Small Successes January 9th

Celebrating the little things that add up.

1. On Tuesday I plowed through the laundry.  I had the timer set in the kitchen and I was on top of getting everything swapped in and out of the washer and dryer.

2. I think Tuesday was the day the "Polar Vortex" or whatever they were calling it, hit our area.  I managed to pry myself out of bed on a day where the little weather station I have inside said it was 7 degrees outside.  SEVEN, as in 25 degrees below the temperature at which water freezes.  Sorry, but that temperature is just no good.  I had frost on the inside of my bedroom windows, people!  I'm pretty sure NJ is never supposed to be that cold.  Anyway, I think it goes without saying that the kids and I didn't go to daily Mass that day since I didn't think having baby Quattro freeze in utero as we walked from the car to the church would be a good thing.  So I had a rare leisurely morning where I stayed in bed longer than I should have and took a sort of hot shower that was longer than I should have taken.  I came out of the shower and realized that I should have already dropped Ellie off at school.  So with just minutes to spare before the school late bell would ring, I had to toss on clothes and drop Ellie off.  She got there on time so all was well with the world, except for the super cold temperature.

3. I'm back to using the color coded excel spreadsheet for Madeline's weekly lesson plans.  She wasn't thrilled with my lazy mom approach of writing the dates on the top of the work book pages and then doing a check list with the other items that had to be done.  Between the first trimester, vacation, holidays and my finger incident I really didn't have the time, energy or desire to write up lesson plans.

4. I've managed to keep all my Christmas decorations up this long.  Ok, I'll be really honest here.  First, I didn't feel like putting them up and now that they're up I really don't feel like taking them down.  Just thinking about the amount of work involved makes me feel like I need a nap.  Then there's the fact that I took hardly any pictures of my kids around the tree.  So one of these days when Katie has hair that doesn't look like she is going for the Flock of Seagulls look or the Aqua Net teased out 80's hair look then I'll take some pictures and get these trees undecorated and packed away.  But for now, the trees aren't bothering me.  In fact, I like the extra heat the family room tree gives when I have the lights turned on.  That's right, I'm using twinkle lights as my own personal space heater.

5. We've been in the process of having some electrical work done the past few weeks.  We now have lots of light in the basement and Bryan and I are both very happy with the work our electrician has done.  Now he's moving on to hooking our ceiling fans up to a switch on the wall.  So in the past week I have finally after 6 1/2 years picked out a ceiling fan for our bedroom to replaced the super ugly one that was installed by the previous owners.  I have also picked out a nice girly ceiling fan for Madeline and Ellie's bedroom.  Tomorrow is the day of the "great ceiling fan swap" where our electrical guy will need to install two new fans and move two existing fans to different bedrooms.   Once that's done I will need to pain Katie's new big girl room and get that ready for her.

6. We've managed to eat only meals prepared at home since last weekend. Our goal is to only eat out once per week instead of the 2-6 times a week we've been eating or ordering take-out.  We found in the past that we save a ton of money when we're not eating out and it's also better for us health-wise.

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