To Do

Ok, I’m feeling just slightly overwhelmed at the moment. Sometime in the next few days I need to get invitations printed and mailed for Kolby’s birthday party that is coming up in two weeks, need to see which requirements have already been fulfilled and what activities still need to be done by each girl in my ‘activity days’ class at church and then prepare a schedule for the entire school year with lessons that correspond to the different requirements that they still need to pass off (the teacher just got released, so I got bumped up from assistant to teacher), once I figure out a schedule I need to get the schedules printed to hand out to the girls and prepare my first lesson for Wednesday night, I need to contact someone to see about getting Eli a speech evaluation because he still mixes up the sounds in those words with ‘S’ in them (I’m not concerned that he has any problems, I think that we’ll find out that he’s totally ‘normal’ and just needs a little extra work on pronouncing certain words, just like Kolby did when he was younger), I need to sew the eyes back onto the Elmo costume before Halloween because they started to come loose, we need to plan an activity for our family night tonight – maybe we’ll take a walk on the trails in the woods near our house if it’s not too cold – that’s close by, free, and good exercise, I was very excited to ‘meet’ someone online last week who is the wife of my 4th cousin and I need to gather up all the old family letters, photos, documents, etc. that I have on the Spohr and Schaefer family lines and send those to her, I’d like to find some time to get in a little more research on the genealogy that I am helping a friend of Faith’s with, oh yeah – updating the blog, I’ve gotten to the point where I haven’t posted any photos or video in long enough that I now have to find a pretty big block of time in order to get that all done, and it would be a good idea to bring the kids’ bikes and outdoor toys inside before it starts to get really cold out there, and we have a gift card from Home Depot so we’d really like to go pick up a can of paint and get the downstairs of the house a little more ‘finished’ looking but when we took in our little Home Depot sample paint jar to have them make us a gallon of the sample color they told us that they can’t convert the barcode from the sample jar to the gallon can size so we now have to get the original can that we had the sample made from and make another trip out there before we can get that done, oh and I can’t forget to send a note to Kolby’s kindergarten teacher reminding him that Kolby will be riding the bus home to a friend’s house on Friday afternoon because Michael and I get to go on a white water rafting trip that day put on by his work, and I’d better also remember to send the special Halloween pencils to school with Kolby this week that he picked out to give all of his classmates because it’s his birthday (because of all the allergies kids aren’t allowed to bring cupcakes or any other kind of food to share for their birthdays anymore, so pencils will have to be the next best thing), and Kolby asked me the other day if he gets to go and pick out special food for breakfast on Saturday for his birthday (apparently he remembers the fact that last year we happened to be out of food on the morning of his birthday so I let him go with me and pick out some special donuts and chocolate milk – I didn’t realize at the time that I was creating a new tradition that I’d have to stick to in future years), and there are about a dozen other things that come to mind that I’d also like to get done in the near future but I know I’ve got to be at least a little realistic with my ‘to do’ list, since I still have to feed, change, clothe, referee, put to bed, give medical care to, entertain, chauffeur, and give one on one attention to all of the boys everyday.

But at least we have been working on something that is helping with that last thing on the list: I’ve heard from two different friends about this idea and we tried it out last week and it really seemed to work well – since our weekly ‘kid’s nights out’ were getting more and more difficult to schedule in because of Michael’s work schedule lately, we decided to start something new: We have ‘kids’ nights up’ instead. Basically, one boy gets to stay up about half an hour after his brothers go down to bed at night. It’s not every night – Monday night is family night and Saturday and Sunday are Mommy’s and Daddy’s nights for dates and relaxing – but on the other four days of the week we have nights up. That way we don’t have to wait until a time when Michael and I are both available (for one of us to go out with a boy and the other to stay home with the others), although we still can take a boy out and do something fun if it’s possible. But the nice thing about this is that the boys get to have their special time with Mommy and/or Daddy a lot more often – almost every week instead of once every 5 weeks. Half an hour isn’t that much time for Michael or I, but it means a lot to the boys. And they get to pick something fun to do with us. So far Kolby stayed up one night and played sports games on the Wii with Michael (when Michael had a day off work for his vacation), Eli stayed up and I let him create his own genealogy file on the laptop with me (he was actually really excited about typing in his name, his parents’ names, and his brothers’ names, and he keeps asking me when he can do it again), Camden chose to have a ‘holdy’ with Mommy and sing songs for the whole time, which was fun even though I almost ran out of songs I could think of before the half hour was over, and Isaac stayed up and had holdies with Mommy and with Daddy. So, it’s a success so far. Well, I really had better get Kolby’s invitations ready before the boys get up from naps.