The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

We went for a ride into the mountains today, and my girls were not impressed with being back in the car. Whining, demanding food, asking “Are we there?” before we even left city limits… I can only imagine what it will be like when we really do leave, now that they know what a long day’s drive feels like.

But hey, look what we found in Ouray!

Apparently I sell western themed paintings and bronze ponies.
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The house is officially on the market on Monday, and Tom is leaving on a business trip on Tuesday morning. The plan was for us to get home that Friday, but now Tom and I are wondering if we shouldn’t hold off and give it a few more days for them to be able to show it without anyone there. He’s put so so so much work into it in the last week and a half, and I know as soon as we walk in the door there will be piles of clothes on the floor, and dishes in the sink. Obviously we could make it work, but why swim upstream if I do not have to? So, who knows when we will be home. I have a feeling that we will know a day or two before, and then just throw everyone in the car and get going.

It’s really been great here though. Ella and my little sister Tillie are great friends, I’m so glad I get to spend time with the boys as they grow up, and I am reminded again how lucky I am that my sister Chance and I get along so well. We parent similarly, we respect each others boundaries, we read and knit and cook dinner together. It’s been easy to be here, and makes me much more patient to wait and see what happens.

As much as we love being here, the one thing I regret is that the sleep schedule that we fought so hard for is now kaput. The girls are sharing a room here (and will be in the little house) but have never had to before, so bedtime is drama, the 15 middle of the night scream fests are drama, waking up is drama, and naptime is drama. Tonight is the first night that I let them lay in the same bed, turned off the light, and walked away, and so far, almost an hour later, they are still in there, talking, dancing, and occasionally yelling “Mama?”.

Scratch that, Alice just came walking down the hall.

If you have any failproof sleep tips (hahahaha does that exist?) for two children sleeping in one room, send them my way.

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We’ve been talking to Tom four or five times a day to get house updates (they are listing it on Monday! Yeehaw!) and also just to hear his voice. We obviously knew being apart would be hard, but the reality of it is a lot harder than the possibility of it. Ella regularly asks when he is coming home from work, and Alice crowds my lap anytime we are talking, yelling “DADA! DADA! DAAAAAADAAAAA!” It looks like we will plan to be home by June 6th, so that is 10 more days without him.

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The girls are loving that Chance is a girly auntie, who will do their fingernails, and let them play in her jewelry box.

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If you had to guess, would you think Alice was my kid, or my sister’s?

(Tillie,6; Ella,3; Alice,1; Me,26; Chance,29)

I swear I was there when she was born…

Just in case you haven’t been following me over on twitter: We made it to my sister’s in less than 36 hours, and have spent the last four days trying to recover. The girls exceeded my expectations in the car on the first day, and we made it nearly 700 miles before we stopped near Salt Lake City. The next day we took on the last 400 miles through the desert, during which the girls wailed, my car started beeping ominously, and a jerk in a RV tried to run me off the road. Good times.

We made here in time to celebrate my little sister’s birthday (she’s 6, I’m 26) and watched 15 kids massacre a pinata pony. Other than that, we have been enjoying the fact that our daily plans have consisted of “Go to the park” and “Go grocery shopping”. Later this week we may venture to the local museum, and the pool, but there is no rush. It is just nice to be here.

Tom has been giving me updates on what he has accomplished at the house, and at this rate, he should be able to list the house before he leaves on the 2nd. If we come home while he is gone, the plan is to stay out of the house as much as possible. Playdates, the children’s museum, long days at the park. Home only to eat, clean, and sleep.

Twitter is still probably the best place to keep up with us, even though my phone is dead (and I have lost the charger *sigh*) since it takes substantially more time and energy to write a post with four kids around than two. Pictures eventually, when I find my camera cord (which is lost with my chargers. Booo.) I realized that i could upload my photos onto my sister’s computer via a card slot on her printer, so more pictures are here.

I finally told Ella that we are leaving to Auntie Chance’s house tomorrow (fingers crossed) and she has been amazing all day. No fighting with her sister, no distracting me from cleaning, no whining that her sandwich has crust. Just.. quiet. And helpful. And really, really, really excited.

I’m feeling a lot better about this entire endeavor as well. Tom has all but forbidden me from cleaning (since he could see that it was stressing me out to the point of tears), and when I do manage to make some small headway (every piece of laundry in this house is clean, folded, packed or boxed up) he notices it and conveniently ignores the days worth of dishes in the sink. So much of the pressure I walk around with is self inflicted, and when I step back and really look at what my family needs from me, it seems so easy. I still feel horribly guilty about leaving the house in worse shape than I wanted to, but there are only so many times that Tom can tell me that he wants me to leave it a mess, if that means I can stop stressing out so much, before I say okay.

The plan is to pack the car today, have dinner with Tom’s parents tonight, go to sleep when Tom does (8pm at the latest), get up at 2:30, make sure everything is set, drink 6 cups of coffee, and leave bu 3:30. Drive drive drive as far as I can before the girls wake up, and then it’s stop and go all day, until I am either half way there, or it gets dark. The next day, we will make the final 8 hour stop and go trek to my sister’s house.

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I have a crate load of ‘NEW!” toys, videos and snacks ready, the potty chair under the seat, all of our kid’s audio books on my iPod, have scoped out hotels and parks along the way, Pam bought the girls a dvd player (there is a time and a place fr everything, and the third hour of screaming in my car is the time and place for this), and I figure that even if the kids scream for 16 hours, I’ll survive, and hey, eventually they’ll go hoarse.

I will have internet on my phone, as well as at my sisters, but will probably not be commenting or around much. Twitter will probably be the most likely place to find me, since I can update via text message. We’ll be home as soon as I can overcome my dread of the drive back.

The last few days have been a nonstop rush to finish.. everything. The mountain of laundry, scrubbing the floors, washing the windows, packing up the craft room, finishing the flowerbeds, selling things on craigslist, finding supplies for the road trip… and there is still so much to do. I know we won’t be leaving tomorrow, as we had planned, but we are still shooting for Tuesday. I am overwhelmed, despite friends taking my children for hours at a time so that I could clean bathrooms, and Tom telling me (after witnessing me losing my damn mind over running out of clean rags) “Just leave it, I’ll deal with it.”

Tonight Tom and I talked about my postponing the trip until later – after his training, after Pam gets home so she can help with the girls, after we have more money in the bank – but honestly, I feel like I need to get out of here, and soon. I am burnt out physically and emotionally, and the stress of putting the house on the market is plucking my last nerve like a banjo. Tom, the most laid back man on earth, can not understand why I feel so anxious, and really, I don’t know if I understand it either. I just already feel defeated, and like my only choices are to let the boat sink, or to keep bailing out the water with a teaspoon. Either way I’m screwed, but it’s my personality to furiously keep trying, even when I know I’m not doing anything but wearing myself out.

And oh I am worn out.

But, leaving the house in this state means that Tom won’t be able to get it on the market before he leaves to training, meaning that we will either be staying in Colorado for much longer than I had planned, or that we will be coming home and creating the same situation we are in now. So, what’s the point?

Like I said, I’m feeling defeated. Tomorrow I get to take my kids to the DMV with me to renew my license, then to the mechanics for an oil change, and then possibly to a pawn shop to find a cheap portable DVD player. Or maybe I’ll just stay home and eat marshmallow fluff.

Today I pulled out my paper journal, and flipped to the page where we have been scrawling down our “Sell the house to-do list”. Of the original 15 things on the list, we have done four, and added another 16. The margins are full of dollar signs and due dates, all past. Panic set in, and I added, at the bottom of the page, “Buy better insurance and burn the place down.”

And then just for fun, I turned to the “Bills vs money” page, because if I were not freaked out enough about what all needs repaired NOW, realizing that we have no money to do said repairs finishes the job.  After a great morning with friends, I spent the afternoon biting my fingernails down to stubs, and calling in favors.

My first call was to Tom at work, where I left a message in all caps. “OH MY GOD WE ARE NEVER GOING TO SELL THE HOUSE I’M FREAKING OUT CALL ME.” The next call was to Meghan, to ask for her spare moving boxes. Then I called my sister and left her a message, something along the lines of  “:(“. When she called me back, I vented that I do not think the girls and I being home is helping get the house closer to show-ready. We make the majority of the messes, and I never seem to be able to stay on top of all of them. Plus, when Tom is home, we demand all of his attention, making it impossible for him to patch holes, fix the pipes, or repaint walls. If we were gone, Tom would have more then enough time to do the repairs, and his messes would be minimal (one outfit a day, one small meal.) He estimates that he could be finished in a week, max.

But getting us to Colorado (where my dad and sister are) would break our already strained accounts. To which my sister, of course, said  “We’ll cover it, when will you be here?” I told her I needed to check with Tom, and she recommended I also call my dad and ask him if he would be willing to help me out with gas money as well. And, of course, he is. Whatever our relationship, he is always happy to see his grandkids, so he is on board.

Then I had to call Tom back and break it to him that he would have to do all the repairs himself, AND we will be gone for a few weeks. He may be leaving on the 24th for his training extravaganza,  so between us leaving and him possibly being gone for a month, it could be  six week apart, which is a long time for all of us.

But, in those six weeks, we could show the house without the risk of anyone spilling cranberry juice on the carpet, or the smell of burnt chicken lingering in the air. The girls and I may come back during that long stretch while he is gone, but we plan to come back to a cleared out house, where the only laundry we will have is what we took to Colorado, and paper plates will be king. We will go to Mobius to play with toys, and if I absolutely have to craft, I will beg Meghan to let me come over and use her studio.  I have failed colossally at proving that I can take care of the kids, keep the house clean and make any headway on our list, so when we come home, it will be to a garage full of boxes, half labeled “Take and sort” and the other half labeled “Goodwill”.

The plan right now is to shoot for us leaving on Monday, splitting the 16 hour drive into two days. I need to finish the other lap desk this weekend,  deep clean the bathrooms and floors, and find a portable DVD player. I also have to tell Ella 465 times “No, we’re not leaving RIGHT NOW, go play.” She is a wee bit excited. We’ll see if she is as thrilled to see her cousins at hour 12 in the car.

Cousins in 2006:

2007:

2008:

Chance, do you have any from when Ella and I came down to Arizona in 2006 (and she got that horrible sun burn from taking my six month old Irish baby to the beach and thinking she didn’t need sunscreen? Yeah, I was a newbie)?
This is such a frazzled entry. No time to edit, I have bags to pack.

After nearly two weeks of blaming Alice’s sleep regression on her new molars, I started to doubt that she would ever sleep again. We had a good week and a half of progress, and then suddenly I was  back to spending hours each night holding a thrashing, angry baby. Night after night she has been awake, refusing to lay in her bed, refusing to drink our of her cup, wailing for her dad at midnight, and waking her sister up at 5 a.m. with her cries. The kindest word I would have used to describe myself at 3 a.m. last week would be frustrated. Angry, bitter,and hopeless would have worked also.

And then, perhaps out of sympathy, but more likely out of exhaustion, she slept. Monday night was better than the week before (but not great), and then last night she only woke up twice between midnight and 6 a.m. What is even better is that she is falling asleep on her own. Previously I had to sit next to her, rubbing her foot, singing “Lukey’s Boat” 867 times. And when I dared scoot off the bed and leave, she would wake up again screaming, putting us back to square one. In the last three days, she has decided to trust that I have not left the country just because she can not see me, and is content to sit in her bed, ‘reading’ a book, drinking her water, until she is tired enough to lay down and sleep. And then she does.

There are so many things I love about this age – her made up words, the joy she gets from seeing something new, the way she fits in my arms – but this sleep battle is not something I am going to look back on wistfully.

Of course, while she is sleeping, I am on the internet jinxing us, assuring that tonight will be hell. Must.Go.Sleep.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and type out my “Ten reasons I love being your mama” lists all day, but instead we went swimming. Then we had a picnic in the yard, then we dug for worms, and then we played kites on the porch. I took along a pen and used some spare construction paper to jot down ideas, but ended up with these letters instead. The originals are going into their (crowded, unorganized) memory boxes, but I thought I would share these here also. You can click over to read them larger.

As I am writing this, it is 1:22pm, exactly 26 years from the moment I was born. I was a posterior baby, “Sunny side up”, and when I was born I was so small, and blue.  They unwrapped the cord from my throat, and waited for me to cry, and when I did, my mother lay back, exhausted, waiting for them to put me in her arms. I do not know what her thoughts were, but I can imagine they were similar to my own at Alice’s birth:  Can I be enough for two children? Will she be like her sister, or be her own person? Will she be healthy? Will she have my talent for music, will she have the patience for fishing with her dad, will she know how loved she is?

I woke up this morning thinking of my mom, and how much I miss her. This may be the first year that the reality of a Birthday  has hit home – today is 26 years after my mother first held me in her arms, so thankful, so scared and excited for the years to come. Giving birth to my girls changed a very core part of my soul, and imagining my own mother feeling that shift, examining my face for some clue of who I would be… it made for an emotional morning.

But time does not stand still around here just because I am weepy, so I did the dishes, changed poopy diapers, made coffee, put a movie on for the girls.  Meghan came by for a playdate around 10:30, and 10 minutes after she showed up someone rang the doorbell. I assumed it was the mailman, but instead it was three of our other friends, and all of their kids, yelling “Surprise! Happy birthday!” It was the absolute best thing for my mood, to be surrounded by good friends, happy kids, and coffee/chocolate cupcakes. I can not stop smiling. Thank you Meg, Sarah, Gretchen and Amy (who I swear does not even own a computer, so no blog link for her!)

Tom is on his way home, and we are having a quiet night at home, with plans to go out later in the week , when he can stay awake past 8. We’re having a family party on Thursday with my inlaws, my bestfriends/bridesmaids called and sent their love, Tiff called yesterday with plans to go get a birthday drink next week, and I know my nephews will sing me “Happy birthday” later. I’m not the best about remembering birthdays, so I know other friends are the same way and will call in a few days, with an “Oops! I hope it was great!” and that will make me smile as well.

I am loved, and that makes me weepy in a very different way.