Motivation Is On Its Way Back

Thank God! Even with the time change, I feel so much better this week. Edwin was out of town most of last week, and every night as soon as I put Anna to bed I crawled into bed myself. Since the weekend, I've done a few scrapbook pages, cleaned more of the basement, cleaned through piles of papers and drawers. Ahh, there's lots more that I want to do so hopefully this productive phase continues.

Right now Hairspray is ending on the television ... Anna loves this movie and has been watching it more lately. She loves the singing and dancing, and she's slowly learning the names to all the major characters. Funny girl. I'm almost ready to go out and buy the Sound of Music DVD, but I don't know if that'll be pushing my luck. What a pain in the ass videos are! I checked out Amazon for Beauty and the Beast and just about fell over to find that the cheapest prices I could find for it were around $40. Crazy.

Tonight Anna and I actually took a walk with her in her stroller. It was a beautiful evening and I promised her we'd take another walk tomorrow evening if it was nice again. Still too cold and sloppy for the playground but there are plenty of other places for us to walk to and hang out for a little while. I opened a couple windows to get some fresh air in the house while we were gone.

Today was my Excel class at work. Of course, today was also the department-wide appreciation breakfast, which I missed completely by being in class. My luck. Oh well.

I brought some work home tonight so I'm off to see how much I can do before calling it a night. I think it's work I can do while watching television, we'll see!

My Growing Girl

So we signed Miss Boo up for the preschool class at Step By Step Montessori over the weekend. We attended their open house on Saturday, so she was able to see the school for herself. Already I have decided that I'd like her to have one of the younger teachers, if possible, but of course I've probably jinxed myself by admitting such a thing on my blog. While we were there Anna went right to work, fixing puzzles and checking out the birds and a few age-appropriate activities in Miss Brooke's room. We requested a July 1 start date, we'll see what happens. Anna would turn 33 months on July 30, which would officially make her a preschooler. So, so hard to believe.

Lately Anna has been eating very well at home. She's always eaten well at daycare, much to our chagrin, but now her hearty appetite has finally followed her home. Tonight she had noodles (she knows that penne rosa is her favorite), almost an entire apple, and her cheddar cheese chex mix for a snack. And milk, of course. She still loves lentil and chicken noodle soup, will ask for grilled cheese sandwiches, and we recently learned she loves oranges as well. So we're slowly adding foods to the list of what we can count on her to eat.

On Saturday during my precious free time I finally went to see No Country For Old Men. I knew going in that it was going to be violent, but wow! I found it irritating that the big climax of the movie, what you were expecting to be a shoot-out when the bad guy catches up with the good guy, wasn't really shown. WTF? I couldn't believe it! All I can think is that it must have been that way in the book. Plus, you never really see that the good guy is dead so for a while I thought maybe somehow he'd figured out an escape after all. Well, I'm sure the directors left that part vague on purpose, but still. If you've seen this movie you know exactly what I mean, if not, sorry! Anyway, not a movie I feel I need to see again. Not that it wasn't good, but just too much. I've kept thinking about the Kill Bill movie I've seen (II) in comparison, which I would like to see again. Also violent, but not so graphic and had true fight scenes with martial arts and crazy music which was entertaining. Not so for No Country. No Country is just too raw, too graphic for me. I'm hopeful I can find someone to discuss the movie with ... Edwin's seen it too long ago to remember the details I hope to discuss.

I still have a cough from the cold I came down with last week. I stayed home sick on Thursday, which helped immensely to spend most of the day in bed. There's sickness all around, Marion was so sick Friday afternoon that Larry called everyone around 2 to come and pick up their kids. Edwin came down with something over the weekend but luckily Anna has been just fine though I must have coughed on her a hundred times by now. My appetite hasn't completely bounced back yet but that's okay, I'm not complaining. I'm always hoping I'd at least shed a couple pounds if I'm going to be sick.

I've been bringing work home a lot lately. It's really wearing me down. I was thinking I could make a great effort to wrap up my recomp last week, but that didn't really go anywhere while I was sick. It's just hard to keep up the stamina for such a long period of time ... I'd brought a lot of work home the week before that, and probably the week before that, too. This year our reviews are supposed to take place the last week of March. With all that has happened to me work-wise this year I should have an interesting review. I'm hoping to have a few weeks of relative down time before the big push with laws starts at the end of April. I think it'll help a lot to have Anna at Step By Step--I won't need to leave as early every day and I won't feel the same pressure to bring work home all the time. Edwin can pick up more often, too. We've loved her current daycare and we realize that Anna's good traits are due in good part to her daycare, but it's also caused me to have to juggle so much to get it to work that I'm ready for that part of it to be over. Or will that part ever be over, when being a WOTH mom?