Go to bed!!!!

This weekend two days, two different ways. Both nights went to bed way too late (like 2 a.m.). Saturday morning had to wake up with the kids who on a week day have to be dragged out of beds at 8, but on weekends won't sleep later then 7. Today I refused to wake up so V. obliged and got up with them. He fed them and played with them while I continued to sleep. Mind you, they were so loud that I was dreaming our house was full of people and kids and pets and don't ask how the kitchen looked, but it was good that I could sleep until half past ten. Woke up groggy with a headache but still I was a different person.

Yesterday I was pissed off all the time without a specific reason, short tempered, yelling a lot, badly handling everything, from kids to cleaning and cooking. Today I've cooked, cleaned the house, played with kids (a little), prepared parcels for the shop, did two loads of laundry, and had patience for things that would have made me mad yesterday. Like Ana wanted ice cream before lunch, took it from the freezer, and would not put it back. And when I took it away from her she went ballistic and smashed her plate to the floor into pieces. So for the first time I took her into the corner for a time-out, and to my surprise she understood and stayed there crying for a while, then we talked about what happened, she calmed down, came to the table and ate nicely. Who would have thought?

Now could someone please force me go to bed no later then 10:30 p.m. so my kids would have a nice mom tomorrow?

Father's day

We have prepared a little surprise for father's day at the low budget end. I fell in love with the silhouettes ever since I've first seen them on Molly's blog. After that I've noticed them here and there on the web, NieNie makes her children's every year and hangs them on the entrance hall, Lu made wonderful ones last year, but I've never made time to try it. Until now. And I have to thank Lu for that. She decided to make stencils on a T-shirt with her boys' silhouettes this year. I have considered the idea also but in the end I made the simple paper ones. I've used Molly's method: take pictures, upload them on the computer, crop and adjust the size of the pictures to fit the frames, trace the contours with a soft pencil on baking paper, then cut with a scalpel both through the baking paper and the black paper, put it in the frame with white background et voila!

The background doesn't match the matting, I'm gonna have to change that later. The CD is also part of the present. I don't know much about Michael Nyman's music except that I love the soundtrack of Jane Campion's "The Piano" (as well as the whole movie). This CD is not exactly what I hoped but I think I'll grow to like it. Hopefully V will like it too and will not read this tonight to spoil the surprise.

So making the silhouettes was easy and it was fun for the kids. They didn't really help much but they enjoyed watching. I mean, there was playing and bickering and even screaming going on next to me while I was working, at some point I've lost my nerve and went to the other room because "I can't do ONE thing with you guys!!!", which has upset terribly Andrei. He started crying and gave me a heartbreaking "Mommy, you are mean FOR us", which woke me up. I've apologized to them, hugged them, told them I was sorry and I shouldn't have said such a thing, and "Let's try to work together!". All was well after that. They were excited to see how their form appeared from the black paper, and can't wait to give the present to daddy.

Here are the pictures I've used:

I think Ana's profile is a bit too small but I wanted to have her ponytail in the picture. Our frames are quite small, they hold 9x16 cm pictures without matting, but with bigger frames it would be even easier to cut the silhouettes.

Now will have to pack everything and wait till Sunday. Happy father's day to everyone!

The up-date for last week: Ana has had chickenpox. We've been together at home and she was a trouper. Barely had any fever, playing happily, we've been cooking together, painting together (so I've had my share of fun). On Wednesday I had to go to work so she had fun with daddy.

That's her doll's dummy in her mouth. We've thrown her own away more than one year ago and she still misses it.

And so, coming to this week's news, daddy is traveling abroad and we are on our own. This is the first time since before Ana was born that I'm alone with the kids for such a long time. I am anxious to see how we'll do. Piece of cake ! I'll have to

-feed kids in the morning

-take the kids to school/ day care by bus/bike

-prepare parcels for the shop and take them to post office (bus/bike)

- work from home until 4 p.m. (meanwhile tidy -up the house, start first washing, unload machine, start second load )

-pick-up the kids from afternoon club/ daycare (again bus/bike)

-cook dinner

-feed kids

-do homework with Andrei

-keep kids happy (draw, read, play, cook, watch TV)

-bath kids (keep them from killing each over over GoGo's or something else)

-put kids to bed (start at 7:30 so they would sleep at 9:30)

-clean up the " remains of the day"

-hang laundry, iron the dried stuff, load washing machine for next day

-prepare parcels for the shop

-finally go to bed

-wash, rinse and repeat.

Also tomorrow Andrei's friend will come with us in the morning and afternoon to and from school, tomorrow evening they go together to this club where they build cool mini models for cars and planes and ships, and on Wednesday Andrei has soccer practice. And a million other little things, like preparing a surprize for father's day.

And have I mentioned the laundry? We'll go to the library one evening, we'll have friends visiting us and try to make the best of the situation.

Also, let's not forget the laundry!

Yes, we'll be fine!

Wednesday, Nov 4th

It seems I can't keep- up with writing AND posting in time. The last two days have been chaos. The kids were ill so they have been at home with me. Andrei has lung infection AGAIN and he is taking Amoxicilin , Ana is mostly OK , but poor souls I had to drag them with me to run my errands walking, changing buses, cycling. It was very hard on Andrei, but they were both cheered up with a little Kinder chocolate egg. There's nothing like a little bribing to get you out of trouble.

Autumn holiday

This is a long overdue post. I've been trying to post it for three days already so it is a bit outdated, but since it is finally done I'll post it anyway.

We've had a veeery loong weekend. Andrei was at home on holiday on Thursday and Friday, so I decided to keep Ana at home too. I was envisioning all kinds of instructive, creative and fun activities for the three of us. I was going to be a stay at home mom for those four days with a big plan for playing, learning and cooking with kids. But all these good intentions went out the window when I decided I could also tackle the laundry, here and there, in the mean time. I guess you could say in the end that I have chosen the laundry over the kids. How lame am I? And it is a battle I keep losing. No, not just a battle, a war. The laundry always wins.

But we killed the boredom of four days at home with some good ol' jumping on the sofa cushions,

some cooking,



and some secret messages decoding as part of an imaginary game Andrei and I are playing. It is a little bit of story telling, a little bit of dreaming while learning on the way. In the game I am Donald Duck and he is a little hamster (his idea) living in my pocket. Together, we are on an epic journey with lots of challenges and obstacles that can be overcome by solving different math problems or deciphering messages encoded with the Bionicle alphabet or a simple Cesar code.

We have now completed the first level of the game and go to level two although Andrei seems to lose interest. I have to come up with some new stuff. Any suggestion?

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Last night I went to bed at 1 a.m. and today I had to travel to work (two hours commute), so woke up at 5:30. But around 4 a.m. Ana woke-up crying so we set together in the Poang and rocked until she went back to sleep. This is something very dear to me. Ever since I was pregnant with her I've wanted a rocking chair for the two of us. We didn't get one, but Poang does a decent job. Ana and I have spent many hours in it rocking. And last night as I was holding her, tired, knowing I woud have to get-up for real in less than an hour, I thought: she is almost three, she can dress herself, eat by herself, knows exactly what she wants and gets it, but she is still my baby.

"Art" project for a two year old and her mommy...

Here is a little exercise we made inspired by Kathy Barbro from art projects for kids.
We used watercolors, masking tape and a black felt-pen. I've made a border out of the masking tape, then I've cut the buildings and taped them randomly on the paper. I could have done a better job at this but didn't think it through. I was just trying to keep Ana busy while doing the real thing (winter birch trees) with Andrei. In the end the real thing didn't come out as planed. Andrei insisted he'd paint the bark cracks in electric green just because he has to put this green on everything (we, bad parents that we are, didn't paint his room green). Anyway, I let him do what he wanted and helped Ana put her choice of colors with a sponge on her paper. Than I let it dry, peeled the masking tape off, draw the buildings with a black pen, and here's what we've got:

This is the original picture scanned, which I have then opened in Gimp and started playing with:

• brighten-up and enhance colors

• oilify and add supernova effects in the up-right corner

• erase little color spots from the buildings

The result is quite neat I think. Now the original lies into little pieces in the waste paper basket (Ana had fun with the scissors). Good that I have saved the files.

How to eat breakfast on weekend...

Picnic on the living room floor...

Snuggled in comforters on the sofa...

On ironing and other important stuff

 

I used to love ironing. Before I had kids or even when Andrei was little it was one of my all times favorite housework. Things started to change little by little as I had less and less time to do it. Then I started procrastinating about it and there you have it, now it ‘s a burden.

But wait! I’ve just come-up with a new routine.  It involves a number of steps and some preparing events:

1. Wait until your husband has a Swedish class in the evening, your son has football practice and you have a pounding headache.
   
2. You will have to leave work early, pick up your son from the afterschool club, pick up your daughter from the daycare and take them to the football practice thing.
   
3. Negotiate on the way with your son that if he doesn’t want to go to the training session you could all just go home but there will be no TV or Play Station that evening. He will try to bargain with you for an extra hour of PS2 playing if he goes to football but don’t give in.
   
4. The weather should be freezing for this time of the year (late September) so all of you will not be dressed well enough for one hour outside with no sun to warm you up. You will be pacing up and down trying to stay alive while he is training.
   
5. Then you will hurry to the bus stop but the bus will be just passing by as you are crossing the street. Another 20 min of waiting.
   
6. You will get home finally but your head is ready to explode. The kids are happily playing in the tub while you fix some 5min meal for them.
   
7. You feed them, put them to bed, fall asleep with Ana and move to your own bed later when your husband gets home. So you go to sleep at HALF PAST NINE PM! Has that ever happened in the last seven years?
   
8. You wake up at 5:15 and debate whether to go back to sleep or get up and start the day. You’ve read many a time about the sleeping cycle and the chances that you will wake up all groggy when the alarm clock goes are quite big given that it is set to 6.
   
9. So you get up and attack the Everest of clean clothes waiting for ironing. It means about 5 washing loads. At that point there will be no clean pants and T-shirts for the kids in their closets, so you start rummaging through the pile looking for them. Then you get some gray cells to start working and sort up all the clothes by type and owner.
10.  Set up the ironing board in the kitchen (it's the only relatively clean room in the house and the big table perfect for piling ironed clothes) and get to business. Take all of Andrei’s pants to the kitchen and iron them, take all his T’s and iron them, take all of Ana’s pants and iron them, take all her T’s and iron them… You get the point.

The thing is if you’ve sorted them like said before you will iron them very fast (1min per item -Is it fast or not?), you won’t have to mix operations ironing-sorting, ironing-sorting, and in the end you will have the piles ready to go to their closets with ALL their clean clothes. You won’t have to wonder 2 days later where are the red pants from this red T-shirt that Ana insists on wearing today.

So this is the big discovery. Or you could just buy a tumble dryer and forget about ironing all together. That’s my plan B.