim lessons with the kids.  I'd see tons of friends at the pool and we would enjoy the long Summer days catching up on old times and watching the next generation of kids become friends. 

I thought we would be at the lake almost every weekend enjoying the boat and the relaxing atmosphere with my Parents.  Watching the kids enjoy nature and soak up the sun.

I thought I'd clean a room in my house each day so that I could look back at the end of the week and know that each room had been somewhat clean at some point in the week.  I'd rest easy that my family wasn't living in filth and that we wouldn't ever have to waste a day cleaning house.

REALITY CHECK!

I'm entertaining kids from sun up to sun down and by the time the sun does go down, I'm exhausted so much so that the next morning my 7am wake up call seems way to early for productivity.  So, I lay in bed being smothered and pulled on by my 5 year old daughter that just can't seem to sleep in her own bed despite the multiple bribes that I have laid out there for her at any given time.  I roll out of bed in time to get the kids off to Summer camp only to find out that they have the chicken pox and have to return home for the week.  I swallow the $250 loss on a week of camp and start rubbing calamine lotion on all of their spots with much opposition from them including running from me, crying hysterically, and moving at just the right moment that the calamine lotion splashes all over the bathroom and towels adding one extra room cleaning to my day and another load of laundry to be cleaned.

We stay home to eat for most meals in efforts to not spend $60 plus a day which involves make a mess clean up a mess at least 3 to 4 times a day.  In between meals, we are plowing Popsicles faster than I can buy them to beat the heat outside and just because we are working hard on rotting our little teeth out as soon as possible so that the dental bill can be just a little bit higher than it is already. Oh and by the way, the chicken pox that I spoke about......."Yes" we have already been vaccinated against these and "No" somehow that didn't do the trick so we are spending another $50 on co-pays and $50 on medication just to sooth the itching for the next 10 days that it could stay in our system.  Just about the time the boys get rid of it, I will be watching my daughter closely to see if she has caught it as well.  If so, it will be another 15 days of quarantining her so that we don't pass it around to all of the lovely friends of ours. 

We haven't made it to the lake yet and really I have no idea when we will. Our weekends are booked for the foreseeable future with other obligations that I seem to always get myself roped into.  It will be the end of July before my babies get to go out on the boat and this just breaks my heart.  We are however, going to the beach as a family for a vacation in the near future, so hopefully that will lift my spirits on this subject. 

I have hired a house cleaner to come and she started coming weekly lately.  A weekly house cleaner seems so excessive to me when I'm not even working, but the reality is, we are a mess.  I'm sitting here on a Wednesday before the Thursday that she comes and my table has goop on it despite my efforts to constantly wipe all of these surfaces down. My laptop is covered in dust.  My kids are having their umpteenth slumber party in the living room this week which involves lots of blankets that I fold and put away, fold and put away, fold and put away seems like 10 times a day.  The dog has decided that the coffee table is a good place to lay (weird), and ironically the kids have decided that the coffee table is a good place to eat ( no interruption of TV time), so I'm constantly wiping this down with Lysol kitchen cleaner to try and beat the germs at their own game. 

The bathrooms are fairly clean until my kids decided that a can of blue shaving cream looked like a fun thing to spray all of the bathroom just for kicks and giggles.  In efforts to clean it up they used EVERY towel in the cabinet and even a little of the bath rug as well.  Too bad it didn't really work at cleaning and now we've added another heavy load of laundry to the every growing pile.  Not to mention the fact that while they were spraying their shaving cream around the room, they apparently brushed their teeth several times because the new tube of toothpaste that I bought for the pickiest child on earth who will only use one kind of toothpaste is now officially empty and needs to be replaced.  

I looked at the budget last night and we are ridiculously overspending which is hard to swallow because I'm using all my best Mommy skills every day to figure out how and what we can do things in order to minimize the random spending.  I want ice cream, a snow cone, Chick Fil-A, lunch at the pool after we just finished lunch at home, more ice cream from the ice cream man at $2 a treat.  It amazes me how starving my kids get anytime that we have just walked out of the house and started on our daily adventure.  Not to mention the fact that every child in the neighborhood is over at our house on a daily basis drinking drinks out of my garage fridge and wanting more Sun chips and cakes and cookies and "stuff" to eat.  I'm having a hard time keeping up. I feel like I need to have a job just to keep the kids fed.

My tan is non existent and I've spent my days instead cleaning in preparation for the house cleaner to come and clean (?!?!?!?!?). Putting our house back together after the tornado I refer to as my three children has swept through the house for the millionth time.  I try to stay ahead of the clutter and mess, but it seems that for each one I get cleaned up to my satisfaction there is another 2 or 3 that were made while I was doing so.  In efforts to teach the kids responsibility, I start a chore list and encourage them to help out in order to earn money.  Instead, I end up being the nag of the century begging them  to pick up their stuff all day long or else and the money that they earn gets added to the pot of the money that mysteriously showed up when  they stole from their little friend and went and bought a third snake with.  Who needs 1 snake let alone 3?  Apparently, my kids do and they will stop at nothing to obtain it.  So we are thieves now.  We call the friend to apologize and I pay the poor kid back vowing to make my boys work off every penny and more which takes tons of supervision and diligence on my part which I am feeling a little low on at the moment.

So, now because they stole from their friend they are grounded all week and when they are grounded what it really means is that I am grounded.  It just so happens that we are all grounded right when my Husband decides its time to take a business trip and leave me with the kids stranded in this dirty house with an overpaid house cleaner and two chicken pox infested rowdy thieves and a clingy Daughter.  We spend the week trying to survive. 

This leads up to now.  Feeling a little bit negative today, but now that I've gotten it all out, I feel better. 

Cheers to keeping it real!

-B-