September Recap

Ahhh, the end of September, and what a month it's been. Would you like a recap? You would? Aww.

• Here's a picture of my darling girls during an afternoon session of playing school. They were getting along so well. It almost makes me forget about the weeping and wailing that took place this morning. 

• As mentioned in the last post, Nils quit his "real" job and is now working for iGlobal full time. So far so good. He loves it when I ask him how he likes being unemployed. Now now, it's all in good fun. (He's loving it.)
  
• Since June, I have been to the dentist 11 times. ELEVEN. Here I am, getting mold #2 for the crown that didn't fit the first time. Don't even get me started. But don't I look happy and approachable?
  
  
  
  
  
• I now spend around 45 minutes a day driving Anders to and from school. The carpool situation didn't work out so well, and I was sweating a lot every morning trying to get everyone up and out the door by 7:30 a.m. By the time the older two were at school I felt like I needed a nap- at 8:30 in the morning. So, he switched to the later time track, which has worked out great. Anyway, I had no idea how much the morning insanity/carpool was stressing me out, until Anders told me how much he hated it and I thought, yeah, I really hate it, too. As soon as it was eliminated from our lives, I felt like having a party. Weird.
  
• Anders joined the Chess Club and the school choir. I had to convince him to join the choir, but he was adamant about Chess Club. Did this child really grow in my womb? I've never even played chess. Ever. Goodbye, soccer. HELLLLLOOOOOO, CHESS!
  
• Aani started in a neighborhood preschool, where we take turns having it at our house for 2 weeks at a time. My turn starts next week. Pray for me. Just kidding, I'm actually pretty excited. It's a rad group of kids and moms. Aani loves it, and it's FREE!
  
• Ava has an obsession with toilet paper and diaper cream, not necessarily together. She'll pull little pieces of toilet paper off the roll, wipe her nose, then put them in the toilet. I kept thinking that we were going through toilet paper really fast, and then one day the toilet was clogged because there was probably half of a roll of tiny pieces filling the thing up. Arrrgggh. She also always manages to dig the diaper cream out of its most recent hiding place and smear it all over her legs, face, clothes and hands. It drives me cuckoo. 

  
  
• At the beginning of the year, I made a declaration that I wanted to run a half-marathon this year. It didn't pan out in the spring, and I've had my sights set on one in October. I ran a 10k in July and thought I would die. Well, I've been going back and forth mentally about doing this half, but a couple of weeks ago, when I ran 7 miles without too much agony, I made up my mind to just sign up and do it. I called Nils and convinced him to let me sign him up too, explaining how much fun it will be to run 13.1 miles together. I've been learning a lot as I've been doing these longer runs, namely that: Chafing is not your friend. Also, that: Walking a minute for every mile I run works like a charm. SO GUESS WHAT WE'RE DOING TONIGHT FOR DATE NIGHT??? Running 9 miles. How cute it that? Isn't it nice that Nils, who hasn't been "training" for this at all, is willing to sacrifice a perfectly good date night to get this run out of the way? Maybe we'll hold hands the whole time. So precious.
  
  Anyway, I've been having nightmares about running, so obviously my anxiety about this thing is pretty heightened. I've gotta learn how to stop psyching myself out. I know it's going to be hard, and I fully expect to hate the last couple of miles, but I'll be happy to have this goal checked off the list. I'm curious to see if I'll want to do more when it's done. What an ordeal.

A wee update

Hello, friends. How are you? I have blogger guilt. I suppose this is similar to scrapbooker guilt, not that I would know, per se, since I've never scrapbooked. But I imagine it's kind of the same thing in that I have 3 million pictures of stuff we've done, but I don't know which computer they're on, and the thought of looking for them and then uploading them here makes me want to suck my thumb and go night-night. That's my 'splanation for all of the picturelessness.

Well, some big things are happening 'round these here parts.

1) School started, and the night before it started I had a sob-fest. Oh man, it was ugly. For one thing, I actually really enjoyed summer with the kids at home. I loved the lazy mornings, and that they all played together and (mostly) got along all summer. I loved the lax bedtime, not having to stress about waking up at the butt-crack of dawn every morning to get to school. So, two big changes this year that made me a blubbering idiot: Addie going into 1st grade and being gone all day, and Anders going to a new school. Orchestrating the logistics of this in my head, and the fact that they both wanted the same time track, has given me an eency bit of stress. Thus, I cried the night before school started as we were talking about it and getting ready for the next day. Apparently my children have never seen me cry, because they didn't know what was happening. They asked me what I was doing. They asked me why my eyes were all red. Geez. I told them I was CRYING, because I was going to miss them while they were at school, and they thought I had lost my mind.

Anyway, I'm in a carpool with 2 other people for getting Anders to school, so it's all worked out just fine. I have an awesome neighbor who makes sure Addie gets to school on the mornings that I drive Anders & Co., and afternoons when I pick him up, Addie hangs out at said neighbor's house for a few minutes until I get home. Lest it seem that I never drive Addie, I do either drop her off or pick her up every day, so hopefully she's feelin' the mom love.

On a bright and lovely note, Anders loves school. Like, loves it so much that he's really sad that he has to stay home on Labor Day. I knew this change would be good for him, but I honestly didn't anticipate that he would LOVE going to school every day. I'm very pleased. Addie also loves school, but that's no surprise. I think staying all day has been a little bit of an adjustment for her, but school is totally her thing. I'm pretty confident that she'll be a teacher when she grows up. She loves bossing younger people around, and is rather effective at it. She's got those methods down.

2) Nils is quitting his job and going to work for iGlobal full time. iGlobal is the company he and his buddy started.


AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


I won't give you the whole back story, because it's boring. But it's been 2 1/2 years in the making, and we've just been waiting for the company to grow enough so that he could do this as his day job. He's spent countless nights working on this thing. I'm sure he'll continue to do so, but it's super weird that this day arrived. It's scary to leave behind a great job at a great company, with benefits like insurance, 401K, a paid week off at Christmas- stuff like that. I'm still hyperventilating a little bit, but we're just gonna roll with this baby and see where it goes. It's freakin' me out!

Welp, that's pretty much it. See ya later, alligators!