Month: January 2007

For a mother of four downtime is elusive. There are days where I desperately want to have just 20 minutes to myself. I check to make sure that all the kids are occupied and then I sit down to eat while reading a book or to write a blog entry. If I get to finish my meal or my entry, I walk away feeling calmer and ready to be a nice mom again. But almost invariably one of the kids needs something or gets hurt or picks a fight. Then I have to interrupt my relaxation time to be a mom. If my little bit of downtime is interrupted it doesn’t count. I have to start over to resettle into my “I am relaxing” mindset. Today is my third day in a row of too little sleep. This means my need for downtime has been greater than usual. It is worse in the afternoon and evening because those are my low ebbs of energy. Unfortunately evening is a very high maintenance time of day.

Part of me wants to lock myself into my office, turn music on loud and tune out all the noises. Unfortunately that would mean the kids would be unsupervised. They’d probably fight over something. Then there would be hitting and yelling. Or someone would need something and come pounding on my door. Or they’d just sit where they are and holler for me to come to them to solve all their problems.

On one level I understand that all of these things are simply because they are children. They are by definition immature. It is my job to be mature. I have to model good behavior and pass judgment and mete out punishment or rewards. I just get so tired. I need to go to bed tonight just about as soon as my kids do. Then I get to get up and do it all again tomorrow.

Oh and while I’m griping about things, today was cold and gray all day long. There wasn’t enough sunshine.

At least lunchtime was really nice. Howard and I spent an hour together in the kitchen talking and making plans for this coming year. I liked that part of today. And I got stuff done. Not all of it, but enough.

For the past several weeks Howard has been suffering from allergy attacks. We finally figured out that his allergies were better during the night when the furnace wasn’t running and the worst hit just after the furnace came on in the mornings. Hot air isn’t usually allergenic, so we decided to blame the dust that the furnace blows back into our house. I resolved to pay for a duct cleaning. Then I called around and found out that there are $90 duct cleanings that I can duplicate with a home vacuum cleaner and there are $750 duct cleanings which get the whole system truly clean at the expense of my budget. I decided to try vacuuming everything out myself and to clean the filter really well to see if that would make a difference for Howard.

Many of our heating vents are in the floor. I had no idea that floor vents were such magnets for detritus. In fact I am now entertaining the theory that each vent is the home of a little gnome who hoards things. I’m not sure I can explain the quantities of junk in any other way. Each gnome had very definite preferences as to hoarding material. In my boy’s room I hauled 6 handfuls of crackers out of the vent along with random small toys. The girls room contained a comparable amount of beads and sunflower seeds. The vent nearest the front door had 78 cents in change and piles of sawdust. The vent in the corner of the living room had dead ants and cheerios. The vent in the kitchen was the most eclectic. It contained random food crumbs, crayons, a pencil, bits of paper, and a mousetrap.

Having cleared the vents, I tackled the air intakes. This is when I learned why $750 might just be worth it. The dust inside those intakes could have been measured with a ruler. I vaccumed out as much as I could reach. Patches was fascinated by this whole process. He hovered beside me holding the flashlight, helping remove and replace screws, and sometimes even vaccuum. He loved it, he wanted me to go find more vents and intakes to vacuum. I felt tired and grubby, but there was still the filter to clean.

Usually when I clean the filter I take it out on the front lawn and spray it off with a high power hose nozzle. This is January, the hose is full of ice. So I took the filter up to the bathtub. I decided to use soap and hot water because I remembered that much of the dust I vacuumed was kind of sticky. It was amazing how quickly the tub water got filthy. I kept swishing and soaping and emptying water and refilling and soaking. Finally the filter was almost back to it’s original blue color. I allowed it to dry and stuck it back in.

What have I learned from all this? That I should probably clean my vents more often. Also, spraying a filter off with the hose does not get it as clean as washing in hot soapy water. I sure hope that it all makes a difference for Howard’s allergies. he has been really miserable lately.

I must have missed the bulletin which announced a huge sleepover in my room last night. Both Gleek and Patches got the bulletin though. Patches arriving in my room is fairly frequent, so that wasn’t too surprising. Gleek’s visit was prompted by a truly terrifying nightmare. I know this nightmare was terrifying because as we approached bedtime this evening she curled up in my lap and cried to me while she told me the details. She also requested with big watery eyes that I please allow her to stay up until Howard and I go to bed. Then she can just go to sleep with us and be safe. Specifically she wants Howard to snuggle her because he is the safest person. I didn’t give her request a definitive answer because there were three other things going on simultaneously to the conversation. Gleek ready to snuggle and talk is a rare and precious event. I really wanted to savor it and focus on her, but Patches was having a meltdown because he couldn’t get ketchup to come out of the bottle. After 5 minutes of distress I finally set Gleek down for a moment and blorked some onto his plate, at which point Patches set to whining because he’d already run out of hot dog and now had nothing to dip in the precious ketchup. I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Then Patches dissolved into full-on crying because Mommy Laughed At Him. So Patches needed snuggles and Gleek needed snuggles. Both wanted undivided Mommy time. Moments like that are one of the hardest parts of parenting. It seems like I’m always being tugged in multiple directions by conflicting needs.

The three of us snuggled into the rocking chair and had a talk about dreams. Gleek talked about her dreams and Patches seriously discussed the dreams of his stuffed Yoshi. Apparently Yoshi has sad dreams that no one will play with him. (I think that Patches was discussing his own scary dreams, but doing it safely by displacing them onto Yoshi.) Gleeks dream featured monsters with glowing red eyes which catch people and suck out their souls. We talked about what causes dreams (no more Harry Potter for a while methinks) and what we can do to make them less scary. We dreamed up a whole arsenal of imaginary weapons that Gleek can use should those monsters dare to show up again.

After all that it was 8:30, no homework was done and no kids were in bed yet. Today was supposed to be the day of re-establishing a normal schedule. Sigh. At least Patches is in bed asleep. Kiki and Link are both quietly working on homework and Gleek is laying on a couch not sleeping until Howard gets home to snuggle her. I figure I’ll concentrate on the older two for awhile. Gleek may fall asleep on her own, thus solving the issue. One night of catering to a particularly frightening dream isn’t a problem. I do have to watch for patterns though. Hopefully she’ll have good dreams tonight and by tomorrow night the nightmare will have faded enough that it won’t be as big a problem.

Oh, and Link acquired a retainer today, so needed to talk over why he needs it and what it will and won’t do. Why do they all have emotional crises on the same day when I’m so worn out?

Yesterday I was talking with raisinfish and rattled off a whole list of things that I want to accomplish during the next year. When I wound down she said “Wow, how are you going to keep track of all that?” I might have mentioned planners or organization or something, I don’t remember. The point is that last night I was totally confident in my ability to track a gazillion goals big and small. This evening I’m staring at the dolist in my planner and seeing how many things aren’t checked off and I’m beginning to wonder. Honestly, it shouldn’t be that hard. Mostly I’m trying to reinstate some good habits which have fallen by the wayside.

I don’t know what it is about the last day of vacation. Yesterday I was lamenting that vacation hadn’t been long enough. Today I am totally ready to send all of the kids back to school. I wonder if they have really been more squabblish today or if it is an observer effect inside me because I’m gearing up to send them all back. At least I got all the Christmas stuff put away.

I think I was inspired by my mom’s impressive example. She has been clearing out decades worth of accumulated junk in her house. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see the full effect at her house because I arrived with a van full of people and stuff which filled up all the empty spaces that she created. Anyway I came home filled with a desire to clear stuff out and get rid of it. When I’m in this mood I get so ruthless that I actually have to double check myself. I was packing away our big fluffy tree skirt and part of me claimed that it takes up too much space and I should just get rid of it. We hardly ever use it anyway. Umm, well yeah. It’s a Christmas decoration. It spends 11 months of the year in a box. I would be very sad next year if I got rid of it this year because I bought it myself and love it. All of our Christmas stuff fits inside 5 boxes and one huge tree duffle. That’s a whole lot less than most people have. To appease the get-rid-of-it desire, I did pitch a couple of broken tree ornaments.

Tomorrow we embark on another 5 months of school schedule. I think these five will be better than the last five were. At the very least these five months will present new and different challenges.