Life of the self-employed

Last week was my first full week of being self-employed. My first day started off a little rough as I had two day cares to find in the middle of a snow storm. I ended up running the van off the road and dislodging the headlight casing with the post I hit. When you have a 10 year old van with 224,000 miles on it, this is not a big deal. Then, after dragging my enormous bag of toys around to a couple of stops, I found out that I might not get paid for one of my sessions due to a paperwork glitch. It all worked out in the end and I have come to the conclusion that I still like working for myself. For the most part, I find myself less exhausted and yelling at my kids less often. I also have had time for some mad cleaning/organizing of closets and bedrooms. I'm convinced that some bachelor must have designed our house because it has hardly any storage space. I had taken the closet doors off the girls room to open up more space. That leaves two closets for a soon-to-be family of 5. And we are super efficient...meaning that I absolutely do not hold onto stuff that does not fit or we don't wear/use. You might say I am an anti-hoarder...which gets me into trouble sometimes (like recently when I threw away the case that some software came in. Am I the only one who didn't know that you need the silly product code in order to load the software onto another computer? An $80 oops) Still, we have to be super creative with space. So, Alina and Ethan will share the one bedroom closet, while Meagan shares the master closet with us. Chris says he's the only man in Fishers who has to share a closet with a 9 year old girl. He's probably right.

Alina is really writing letters now. Can write her name and then strings together "sentences" like the one below. She's also drawing real people. The picture below is of "mommy at school." That's me hanging on the monkey bars. The number 100 is written above my head because that's how old I am. That's gum coming out of my mouth because I'm chewing way too much.



Alina sometimes tires of my endless store of nicknames for her. I have recently taken to calling her "punky-doo". The other day she said, "Mom, don't call me punky-doo. I don't like that nick name. Please just call me cow." (apparently a much less offensive term of endearment)

We were playing memory the other night and Alina was getting a lot of matches. Each time she got a match she would say, "I am smart at this game...Chinese people are smart" (Not sure where she heard that...we definitely don't throw around stereotypes...luckily this one is pretty benign:)

I love the way that 4-year-olds misunderstand names for things and end up creating novel names for them. For years Meagan referred to Parmesan cheese as "Papa John's cheese". NiNi calls American cheese "miracle cheese." (we really like cheese) NiNi also remembered that we sometimes get big boxes of treats at Sam's club, in particular we recently got some ice cream sandwiches. When I told her they were all gone she asked if we could go to "Santa Club" to get some more. I guess going there is a little like Christmas, except nothing is free and it doesn't get delivered down your chimney. Now that would be nice. During a pretend tea party, Alina kept offering me a cup of "apple-tite." I thought she meant applesauce or apple cider, but she insisted it was a cup of apple-tite. When I asked her what apple-tite was she said, "You know, if you eat too many snacks you'll lose your apple-tite."