Month: February 2006

I do not like conflict. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. I do not like feeling powerless. I do not like having to care if someone gets angry at Howard and pledges never to send him money again. I see that “out of savings” deadline coming closer while I scramble every single day to not spend money and push that deadline further away. Howard scrambles every single day to put out a funny comic and to bring more money in. It wounds me deeply to have people who have never met Howard call him nasty names. I live with him. I love him. I see every single day what a wonderful, kind, caring person he is.

Yes I know that being in the public eye means being open to public abuse. That is a given. I just wish the abuse didn’t hurt so much.

Oh, and if anyone uses the comments field in this post to defend their position on why Howard is a horrible person, I WILL delete the post. If you decide never to send him money again, that’s fine. It’s your money. I will not allow Howard abuse in my journal.

I did not have to watch NotMyBaby yesterday or today. This unforseen break from babycare is courtesy of Patches breaking out in an all over body rash. Fortunately I now have almost 11 years worth of experience with rashes on children. This one isn’t alarming, it just appears to be a wierd viral rash which accompanies his cold. He isn’t even acting sick, just a little crankier than usual. Most serious childhood illnesses involve high fevers and a complete lack of playing. I told this to NMB’s mom, but he’s her only baby and she likes to play things safe.

Yesterday I used my free time for clothing inventory. I finished going through all the boxes of clothes that I have waiting for my kids to grow. Now I have a list of exactly what I have waiting for them in various sizes. More importantly, I know what I DON’T have. That becomes my “looking for” list. The clothing inventory is an annual event and takes about an hour per child. In theory I could be using my inventory sheets all year and adding new items as I acquire them. That would save me from the annual inventory event, but I always forget or lose the inventory paper. I’ve also discovered that it is good for me to actually handle all the clothes at least once a year so that I have a feel for the colors, textures, and styles of clothing that are waiting. Little tally marks on the page can’t provide that.

Today not only is NMB absent, but Gleek has preschool. This means it is a perfect morning for me to take Patches and run various errands. I like shopping with Patches. He keeps me company, stays fairly close, and makes amusing observations about the world. He is a good shopping buddy. I like having the individual time with him and I don’t get it very often now that I babysit every weekday morning. I expect today’s conversations will include the words “totally” and “ultra” only he pronounces them “todawwy” and “Uwtwa” they are is favorite words right now. I think he learned them from Link. When Kiki was 2 I knew exactly where she learned every single word in her vocabulary, that is not true for Patches. Patches has so many other sources for input that the best I can do is make guesses if I even bother to wonder at all.

January is now gone. February is only 28 days long. Not much winter left. This makes me very happy.

My week of frantic scrubbing has thus far failed to materialize. Monday slipped away somewhere. Tuesday was spent on regular types of cleaning and laundering. Today I was taken by a fit of organization. I helped Gleek sort through her toys. She had new birthday things which didn’t really have a home yet. Now everything has a place to belong and there was even additional space on her shelves. I’ve instructed her only to get out one thing at a time, I expect her to follow that instruction for about 5 minutes. The good news is that we identified some toys and junk that she was willing to get rid of. Her first plan was to get rid of it all by giving it to her best friend. I convinced her that friends really don’t need old cardboard boxes and scraps of paper. The friend did end up recieving a couple of stuffed animals. Most everything else went into a thrift shop box or into the trash.

It felt so good to sort and get rid of stuff, that I tackled my office next. Most of what my office needed was for me to take the stacks of books and put them back onto the bookshelves where they belong. Of course there were also papers strewn everywhere and toys which wandered in from who knows where. It isn’t done yet, but it is already looking much neater. I’d like to get my office cleaned up enough for me to tackle some of the sewing projects that have been accumulating. Most of them are mending projects, but Kiki has also requested a new church dress and I’d like to be able to accomodate her and create something really beautiful. It all depends on what I have in my stash of fabrics and notions. Last summer I was able to make a wonderful dress for myself for a cost of about $8. I feel warm and fuzzy every time that dress gets complimented.

The cleaning spirit must have been in the air because this evening Kiki spent an hour organizing and sorting through her belongings. She too unloaded a pile of stuff. Unfortunately she unloaded most of it by giving it to Gleek. You know all that space I helped Gleek create? It’s filled. It is filled with little plasic shiny things, and pictures cut out of catalogs, and buttons, and anything else shiny, fuzzy, or pink that you can imagine. The good news is that I can count on Gleek to leave these things lying around where they’ll get broken and then I can get rid of them. Kiki kept everything carefully put away.

Howard is also feeling a need to clear out. He’ll be tackling his office. I think I may be making a run to the thrift store tomorrow to drop stuff off. It will feel really good to get it all out of the house. My storage room actually has floorspace now. If I could find a rug for it the kids could actually do some playing down there. That would be good because in the winter we always need more places for kids to play separately from each other. The frequency of squabbles has been steadily increasing ever since Christmas. My patience with squabbles has been decreasing at the same rate. Yet another reason I long for warmer weather.

Hopefully tomorrow will also see the death of bathroom mildew. I’m starting to be scared at the variety of colors that seem to be available for mildewy growths.

Hmm. If I want to accomplish all of that, I’d better get off to bed.