Life Lately...

I wasn't sure what to title this post, but it's been several months in the making. We've been so busy around here lately, so many new things, so many changes. The end of last summer, I took on a very part time job. I also decided that when my daycare girl went to school, I would no longer be watching children on a long-term/permanent basis. School began the end of August & my hours at my job increased. In November I began another rep job. December brought an unpaid promotion to Hubba, where he took over the department in which I was working. Policy states that family cannot work directly for each other, so I put in my notice, and as of now, I am just working my rep jobs.

This is totally ok, though, as we also decided to put our house on the market. Repairing, redecorating & renovating a house to stage for market is a full-plus-overtime job, and it can be very overwhelming. By leaving my job, I have freed up 20 hours of my week. The kids are so happy to have me home again, too. It was surprising that even my teenage boy was unhappy with me working. He dealt with it, because he is old enough to understand, but he thinks me not working there anymore is like sliced bread, LOL.

I've been logging some of our progress on facebook, and you can view the pictures here.

Christmas was an amazing time. We spent it, just the 5 of us, at home. The boys were amazingly spoiled. We got a Wii for the family & 2 of the boys got a PSP & a Nintendo DS Lite. Keenan celebrated his birthday a week ago, & he also got a DS for his birthday.

This past Saturday I went to a freezer cooking class, aka Once-a-month-cooking (OAMC). Everyone I told about the class ahead of time laughed at me. Apparently I don't need cooking classes. I know I don't need it, but I had this fluky moment of "I WANT to do this." It was my first Saturday as a "free woman." I used the class for many reasons- weaning off of having something to do on Saturday, fellowship with like-minded people but mainly for inspiration. See, I love OAMC, but hadn't done it in a while. Knowing the overwhelming things happening in our lives right now, I went for inspiration. We need freezer meals right now. We need to know that there are meals ready for us just as quickly as pizza would arrive on our doorstep.

Sure enough, the inspiring part kicked in, and this past Tuesday I added 16 family meals to the freezer, along with 9 individual meals for Hubba to take to work. I love opening the freezer & seeing so many wonderful options in there. I love opening the freezer & thinking- tonight we will NOT order pizza.

So now I've freed up a couple of things to help with our transition- 20 hours a week & a few meals for the super busy days. We have so much to do. Some days I walk around in circles, because I don't know where to begin that day. One of our biggest issues is storage. When staging a house, you can't have boxes stacked everywhere. 2 of the storage properties I've called are full, and another hasn't returned my phone calls. Another place I was looking into, I found out, has horse stalls (more or less), so there's no privacy or security (yeah I thought "HUH?" too!). It's time to think outside the box on this one, and I have a couple plans.

So that's what's going on here in a very.small.nutshell. I don't have a lot of time, so I'll sign off with this for now, and I hope to "see" you all soon!