Week 10

Blaine lost another molar (gross!). This makes 3 in the last 10 days or so. He is also obsessed with taking pencil erasers, drawing faces on them and making an "eraser army". He has tons of these erasers, I don't know where he is getting them. I think I may have a quirky child.

Aislin finally tried track! Practices are Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for two hours per practice. We have until 3/19 to withdrawal and get our money back so I really needed her to give it a try. Luckily she has a friend doing track who is really into it. So glad she tried it. I think as long as Savannah runs Aislin will, but I'm guessing on days that she is not there Aislin will want to opt out of practice.

This week I've been busy working away. I mean getting up early, working 10 hour days and then coming home and working from 8pm-10pm while Brent puts the kids to bed. I had 5 or 6 eligibility meetings. In those meetings I go over my 25+ page reports with parents and the eligibility team and it can be quite draining. I hope to never schedule so many meetings in one week again like that. Luckily Brent understands what it is like to have deadlines and was great with taking over in the evening so that I could work. I won't lie, the conversation has come up about me "retiring" in a year. It so hard to know what I want. There are weeks that are great and I love what I do and feel like I can have it all- career and family. Then there are other weeks that I am just drained, physically and emotionally. During those weeks I just want my only responsibility to be our family. I feel guilty about everything and feel like I am a horrible mother.

In the meantime we have taken a big step, one that I've only told one friend about. Brent and I talked about what would be most helpful to me. These are the times I felt horrible: when at 8:00 pm the kids are laying out clothes for the next day and we realize there is nothing clean, or when I come in the house after a long day and the counter is stacked full of dishes, the dogs are whining and I need to cook dinner, do homework and get kids to practice. We decided that having someone help me do these things is what we need. Brent pointed out that laundry, cooking and cleaning are not things I like to do anyway. We bumped our housecleaners to coming every other week instead of once a month and we hired a housekeeper. For two months I posted the ad about what we needed on this website where you have to pay to have access. It worked. During the week of Winter Break I screened numerous people over the phone, and then interviewed two people at our house. I found a lady that lives around the corner. She now comes to the house twice a week to do laundry, cook some dinner and clean the kitchen/family room and walk the dogs. It has been great! Just that extra help is all I needed to stay on top of things. The kids have clean clothes, I have a home cooked dinner twice a week and I can see my counters, and the dogs are much less whinny!

This help was just in time- Brent leaves for Dubai and India on Sunday!