Even the Best Laid Plans.....

It's been crazy here lately. I've been getting lectured by other working mothers about how I should just buy a store-made cake, store-made costume, etc., but the fact of the matter is that I WANT to do these things. I actually ENJOY them. I actually believe I was meant to do them. I get such satisfaction from doing them as well. I hate that my "life-n-stuff" gets in the way. I do the best I can.

I know my 3-year-old doesn't mind what his cake looks like as long as it had some train tracks and a Thomas engine on it and I know he didn't even care what he was for Halloween, other than avoiding scary since he's a big ol' Halloween chicken. lol.

I know not every working mother encounters the same issues as I do because circumstances vary so greatly. For me, however, I've learned that with working opposite schedules as my spouse so that there is always one of us with our kids, the days of the week an event/holiday falls on combined with his rotating schedule really impacts whether or not I can accomplish what I have planned. See, if Halloween had been on a Monday or Tuesday this year, I could have had "my" weekend days to tend to finishing the costume, baking the cake/decorating it, creating those mummy cookies my oldest son unknowingly volunteered to bring to class for his party, etc., but Halloween was at the end of the week and DH wound up having all sorts of last-minute overtime last week on his "weekend days" that I was counting on, including "my" whole weekend prior. Since I work around his schedule, it drastically cut down on my available hours to accomplish work, let alone all of these other extra to-do items I added to the list.

To complicate matters, my parents decided to come out for a visit on Halloween day for the first time in 18 months! Now instead of pizza and on-the-go foods (parents have dietary issues), I needed to cook a meal! I needed to have my 3-y/o's birthday party between 4:30 and 5:30 (the time the older kids get home and he wakes from his nap), serve up a dinner, finish sewing that bone on the costume, cake and presents, get 'em all dressed and go trick or treating in a one-hour period!

So, the cake didn't get decorated the elaborate way I had planned. Instead I did it in 20 minutes flat - thank goodness for green icing spray paint--I didn't have to tint the frosting myself to cover the top only for grass! Heck, he didn't even say a word about the pink frosting that should've been red!

I didn't get to make a new loin cloth for the Bamm-Bamm costume that was too tight for my little T-o-T'er, and the fleece body suit I made from a jammie pattern in a large size was now too big because the weather was so nice and we didn't need the extra clothes beneath them. This in turn meant that the red drape over his shoulder also fell down frequently. There was no pattern for the Bamm-Bamm parts - I just winged it. I think it was pretty darned good considering that was my first crack at sewing since 7th grade home ec! (the costume dilemma was also compounded by the fact that since the pattern actually fit all 3 of my kids I decided that I could make them all jammie bottoms, but this meant I needed to start with cutting out the largest size first and then reducing the pattern to the smallest size before I could get to the costume for the smallest kid!)

The foam DH bought from the craft store to carve into a club and a bone for the costume couldn't take the spray paint. The spray paint ate the foam, some sort of chemical reaction I suppose. I had to scramble to find a paper mache recipe, which is surprisingly easy - messy, but easy. Flour, water, and salt and newspaper strips. Set onto a heat register, it dries relatively quickly. This could now take the spray paint. (Beware of dogs, however, as ours wanted to eat them in a bad way - couldn't stop trying to lick them before the paint was added!)


I also did not make a salad for the dinner. Instead everyone settled for the cornish game hens with sausage stuffing and garlic asparagus only.

I also didn't get to send in the mummy cookies with my child to school that morning because we ran out of white chocolate chips and I was 2 cookies shy of making the class count (would have only been 1 shy had I not eaten 1, but they are so good and fudgie AND it seems some pantry gnomes were munching on the white chips, hence the shortage). The night before, I knew I was going to be cutting it close. I asked my son if it would be okay to have Dad stop and buy a store treat for the school party, but his eyes welled up and he explained that he had bragged about those cookies and another kid who had them had chimed in on their deliciousness, so all the kids were looking forward to them. Sigh. Yummy mummy cookies it is then. The cookies were finished the following morning and dropped off at school by noon.

I got it all done somehow, but my back and feet were aching from being on them for 2 days straight. Wouldn't you know it, all that work on the costume, which wasn't too bad, just stressful timewise with a little stinker who liked to sneak up on me and step on the sewing machine pedal, and my little real-life Bamm-Bamm decided after about 40 minutes that he wanted to go home and play with his new birthday presents. lol. Where are the Flinstones these days anyway? I had to find an online Flinstone episode to show my baby who Bamm-Bamm even was! It was the episode he got adopted and my baby loved it - took to clubbing items right away while saying Bamm-Bamm. He was really impressed at how strong he was. lol.

I took all day Saturday, a weekend day DH had in common with me for a change, and we both just recuperated from our week together as a family, which doesn't happen but once a quarter it seems. Sunday I worked all day catching up what I had to ignore on Friday, cleaning up, invoicing, etc., then back to the usual. What is really important to me is that all 3 of my kids were happy and have no idea what I went through just to see those smiles on their faces!

Is there a Positive?

Try as I might, I'm not able to find anything positive in this one. This is a photo of items that had been neatly organized and labeled into our storage room. Only a few have been removed so far too, the most important items. The rest is yet to come.

Why are they no longer neatly resting on the shelves from which they came? Because the toilet located on the floor just above them in our half bathroom overflowed and all of the water came down through the floor somehow around the floorboards and through the duct work via the vent next to the toilet.

I heard swearing and then "Get up here!" As he continued on, I said "I'd better go downstairs and check it out." Sure 'nuf. The large blue and white boxes are the boxes containing my wedding dress and train, the large slab of wood to the left is our extra table leaf. Both items I'd prefer do not make contact with remotely crappy water!

I think I mentioned before I had started a basement organizing campaign, and the storage room looked so nice. Everything in those labeled paper ream boxes now need to be placed into new boxes. The wooden shelves need to have bleach thrown on them, and I can barely type it, everything within them needs to be bleached as well, including the concrete floor. Overkill? Maybe for some, but for a feces germophobe, there is no other way.

I just spent the last 3 days trying to enter an invention/idea contest in my "spare time" and could not get either of my computers to upload media. I'd hit that upload button, but nothing would happen. Apparently the problem wasn't limited to me, and in the end, literally in the last 8 hours before the deadline, the sponsors agreed to let me e-mail them my 30 pictures. Felt good to have them finally there and my submission accepted, but the 3 days it took of downloading software, updates, trying this and that, changing settings, etc. really set me behind. When I got the kids into bed last night, I logged on to find that my submission information was completely gone and so was the contest. I thought, "All that work and it's over before midnight on the deadline date?!" I cried and decided to take a shower. The powers that be for the invention contest fixed the problem and brought back my information. Had this toilet issue happened last night during my meltdown.....who knows. lol.

I neglected my kids somewhat in an effort to make it, to edit pics, fill out forms just so, etc. (not really neglected, but it wasn't fun for them either)....they wound up missing half of a class they had on Monday as I attempted to videotape a presentation. They were angry, but in the end they didn't miss much and felt better. I completely forgot that I needed to pick them up at school before they got on the bus because bus delivery is later than the start of this class. I stayed up extra late trying to squeeze it all in. We had the strep throat and pinkeye, lots of disinfecting upstairs. It just seems like a blur. I was happy that task was over so that I could move onto my next major task that once completed is completely out of the way -- creating 56 bar graphs in Excel to put onto a website. Once this task was completed, it was time to get to the business of organizing my basement so I could start a brand new workout routine - how long this is now delayed, I can't even say for certain. I'll be bleaching and reorganizing that storage a little at a time in the little time I have.

What a bummer. It's hard to literally not raise up my hands and yell "What did I do? Why? Somebody somewhere hates me!" While I don't believe in self-sabotage, it sure feels like I'm being sabotaged a lot of the time, that there are forces working against me. Don't even know how I can type that out, as I also believe everything happens for a reason. Here's to hoping THIS positive reason magically appears, but somehow I doubt it. We might just be able to get my husband to laugh about it in the next 6 months. He doesn't tend to laugh about these things. I usually can, but not when my wedding dress and table leaf are mentioned in the same sentence as sewer water. Ugh.