Thirty

Yesterday, I turned 30.  It wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it would be.  I suppose it's a classic case of anticipation being 10x worse than the actual experience, much like getting your blood drawn.  In any case, now that I am the big three-oh, I expect that life will continue much like it did in my twenties, which is just fine with me.  I would only make one tweak: for my children to sleep better.  :)

Plans and plan-breaking

In true awesome-Christine fashion, I started the day with a great plan and then didn't do any of it.  Well, I suppose that's not true.  I did make dinner.  But that's about it.

We spent the afternoon outside, walking around the neighborhood, visiting with friends, and then helping ourselves to a giant watermelon feast at the Dunaway's.  Kh. Betsy used a cleaver and chopped up a watermelon on her front steps, dolling it out to all the neighborhood kids who had managed to converge on her lawn.  I think Melanie ate four slices.  No joke.  That girl loves watermelon.  Today is the church planting day, so we're planning (uh oh, there's that "plan" word again) on heading up to the church lawn in a couple hours to get our hands dirty planting flowers around the property.

Yesterday, I was watching Iron Chef on Youtube, and Marina decided to join me.  The episode was "Battle: Suckling Pig" which I didn't think mattered until I realized they were kicking it off by showing a giant pile of whole suckling pigs (heads and everything). Marina, being the animal lover that she is, was marginally concerned by this sight.  I explained to her that these are "eating" pigs, not "pet" pigs, and that they were already dead and ready to be cooked.  She gave me a skeptical expression, then leaned close to the computer screen.  "Mom!" she said, "I think I just heard one oink."  We ended up making it through without incident, but I think I'll save "Battle: Wild Boar" for after she's asleep.

Projects

I have a couple of projects that I'm working on right now.  I bought a toddler-sized rocking chair for $3 at a garage sale last week, and I've been busy chipping three layers of paint off of it.  The chair is sturdy, but ugly and chipped, so I have to get down to the wood before I can sand and paint it again.  I plan on spray painting it a glossy white (a la Young House Love), and then it's going in Melanie's room.  This is definitely an outside project, with all the scraping and sanding, which means I won't get to work on it today since it's raining.  Instead, I turn to project number 2, which is finishing the kids' bean bag chairs.

I found a really neat idea online, where the bean bag chairs are made with a zipper in the side, then filled with stuffed animals instead of beans or fluff.  They now serve double duty: as a seat for the kids, and stuffed animal storage!  Since I bought too much fabric, I am going to make four.  I have actually finished two of them, but the first day the zipper broke on Megan's, so I need to replace it and make the other two.  One is going to be a gift, but the last one I am stuffing with all the random baby blankets we have lying around.  The kids love to play with them, but I'm tired of them taking up shelf space.  Ergo, Megan and Marina's bags will have stuffed animals in them, and Melanie's will have the blankets.  Each kid has a seat, and I get to breathe a triple sigh of relief as the clutter decreases.

I have really (really really really) high hopes to make at least four Christmas gifts for family members this year, so I suppose I should start on those this summer too.  If I don't, December 15 will roll around and I'll be pulling my prematurely grey hair out by the handful.  Of course, I can't post the details here, but rest assured that they are awesome.  :)  I also started Christmas stockings for the kids in January.  I (again, high hopes here) want to cross stitch their names in the top, then sew them up.  I have sewn approximately 1/8 of one of them...so 2 7/8 left to go.  We'll see if that happens for this year...

Listy McListerson

Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime....today kicks off day 1 of summer vacation for the Jolly Rogers.  Hooray! Megan is a bit cranky that there is no school until August, but she will live.  Marina has a cough, and is taking the better part of ten minutes to go get a Kleenex like I told her, but that's just Marina.  And Melanie, after waking up and screaming at 6:30 a.m., is--God bless her--back asleep and staying that way for the time being.

I was thinking this weekend about goals.  I am a goal-oriented person.  I want to see it on a piece of paper, listed out with steps, and happily cross out each step as it's completed.  I feel the accomplishment that way.  Plus, I just like making lists.  I don't know why.  But they make me happy.  (Confession: I frequently re-write lists so they look nice also).  But back to the goals.  I didn't want to just surf through the summer doing nothing, and I didn't want my whole summer to be taken up with jam.  So, here are my tentative umbrella goals for the summer.

Goal 1) Work on the grocery budget.  More specifically, work on staying WITHIN the grocery budget.  This is something that I have difficulty with.  To be completely honest, I suck at it, and I'm convinced that when my husband hears me say I'm going grocery shopping, his knee-jerk reaction is to pop a handful of Tums.  I have been reading various articles all over this great world wide web of ours, and it seems like a lot of people have a lot of ideas.  I have attempted to glean the best of these (10 points for correct use of the word "glean"!) and combine them to make a plan that fits me and my family life.

     Point A) Menu plan the ever-living crap out of our week.  I'm already pretty good at dinners, but it never occurred to me to plan breakfasts, lunches, and snacks as well.  I'm going to have the kids help me, hoping that if they help me decide what we're going to eat for the week, they will be happier about eating it.
     Point B) Grocery shop weekly, not bi-weekly.  The spending can get out of control when I'm trying to think over everything we could possibly need for the next 14 days in one sitting.
     Point C) Make better use of the food I already have in the house before buying more.
     Point D) Shop for the short term, not the long term.  I'm a big "see a sale, stock up" kind of girl, and this contributes in a major way to my perpetual overspending.  My new rule of thumb is going to be some variation of "if we won't eat all of this in three weeks, don't buy it."  I am hoping this will, in turn, help create some much-needed pantry space as I won't continually be trying to shove Costco sized packages of things into a too-small space.

Goal 2) Refinish some furniture!  Not just random pieces, mind you, but I have a small list of things that I want to strip/pain, fix, etc.  Today, I'll be making a list (see! another list! oh happy day) of the various house projects I'm hoping to tackle this summer.  I'll post it for you tomorrow, and then we can share together in the joy of me crossing them off.

Goal 3) All the other random projects/sewing/organizing that have been rattling around in my brain  (Do you sense another list coming??  It's almost more than I can handle).  In no way do I think I will actually accomplish all of them in a three month period of time, but it will be nice to see them all delineated (another 10 points!) so I have an idea of things that I can/want to do.  Sometimes, there's just too many ideas (darn you Pinterest) ping-ponging around in my brain for me to sort out and actually pare down to see what I am going to do next.

Goal 4) Get my kids to adjust to the new meal planning regime before school starts.  They don't like change, especially not change that eliminates their morning routine of taking fifteen minutes to decide what they want for breakfast.  (Although, in my defense, I did let them have jello as part of their balanced breakfast today...of course, now that I think of it, using the fact that I did that as proof of my awesome parenting may backfire.  Hmm).  Also, I am hoping that this gets some more varied foods in their diets.  Man (or Megan) cannot live on corn-dogs alone.

So, there's my summer in a nutshell.  Now imagine me prancing happily to find a pen and my favorite yellow steno pad to make a dozen lists.

What are the girls up to this morning?

Megan is getting ready for her VERY LAST DAY of pre-school.  The next time I send her out the door, she'll be a Kindergartener.  sniffle, sniffle.

Marina is having the following conversation with me right now:
Me: "Marina, take that cup to the kitchen.  I know you hear me."
Marina: "No, I don't."
Me: "Marina, I KNOW you hear me."
Marina: "No, I don't."
Me: "Marina." (in the stern Mama warning tone)
Marina: (whispering) "Mama, I can't hear you ask me to take the cup.  I just can't."

Melanie was woken up for the very first time by an earthquake this morning. Megan and Marina were snuggling in bed with me when the first jolt shook, and I could hear the next wave coming (imagine a rumbling not unlike a freight train coming down the street).  I had enough time to breathe a "Lord have mercy" and tell the kids to get in the doorway.  We made it to the doorway just as the big jolt hit, and I was on my way to grab Melanie out of her crib when it stopped.  I had about a split second to hope that she had slept through it when the wailing started. Ah well, I suppose you can't have everything in life. 

Farmer's Market Bust

I had my first Farmer's Market today...sorf-of.  Palmer was a balmy 45 degrees, and the wind was whipping everywhere.  There were tents flying right and left, so I made an executive decision not to stay.  It's unfortunate, since I have a credit card bill due next week and could really have used the funds, but ah well.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate next Friday.

In home news, I left a sharpie out in an easily accessible place last night.  I must have walked by it ten times today before putting it away, which strikes me as extremely dumb, since I am Marina's Mom.  Low-lying sharpies--or any markers for that matter--are just an invitation to catastrophe.  Frankly, I should have been doubly concerned, since Melanie has recently learned how much fun it is to climb on things...like the table.  She's been eating a lot of crayons lately, since the kitchen table is no longer a safe place for the big girls to color.  It's not nearly as much fun to fall off the kitchen table, but she's done that a couple times too.

Melanie has also picked up a couple new words, one of them being, "Dog."  We went to the zoo the other day, and every animal was a dog.  It was so cute.  We'd say, "Look Melanie!  There's a bear/camel/moose/porcupine/etc."  She's point and shout, "Dog!"  It never got old.

Megan has recently expressed her extreme displeasure that school gets out next week.  I can only hope that this attitude is still around in ten years or so...  I've had a couple people ask me what I'm going to do with them all summer.  The answer?  I don't have the foggiest freaking clue.  It should be interesting.  We don't have any trips planned, although we're holding out hope that Dn. John's folks will make it up sometime, and we have some aunts and uncles hopefully coming to visit in August/September.

Since my afternoon is now free, I should probably make use of it by doing next week's meal planning, so I can hit Costco this weekend.  If you think of anything that sounds tasty, shoot me an email.  :)

Spring!

Spring seems to have finally sprung around here...thank God!  We had a rough go of it this winter, with record-breaking snowfall (something like 138 inches over the course of the winter), and virtually the entire month of January was spent at below zero temps.  I think it crept up to 8 or 10 above approximately twice.  It was ugly.  Now, the trees have budded, and the leaves are large enough that you can see a haze of green when you look out the window.  The snow is almost completely gone from our yard, but there's still some in the ditches across the street (we live on the south side of the road, so we get more sun!).  The kids are thrilled that their sandbox has finally thawed, and we've been taking lots of evening walks enjoying the sun.

My first Farmer's Market is this Friday, so I've been churning out hundreds of jars of jam in preparation.  I have one more batch to do sometime this week, then I should be ready!

With spring also comes the thought of camping, and we are gearing up for a Memorial Day Weekend trip to Seward with some other families from church.  We had a great time last year, and this year's trip has the added interest of occurring on my 30th birthday...which for all intensive purposes, I am planning to forget.  At least the turning 30 part.