Checklists

Thursday  in mid-morning  Mystie

In November I made my December to-do lists, one for each week. I then transcribed them up onto the white board and have been very happy with myself. So happy that I still have the first week of December’s list on there just so I can see all those checked off items. :) Seeing what has to be done and being able to see progress on a list is a huge motivator for me. And, part of my secret with these lists is that I really only listed things that *had* to be done. The motivation came in part from the list, but also from the fact that these were not overly-ambitious, “I would really like to” lists.

Confection Selection, a fancy Christmas bake sale that Marji and I coordinate for our church to raise money for the local Pregnancy Center, was Saturday and my whole week last week was in preparation for that event. It is an event that doesn’t take much planning or work beforehand, but the Friday and Saturday are crazy. I made many dozens of cookies (and most of them turned out!), a pan of fudge, some truffles, and peanut brittle. I put a few bags of the cookies into the freezer for our Christmas and have some fudged wrapped up in the fridge, so I’m done with all the baking I’m going to do, unless I really want to do more. If I feel like it, later in the week I might try doing sugar cookies with the boys. This year’s Confection Selection went off very well. We’ve finally got the hang of the event and were more organized this year, so it was the least stressful morning we’ve had so far (this was our sixth year). This is also the first year all my cookies sold! I figured out after coming home with half my cookies last year that my problem was not the actual cookies, but the volume. To me, doubling or tripling a recipe is something you just do most of the time. Why bother getting stuff out and making a mess if you’re not going to make it worth while. :) So, I think, “I need to make *lots* of cookies for Confection Selection.” So the last couple years I have taken two or three types of cookies and made two triple batches. My cookies sold as much as the others, really, it’s just I had brought three or four times as many as everyone else! :) So this year I made double recipes and kept back a dozen or so for our freezer. The amounts ended up being perfect, even though it seemed like pitiful quantity to me. :) This year I’m making a list now of what to make next year and including the recipes I used in my Confection Selection file folder. Every year I get a little smarter. :)

So I got home from Confection Selection last Saturday, sat down on the couch, and suddenly it hit me. Three weeks I have been telling people. Three weeks. I’m 37 weeks along and maybe all that home birth stuff should be ready around 38 weeks — which will be Christmas, so that means either I wash all that stuff and check those lists now or I’ll be 39 weeks before it gets done! Yikes! We’re going to have a baby! I’ve been more preoccupied with the actual pregnancy part this time around and more aware of being pregnant and feeling the baby and trying to be aware of any weirdness, so it has been a long-feeling pregnancy (not to mention the fact that because of the two losses beforehand, it seemed like the first trimester alone was 6 months long). I am ready to be done. I laid in bed one night last week and thought, “Oh, I am almost done. Yay.” (that’s an exhausted “yay.”) Then suddenly it hit me: I’m going to be done being pregnant, and there’s going to be a baby. I know Jaeger and Ilse will only be 2 3/4 years apart, but that’s a year farther apart than Hans and Jaeger were, and it seems like forever since I’ve done the baby thing. Then I went to a playgroup-mommy dinner — thank you, Andrea! — and the topic did turn to labor stories and I realized, “Oh my, it’s coming.” I’m not yet quite mentally prepared for labor or a newborn yet; it’s about time I get there. :)

So, my lists and mentality have shifted from Christmas to baby. The spare room still needs some unpacking and cleaning and setting up to become the baby room, I need to open and go through and wash my home birth towels and sheets and everything, I need to go get the vitamin K shot for Ilse (only one pharmacy in town does it and they, of course, are on the opposite side of the Tri-Cities), Matt cleaned our bedroom the other day and caught up the laundry, Fran gave me the birth kit with all those sterile disposables one needs, and I do have popsicles and Propel/Powerade on hand.

I also have enough freezer meals in the freezer so that between them and church meals I won’t have to cook from after Christmas through all of January. I was planning to do maybe ten, but then early in the month I encountered several meat sales and put up quite a few extra meals. This time I am keeping an inventory on our kitchen whiteboard; freezer inventories have never worked for me because I lose them or just don’t use them, so we’ll see how this works. I should copy down the casseroles I did and where I got the recipe from so I don’t have to browse the cookbooks again next time I do freezer cooking…

And, right now, it’s 9 o’clock and the boys are still in jammies, so maybe I need to take care of each day’s troubles before thinking about the next. :) I need mental energy to prepare for getting down on the ground and changing diapers and dressing boys. At least at 20 months Hans was still small enough to lift onto a changing table. Jaeger would break the changing table. So down on the ground I go, and hoist myself back up again using the bunk bed ladder.

And Hans just came down to ask to get something out and when told that they needed to get dressed first, he informed me that Jaeger had made a big mess and was in trouble. Sigh. I guess I’ll go check it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 10:18 am and is filed under Housekeeper, Lady of the House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.