A Day in the Life of ABW

I meant to post this last night....

I hear Em up way earlier than usual.

Finally find out from her that she's not feeling so well.  I order her back to bed with threats of bread and water all day and she can't come out unless she's ready to go to school.

I lysol the house.  Em comes out.  I lysol again.

I get Abs moving because of course this is the first time that she has slept in, in forever.

Get Junior up and moving.  Put him in underwear, but he refuses to go potty, so back in a pullup so he won't pee in the car.  Yeah, it happens.

Load up Abs and Junior, take Junior to hourly care.  It's a new month, so that means more med cards to fill out.  I walked in, they asked his name, and the girl was like "Oh, the boy with all the allergies and meds".  Ummmm.....no.

Finish up there, race to Ab's school because I was supposed to meet with the teacher and the principal.  (I was kind of glad that we were late and it didn't happen)  Drop Abs off.  Race back to Em.

Lysol the house again.  Add more lysol to Sam's list.  Check to make sure that all bathrooms are cleaned and well stocked.

Find lost mail keys that I just paid $40 to replace and go gather days worth of mail.

Em starts rumbling that she's bored.  Finally she decides that school is better than being home.  Load her up and take her to school.  Run into principal who wants to have meeting then, but I have to get Junior.  Schedule meeting for 2:30.

Go get Junior, race home, have lunch, play, convince him that going potty is fun.  Put him in underwear.

Take Junior to preschool, go to school to have meeting with teacher and principal.

Meeting occurs.

Pickup girls.  Come home to find smoke alarm chirping.  Leave girls, get Junior, go to commissary to get "batteries".  That leads to a cart full of groceries.  Go home, insert new battery and chirping continues.  I start messing with it, it chirps more.

Kids unload groceries.

Call housing.  Housing said they will come check it out.

Feed kids.

Gunner calls.  Military one source calls to schedule appt for Abs.  Tell military one source that I will have to call them back after I have been waiting for them to call for two days.

Junior pees on the floor.

Maintenance shows up, so I pass Gunner off to the kids.  Junior lets the dog in who then goes crazy and the maintenance people are scared to come down the stairs.  I assure them he won't bite and go to get him outside.

Maintenance leaves and the fire alarm starts chirping.  I go outside to wave down the maintenance people.  Sammy gets out.  Neighbors and I are chasing the dog while I am trying to still talk to Gunner and trying not to run too far so I lose the signal.

Neighbor catches the dog.  Abs puts dog in backyard.  Maintenance comes back in and disconnects the alarm and tells me it is an electrical problem and they will have to have an electrician come tomorrow.  (I have to say that I have never met nicer maintenance men than I have at this post.)

Talk to Gunner a bit more.  Bathe Junior, supervise Abs so there are no Eiffel Bubble Towers, and rotate Em through before the hot water is all gone.

Call back military one source and put kids to bed.  It takes an hour to get through their process.  More on that later, because we can do a self-referral with me looking someone up in the phone book for a lot less of a hassle.  She was nice though.

Kids are still asleep.  I might need a glass of wine tonight.  I want to run tomorrow to try out my new forerunner.  I hope I can fit it in.

Mail Question

While I am sorting through 16 years of crap in the garage, I came across tubs and tubs and tubs and tubs or mail.

When Gunner deployed to Bosnia, he was gone for a year, and we had little to no communication by phone and email was not available.  We wrote hundreds of letters.

Now that you can add three deployments to Iraq in there, and in 11 months a tour in Afghanistan under his belt, that leaves me with more mail than I can haul around.

So my question is.....what do you do with it all?  What do you do with his letters?  What about all the other mail that he was sent while over there?  People have sent letters, cards, cartoons, etc.  No worries, he kept it all!

When I say tubs, I mean those big blue rubber maid containers that are about 36 inches x 12 inches x 18 inches.  I haven't ever gone through it, and I know it contains a lot of memories for him, because some of those cards and letters from random strangers appeared on a day that he really needed them.

If I mention them, he might just tell me to toss them, but I thought maybe y'all would have a better idea of what to do with them.  I'm open to any and all suggestions....except scrapbooking, I am getting rid of my thousands of dollars worth of supplies because I have no room or time!

Is there a way to organize it?  Do you just keep the stuff that y'all write back and forth to each other?  I'm sure our cards and letters back and forth are 2-3 tubs alone.  We've been apart for 4 years and this will make year number 5.  Help!

Life With Abs....

It's never easy, and lately it has been harder than hard.  It's not one thing in particular, but a million things at once.  How does that child sleep at night?  Oh wait, she doesn't.  A non-sleeping Abs means a non-sleeping ABW.  I'm worn out.

I'm in the throws of personal training.  I did a 5 K this past weekend and took this girl.

She wanted to run around the track to warm up.  I told her to conserve her energy.  Good thing I did, because .1 miles into the race she decided that we should go the pace of a dead snail.  I did what any parent that wanted to finish would do and put Abs on my back.  I carried the girl for 3 miles, all 68 pounds of her.  I'm still sore.

I've been tackling my 30 day challenges head on.  Remember this picture...

Well I worked on it for about 8 hours.  There's a slight difference.  Two trips to the thrift store.  A full trash can.  I sent the after picture to Gunner and he said "Boy, you have a long way to go".  Thanks babe!

At least you can see some of the floor!  See all those bikes?  This is what happens when you step over the same bike in the same place, and fall once each day because you can barely maneuver due to all the crap.

It looked worse when it happens.  Darn mountain bikes.

I don't want to move anything out of the garage, but I need to in order to get to the front right corner to make some headway.  How come I don't want to?  Because when I am tired and want to quit and not move it back in, I don't have Gunner to come help me.  This might turn into a 365 day challenge at this rate!

The vegetarian eating is going well.  I grabbed a piece of Em's beef jerky yesterday and spit it out when I realized what I was doing.

I took Abs to get her haircut again today.  She had it cut a week ago, but it seemed all uneven, etc.  My girl did it, and explained to me what happened.  She's got my thick hair, and it's straight as a board (that's from her father).  You could cut my hair a million different ways and never be able to tell, I guess that's one benefit to curly hair!

I have a meeting tomorrow morning with Ab's teacher and the principal.  She's actually not in trouble (that was Friday), but I am still not looking forward to it.

Oh, I also had to go get new mailbox keys.  My new garmin gps is sitting in the box probably, if someone didn't find the keys and go take everything.  It's $40.  I will be putting each of the three keys on different rings, in different locations, and not near Abs.  Apparently the one time I sent her to check the mail, she lost the keys on the way to the box, but had forgotten to tell me on the way back.  Did I mention this trip took 20 minutes?

The dotted line is representative of how Abs travels.  She once told me that straight lines were boring.  (Don't bother enlarging, I borrowed this from chamotlabs.com, and the wording was changed to fit their company and makes no sense to me)

Maybe tomorrow I can get Ab's Mr. Potato head project back so I can share some pictures from it, it's cute!