Wacky Wednesdays

I have hesitated mentioning this before, but I was hired on to write for the San Antonio Examiner on topics relating to Attachment Parenting. It is an online magazine/newspaper tagged lined as the "insider source for everything local." Almost all cities have their own edition. I am waiting to have my first article, "Intimacy and the attached parent" approved for publication. I get paid per page view ($10 for every 1000 hits) so it is not a big money maker, more like a forum for me to link people to attachment parenting, and things happening in SA. I am pretty excited.

I am also in the planning stages of creating my own business and also doing some planning to market things on the side (more on these when and if they actually happen). I am still developing my informational blog called "Big Family, Small Budget" - does what it says - talk about living with a big family on a small budget.

We got a box of girl clothes from a friend yesterday. It has sizes from 0 months to 6years. I barely got it through the door before the kids ransacked it. I have tried to organize it 5 times, but C keeps trying on all the clothes and the box has been made into a car/rocket ship by the boys. L is a little ambivalent about the whole thing. Needless to say, the family room is covered with cardboard and clothes. I am just going to be zen about it and let my frustration fade away until I catch up with all the other stuff I have to do.

I need to figure out what to do about our bed. The movers mangled our mattress during the move-from-hell and broke the headboard and mattress frame, so our bed has a horizontal fold down the middle and a vertical dip because the bed in sagging due to lack of support from the broken frame. We are all waking up grumpy and in pain. Either we have to ditch the frame and headboard and just put the mattress on the floor or we have to fix the frame; neither option is particularly appealing at this time.

I have been trying to cut down on our consumption of sugar and sugary products (not that we ever ate many) in the first stage of revamping our diet to be more in line with X's and my hypoglycemia. I'll just put this out there: I would sell an ovary for some brown sugar or maple syrup to put on my porridge right about now. I WANT MAPLE SYRUP!!! THE REAL KIND NOT THIS FAKE SHIT!!! Oh my kingdom for a cabane a sucre and the heady days of sugaring off...maple syrup boiled down and poured over fresh snow so that it becomes viscous and taffyish, oreilles de crise, maple pie, ham and beans, split pea soup (check this out for a typical sugaring off feast - the site is in french, but if you can't read it, the pictures do the trick). Mouth stop watering.

The dishwasher is broken (won't drain properly) but after 3 days of trying to fix it I have given up and am just using it. The water never overflows it just doesn't drain totally, so I am trying to make my way through the mounds of dishes that piled up during my futile fixing days. I am also drowning under loads of laundry - all the linens that mildewed in the closet when the a/c unit backed up and leaked through to the linen closet, the sleeping bags and comforters from the indoor campout that had juice dropped all over them, and the regular laundry.

Wow, I need to start writing all these things down because my brain is not fully operational right now. So, here is my To Do List for Today"

- catch up on extra laundry
- publish first Examiner article
- do boys' laundry
- do thorough cleaning of boys' room and playroom (usually the boys room is on Tuesday and I do X's laundry on Tuesday and S's laundry on Wednesday, but I didn't manage it yesterday). Thorough cleaning involves stripping and remaking beds, thorough vacuuming, washing walls and baseboards, dusting blinds, putting everything away properly.
- work on blogs and blog design for new blogs
- figure out how to widen the main column in this blog because it is bugging me how narrow it is.
- detail out business plan
- finish homeschool budget and find best prices for books
- reading lesson with S and X (okay and C too because she wants to be included, but isn't really ready)
- do loan forbearance application for student loans
- make dinner
-organize clothes from friend

God that is depressing; I am stopping now.

Just a fun picture to get me through the day (thank god they're cute):