Positively Filthy Rich

It's been a rough day...and God knows I needed a bit of a kick in the pants to remember that my current "mess" is my own fault.  But in the midst of the mess, He also wanted to point out the fairly obvious:  no matter how "poor" we might be by America's standards?  We have SO MUCH when compared to the rest of the world.  It's absolutely appalling, the waste and excess in this house.  I can state without blinking an eye that I had NO idea just how much Stuff was sitting in my laundry room.  Granted, a lot of what was on the shelves in there was storage.  I keep extra paper towels and laundry soap ingredients up above the washer and dryer.  One wall has wire shelving for cans and jars.  But it was the Stuff I didn't know about--things I had just haphazardly stuffed in an open space because I would get to it "later"...and later just happened to be today.  

I'll spare you the gory details of what necessitated the emptying of my laundry room.  But the cleaning led to a huddled discussion with The Hubby about when/how we were tiling the floor in there.  Why not now, we decided.  We had got the tile a couple of months ago, and there were a couple of items to pick up at the hardware store to complete the project (tile grout, etc).  So we picked up the Older Manlings from VoTech, went to lunch, and then to Lowe's.  When we got home, the Manlings and I all finished emptying the laundry room and stripping the walls.

Which brings me to the point of this post:

Regardless of how AWFUL my days may seem, the sheer insanity of life that astounds, the complete idiocy of some decisions made around here, we have life GOOD.  

No, not good.  We have it GREAT.

I can walk into my pantry...or the laundry room...or the cellarway...or go downstairs to the storage room....and I can fix any one of a dozen...maybe two or three dozen..different meals because I have everything I need.  When compared with places like Africa and India, we are positively Filthy Rich.  

I have decided.  

*pause*

I have decided (which is more than half the battle, y'know?)...AHEM.

I have decided:

a)  I will make the Lord my focus each day, and I will walk in the path He's set before my feet.  I will do this INTENTIONALLY.

b)  I will be the mother and wife I want to be.  If not now, then when?  Better to do it now.

c)   I will be more organized in 2012.

d)  I will post each night before bed as recap.

e)  I will get my Lists in order and keep them.

f)  I will start to catch up all of the projects I have started and not finished.

g)  I will clean the house from top to bottom, and I will be the Keeper of THIS House.

h)  I will get our Emergency Prep Plans back under control, and then I will implement them.  No more putting things off....not in these times.  

To further all these aims, I am using the rest of December as "Prep Month".  I need to get my planners updated and organized.  I've been woefully under-organized the last four years.  That must stop.  

Funny how once you make the Plan to Start, the adrenaline starts to flow.  One wouldn't equate the start of a race for instance with a (re)start of Homemaking.  But I suppose it's all the same to your brain chemistry.  It's an eagerly anticipated event, something to be sought after and waited for (however impatiently).  

And I've waited a LONG TIME to reach this point.  

I am home.  Thank God.

In the true spirit of the New Year and getting my life back in order, I have been working on all of the paperwork and crazy-ness in my life.

At work I have now gotten all of the backend filing and miscellaneous things caught up as of this week, as well as the consult billing done through the end of 2008. This means I can now move forward on this year's billing (which will take a couple of days) and finish getting new charts together for next month. I cannot tell you how good this feels!

At home I've gradually been working on taking back my sanity (and bedroom) from the stacks of papers and binders that seem to have multiplied exponentially in the last year and a half. It's been very disheartening to realize that I've lost so much time and energy trying to find things when it was all right underneath my fingertips the whole time. In all fairness it's been a long year and a half, and I thank God it's over and done with and regular life can now resume. I sincerely do not want to have to go through another cycle of trying to find a few decent employees at work. Ever.

I am currently working on putting my sons' homeschooling portfolios together for the end of the year, and then I'm moving on to lesson planning for the last four or five months. I am also hoping to get my seed orders together this week and make up the wish lists for homeschool items to get once we get our tax refund. *sigh* It's so nice to be able to breathe again.

Time to get back to work.

Of Books, Boys, and Nothing in Particular

Another Sunday.
Another white wintery day.
We actually had a decent amount of snow last evening and into this afternoon. It's not a Wyoming Blizzard....but at least the grass is covered! Or was...until Manlings #3 & 4 scooped most of it up for their sledding ramp in the backyard. Thank goodness it's started coming down again to cover up the bare sports. Just so I can pretend we've had a snow 'storm.'

Manlings #1 & 2 came back from their Boy Scout Klondike Derby this morning, only to find me on the warpath after tearing apart the living room and their desks--only to find a whole lot more left undone than had been confessed to last week. I was NOT happy. Neither was their dad. Privileges have been revoked. A martial state has been declared, and we're going to have a long couple of weeks ahead of us trying to get back on track.

*sigh* Just when I thought things were getting better.

You know, it's not even that they didn't do the work as they said they did. It's the LYING that accompanied it. I hate it when my kids lie to me--for whatever reason. It really feels like someone has punched me square in the stomach, and I just can't get my breath. They know I'm going to be mad if they don't do their homework; but why lie about it? Lying just makes me even angrier, and they've blown my trust in them.

*feels small* Sometimes I envy parents who can send their kids off to public school. At least they can have a break from the constant presence of a child who cares so little for their parents' affection that they have no compunction about telling white-faced lies.

I just don't get it.

On the upside, the younger two both told me this morning that they feel things have gone much more smoothly now I'm home to explain things to them more. I know they're enjoying more mom/boys time.

With the older two out of the house for camp this weekend, I did get some cleaning done. My living room looks much more live-able now, and we rearranged the dining room to better accommodate our table (which really is too large for the room but that can't be helped with six people).

There was a whole fiasco this summer with my oldest sister who was using my house as her own personal storage unit the last year or so. When she finally decided she could find room in her new place, I had to literally empty of her crap out of my house in the space of a weekend. (Very hard to do when most of it had been put to use with her permission and blessing.) To be honest, I hadn't really liked having her 'stuff' cluttering up my house in the first place. You know how somethings just 'don't belong'? That pretty much sums up her items. Everything put me on edge. But getting it all out in one large sweeping clean-up meant a lot of holes and misplaced items of mine, which I haven't really had time to correct what with working so much.

This weekend I finally managed to banish the holes and start replacing things where they belonged. My tins and sewing things have reclaimed their places in my living room. My apple knicknacks have restaked their rightful places on the entertainment center. Best of all, it feels like MY house again.

And let me tell you what: DH and I have worked too long and too hard for what we have for us not to walk into this house and be able to claim it as our own. This is OUR space. It's not big, and it's not fancy...but it's OURS.

I'm dreaming of a white...Sunday?

The snow has been falling quite happily outside my contented little home for most of the late afternoon. It's probably the first 'real' snow we've had this winter--although there have been two or three with accumulation, they didn't last and were mostly sleet/freezing rain. This is honest-to-goodness white flakes with a solid two to four inches of ground cover. I'm inclined to take this as a sign that Mother Nature (in all her wisdom and glory) has decided we idiots in the Mid-Atlantic deserve a White Winter too. Amen.

On a more domestic note, I decided to take advantage of our Winter Storm Warning Day and do a little 'redding up' as my PA Dutch ancestors would say. Heaven knows, with four Manlings, a husband, the cat, a Punkin rabbit, and five little piggies in this house 24 hours a day, seven days a week--give or take trips to the grocery store and errands--the place is starting to look a bit rough around the edges. I'm not sure houses were actually built to take This Much Abuse.

The basement got a good going-over since all our school stuff is down there. The 'classroom' needed organizing and sorting. I even found a couple of books I missed which will come in handy for our Geology unit. OH! And I found the planner that had 'gone missing' months ago! ...only I already bought another. Oh well. I'll just erase the started pages and use it again this fall. LOL

The kitchen and dining room got picked up and swept. It is starting to look like human beings live here. Now if I could just do something about my icky stove and cabinets... Our home was rented before we moved in, and the tenants didn't really take great care of the place. Consequently the kitchen only gets So Clean before this gigantic gaping hole in the universe opens, and TPTB sit on my nasty dirty range hood and laugh maniacally at me. I've tried everything I can think of to get the grease off that hood and the cabinets around it...and they just won't come clean. I guess there's only so much accumulated filth you can remove. Thank heavens my DH and I are also in complete agreement about removing that entire section of the kitchen first. Hopefully soon.

On the homeschooling front, the Manlings started homework back up this week. Well...the younger two did anyway. In a spurt of motivated insanity, they finished up their Colonial America lapbooks, worked on their Genesis lapbook, and started their Geology Notebook. Next week we are starting up the American Revolution with sections on all the major players, and they are going to do Noah's Ark for their Genesis lapbook.

Manling #3 is doing better than expected in his reading but lapsed a bit on what he was asked to do in copywork and math. We had a little chat about what to expect now that my work schedule has stabilized and I'm home most of the morning/afternoon to help out more. He's actually quite content with how things are going and is an incredibly happy child.

Manling #4 is my handful, and I dearly love him in spite of it. He's been very grumpy about learning to read and has been pretty resistant to it. DH suggested that perhaps he's afraid that if he learns to read I'll stop reading to him. (I read to the whole family quite a lot. We're working on Johnny Tremain for history with the younger two...but the older two listen in. The 'family' book at the moment is Brisingr by Chris Paolini.) I had a talk with him and let him know that learning to read will not stop family reading time...and the next morning I got much less resistance when we went over his McGuffey Reader lesson. He's started a new copywork book which is children's poems (and he loves it!) and is re-starting his Explode the Code book which he had been refusing to do. Yay!

Manling #1 is chomping at the bit for the Civil War Unit I have planned to start in March, so I'm giving him some upper-level reading to do on generals and important people. I think I might have him start a CW notebook on them that we can then add to when the other three are ready. He is also supposed to start plotting what he'd like to study when he starts 'high school' in the summer.

Manling #2 has been having some "focus" issues and found himself behind in Math and Science. He's playing catch-up at the moment and isn't happy. But he's realized it's better to finish small chunks every day than have to do a whole bunch all at once. Lesson learned. I also told him he couldn't start his WWI Unit until the make-up is done. Ouch. That didn't make him happier.

Overall I think things are going to run a bit more smoothly now that I'm not working as much and at a better time. It's just too distracting and non-productive to put in extra hours all the time and really get nothing out of it. I'm much more relaxed too, both at home and at work. I was a little worried about learning to bill...but I've actually been enjoying it. It's mindless and easy on the nerves and gives me some much-needed downtime in the evenings. I get to unwind, then come home and finish up whatever needs doing yet before bed.

A reference for me: http://www.homeschoolforfree.net/2007/09/lapbooking-links.html

It's a list of lapbooking resources. Heaven knows I'm gonna need it!