A Full and Lazy Day/12 Weeks

I don’t know if you’re like me, but when I get overwhelmed, I tend to do nothing. Being overwhelmed exhausts me, and instead of tacking the tasks at hand, I’ll escape for a while. Yesterday I woke up to a very filthy house, and I had about 11 million other projects that needed doing otherwise.
The reason I had struck The Hired Housekeeper Deal with my husband BEFORE ever getting pregnant was to avoid days like yesterday. While I appreciate my pregnancy, I KNEW that without hired help my pregnancy would read something like: be sick, be tired, eat, feel a little better, clean.
There’s nothing much worse than battling nausea and watching helplessly from the couch as the work you’ve just done on your Well Time get unraveled.
Well, The Hired Housekeeping Deal has not panned out. I’m getting angry about the whole thing because, if you don’t mind my being dramatic, I’m losing my identity in my laundry.
Yesterday was the worst of it. My house keeps getting worse and worse, and I feel like I’m throwing marbles at a battleship.
“Take that,” I’m saying as I pitch the innocent little shiny marbles at the metal battleship, and then I flinch as they pop off the battleship and fly right back at my face.
Hope gave up the ghost yesterday. Instead of going with my usual routine of “chores before fun” I had fun first because I knew if I did the chores first, the fun would not happen, and my kid are in dire need of a little fun with a mother who isn’t harping on them to PUT this away and THROW that out and STOP FIGHTING!
So we made deviled egg boats.

The kids ate those babies up in 5 minutes, and no foolin’.
After making boats, we watched “Tangled.” I can’t seem to get sick of that movie, and it felt good to stretch out on the couch.
“Mom?” my daughter asked, “Do horses really eat apples like that?”
“Yeah,” I said, “Do you want to go feed the horses some apples?”
“SURE!” The kids were both in agreement.
I’m determined to be the teacher this summer. I’ve mentioned this before, I know. But you don’t know what’s been going on in our house lately.
“Mom,” my daughter said to me one day, “Our plants need some compost if they’re going to grow bigger and bigger.”
“Compost?” I echoed.
“We just make it like: food we don’t eat, dirt, water, mix together… make sure to give it air aaaaaand COMPOST!”
“Where did you learn THAT?” I asked.
“Curious George.”
She’s told me all about fruit bats that see at night and how helicopters always call out “May day! May day!” while going down.
I fear someday she’ll roam the streets saying things like, “Everything I know, I learned from Nick Jr.”
So I’m taking over. It isn’t her fault she remembers so much of what she watches. She inherits that quality from me. Just ask my aunt… the one I followed around as a little kid and quoted Bonanza episodes to.
Anyway, we chopped up some tart apples and drove to the horses… our two hosses that usually sit next to our house have been moved. We paid a visit to the younger one (Giselle) yesterday.
There’s nothing sweeter than feeding apples to horses and taking pictures that make your daughter look like she only has one arm…

We made it home just in time for me to teach two piano lessons, and after they left I had a twenty minute break to restore some semblance of order to my home before my next lesson arrived.
My next lesson never arrived, so the kids and I just kept on keeping on. The end result was a vacuumed living room -thanks to my daughter -and a spot-mopped kitchen floor -thanks to my son. The dishes got almost all the way done which is a FAR improvement from the state they were in before, and my son even took out the bathroom trashes. I suddenly wasn’t nearly so overwhelmed, and I just pushed the whole “in the very near future, all your work will be for nothing” to the backest back of my mind.
And the kids and I made chocolate chip cookies.

I visited over the fence with our neighbor while my daughter, still apron clad, pulled weeds.

and my son practiced riding his wee bike.

We came in to find a snake on the porch. We leaned over it and pleaded with it to please eat the mice lurking around our trailer. My daughter prodded it with a stick, and it slithered under our house… to hunt for mice, we presume.

Once inside, I made some homemade garden scrub and took a ridiculous amount of time designing a little label for it.

It turned out pretty good. I’ll have to make another batch for my husband who loves to spend his off time in the mud and the muck.

After the scrub was packaged up nicely, I baked a tomato pie (recipe coming soon, and it’s WELL worth making) and then devoured two slices while the kids and I watched the 1950’s version of “Cheaper By the Dozen” which was really funny and surprisingly depressing all at the same time.
Readers, I honestly can’t believe how much more time I have simply by dumping facebook. It’s embarrassing. I may never put it back on my phone. I mean, I spent a HUGE chunk of yesterday lounging around feeling very tired and overwhelmed. I watched two full-length movies with my kids! And I still managed to get quite a lot done.
The best thing I got done? (Aside from soaking up my Dad saying, “Are these cookies your mother’s recipe? They taste just like hers!” My mission in life has officially been accomplished. I can now die a happy woman) Made it through the wilderness of the first trimester! My belly growth has slowed way down, which it did with my son as well… I’m glad. If I had kept growing at the intense rate I was going, I was in for a RIDE of a pregnancy. As it is, I’m experiencing weird symptoms like a metallic taste in my mouth and I’m cold all the time. My house was 85 degrees the other day, and it felt downright perfect.
My husband is about to go out of his mind living with The Sweater Lady.
I ended my day yesterday by finding my very first EVER spider vein.
In the words of my son who I just clobbered with a kiss, “Guh-woss.”
(I took, edited, and posted a picture of my 12 week belly here… and then I noticed the bra hanging in the background. Whoopsie. I promptly removed it. You’re very welcome.)