Tonight, at bedtime: “Mommy, you’re a meatball.” Hmmm. Is it my rotund appearance? My meaty smell? My combination pork/beef chemical makeup? I have no idea, but Lily thought it was hilarious to call me a meatball while petting my cheeks. She said I felt like one to her.
I’m dead tired tonight. Mike is watching the Flyers (taped from last night) and I’m sitting in bed seriously considering blowing off the many things I said I’d complete tonight and just going to sleep right now. I’ll delay the inevitable by writing about my day today.
It was the Thanksgiving Feast at preschool today. Mike and I called it “Feast of the Beast” (aka Lily). Pretty much any time we can insert the word “monster” or “beast” or “devil” for Lily, we do. We mean it with all the love in the world. The kitchen staff cooks a big turkey extravaganza and they invite family and friends in to eat in shifts with their kids. It was a lot of fun but a bit overwhelming for Lily - lots of noise and excitement. I always feel really bad when they do parties and things and parents are invited. Usually only half of them show up, so some of the kids have their parents with them and some of them don’t. I am fortunate enough to have a flexible schedule and right now my “office” is in my house - so I’m literally 1/4 mile from her school. No excuses. Grammy and Grampy went and mom ended up helping Lily’s friend Rahol with his meal and I wiped Elizabeth’s nose throughout lunch. We all just pitched in to whoever needed the most help at the time.
After we watched Lily play a little outside with the rest of her classmates and then she “pushed” us out the door. Her teacher’s ploy to keep them from crying is to have them push us gently through the door - she says it makes them feel in control of us leaving. It’s really cute watching Lily push her daddy into the school. She is totally comfortable there. No tears at all - just shoved us out, waved goodbye and went tearing back across the playground to the sandbox. Speaking of the sandbox, I was cuddling this morning with her and her bed is full of sand. I couldn’t figure out why, but it’s because she lives in that sandbox and I swear, even though we bathe her every night, she has sand coming out of her pores by now.
I was completely worthless this afternoon and got nothing done other than finding out that all of Lily’s expensive nursery decor was worth $17 total at the consignment shop. Ebay, here I come. I couldn’t believe it. That stuff probably cost $500-600. I certainly don’t expect to get that, but $100 would be nice! It’s not just bedding - it’s EVERYTHING. You can tell it was a first child. Even the diaper genie had a matching cover for it. I just couldn’t bear to watch my first-born’s nursery bedding put in a consignment shop for that amount of money. Apparently I am sentimental about it. I told Mike that if it didn’t sell on Ebay, I would donate it to Goodwill. It’s not even worth $17. I’d rather give it away than sell it like that. They do, however, want my swing and exersaucer and will pay good money for those items. Apparently crib linens are a hard sell.
I have two of the world’s most annoying meetings tomorrow. Great way to spend a Friday. I volunteer on a committee for a very worthy organization. However, it’s annoying because the organization is like most typical not-for-profits. They need so much, but they are unable to get their act together for longer than 5 minutes. I’ve offered to do tons of work for them for free but they can’t accept the help because they can’t even give me the tiniest bit of what I need due to problems with their information systems and various other roadblocks that I personally feel are self-imposed. Only in the world of government and not-for-profit is hand-wringing allowed. In the real business world, we’d have to figure it out or we’d go under. So that just makes me crazy. I try to breathe a lot, be patient, supportive, and not overtly look at my watch.
