Things are sooooo much better with me (as Mummy!) at the moment, and I'm so relieved and happy about it. Maybe it was hormones? I don't know. I DO know that after I wrote the last post here, that evening, I prayed about it a bit and then decided to go spend some "browsing time" at the MOMYS (Mothers of Many Young Siblings) forums. I am so glad I did! I find that place such a source at the moment. I know there are a few who dislike MOMYS, but I for one love it! Lately it's a great source of ideas, support, reassurance, advice, etc, etc. I rarely post, and mostly just read and read and read. That evening it just felt like - I can't describe it even... like a soothing breeze over me, physically, just to click and open the forums. It felt like a place where I could breathe easy. Nobody actually really knows me at all, since I have only posted in the pregnancy forum so far, and then only a couple of times. But it's like taking a heavy item of daily clothing off my back and shoulders and setting it at the door as I go in, which feels so fresh and relieving. I really haven't figured out exactly why, or exactly what that feeling is stemming from. I'm not having an awful time of it amongst the rest of the world (online or in "real" life) with having more than the average number of babies close together, or with our plans to trust God with our family size and the timing of our children. So it can't be that. I'm noticing that in general, mothers of lots of kids are often different in their mindsets than mothers of 1, 2 or 3 kids. In a refreshing way, to me, anyway. So maybe that's it? I used to only see the mindsets of the smaller families (I know I'm being vague, sorry! I'm really just hoping to write this quickly, knowing my tendencies to the opposite (!) and wanting to get to bed not-too-late!) and had no idea there were other ways of doing or seeing, or thinking, in terms of the role and task of motherhood, and raising children. This last year I have begun to read things and become aware of things that have opened my eyes to a lot of stuff - stuff that I absolutely did not anticipate being able to do/think/maintain! Kind of like last year when we LEARNED to trust God like no other time in our lives, with no income for 9 months. I don't think we would have ever learned that lesson without that experience, and from it we've discovered the "buzz" of trusting God with the big things in life! And thus, baby #4 on the way! ;)
There is a lot of dying-to-self involved in the kind of motherhood I am now chasing after, which feels like an impossible mountain to climb, but I'm already starting, or have been these last few months as these new thoughts and ideas and realisations have been sinking into me. And I am beginning to see that it IS do-able. Just totally NOT without God enabling me. I mean, totally not possible otherwise. Incredibly hard even WITH God! But do-able, even for someone like me! The rewards, oh the rewards! will be so worth it, if I keep at it. I am excited and LONGING to work at this!
Anyway, I am absolutely sure I will fall fifty bazillion times and write about it here, haha! But I will get up again, and God is patient and he always perseveres with me. It's a new, wonderful goal, that changes my whole perspective on motherhood. And people are understanding me LESS for it, especially other mothers. Ahhh, maybe THAT'S why I feel such a physical sense of relief at MOMYS?! I figured it out just by blogging my thought processes, hehe!
Well, so that evening I read a ton of stuff, for hours on end. I found so many helpful ideas on anger management (in terms of feeling overwhelmed by small disobedient children, for example!), discipline, what might be making my 4-year-old tick, etc. And just tons of reassuring stuff from mothers of MANY little ones, now no longer little - very very wiiiiise mamas! They have the most laid-back approaches and the best understanding of little children, it seems. They are least desperate for control! ;) I learned a lot from just reading other people's posts and the responses to them. Next day I did not shout or smack at all. I instituted standing in the corner as a consequence for lots of things. I also brought back time-out in the porch which had been happening very rarely with the cold weather (understandably!)! I remembered I am training, training, training, not controlling or doling out consequences for certain behaviour. I am training, with loving intent, desiring my work to bring about a fruitful and life-giving result for my children, not me. I was also very helpfully reminded at MOMYS that evening that a 4-year-old is a LITTLE ONE, still immature in responses to things and behaviour, because of only being 4-years-old!!! I can't think how I got so that I didn't see it like that. It helped a LOT. It does mean that I re-realised that I have 3 children who lack maturity and thus are still in "training" stage, needing my constant input and a TON of patience and persistance! Apparently this lessens somewhat after age 5 or 6 (depending on the child) IF loving work has been done with the little one before that age to help bring them to maturity. Hard work! But a helpful perspective.
Of course in the time since then I have lapsed big time and lost my temper and yelled at the kids and so on and so on. But I am talking to them more about it, asking their forgiveness more, and trying to learn to behave more gently and patiently towards them. They're only little! It's hard because it isn't coming naturally, but I think my hormones don't help. Some days it's not too hard at all, and other days I want to pull my own skin off all day with irritability! So I guess the hormones aren't helping sometimes.
Anyway! My thoughts on my 4-year-old are that he doesn't need to go to school or nursery, developmentally, personally, behaviourally, or anything like that. I know lots of 4-year-olds behave similarly and improve hugely for starting school, but I don't believe school is necessary, even though the above example makes it look that way! That's a bigger subject that I haven't got time to go into tonight though.
A few days later I was back browsing MOMYS and praying for insight again, and found a link to Motivated Moms. There was a post about keeping the house in order (or the apparent lack of ability whilst juggling homeschooling and a bunch of small children!), and somebody commented to say that they'd tried FlyLady and a lot of other stuff, but they found Motivated Moms and it changed their household! So I figured it was worth a look! I have done FlyLady on and off for a couple of years, and not managed to keep up with it. It's helped a lot while I've been "on" it, but apart from that, it has not worked for me. So I went and found that it's an e-book (to buy) with printable chore charts. Now, that might sound like a huge drag, but I looked at the sample pages and figured it might work. Also, it was not expensive, being an e-book. So I bought it and downloaded it. I still have the spring cleaning e-book that I talked about recently, and have been working on that slowly along with my 5 Things that I write myself to get done each day.
So last weekend I downloaded the Motivated Moms thing. I chose the weekly chart, not the daily one (less to print out over the year and I like seeing my week at a glance), and printed 3 weeks of charts out. I am getting skeptical now - I have such weak sticking power to this kind of thing! I'm great while the novelty is burning away brightly, but once it wears off a bit, that's basically the end of the Great New Thing, except for occasional bursts of new motivation and short-lasting willpower. I annoy myself mightily in this department, but that's how it has been with me so far.
On Monday, I started my first day of Motivated Moms and today is Friday and I have done almost a week. Now, I do not want to discount the potential of the novelty factor (knowing myself like I do), which is why I only printed 3 weeks worth! If I get to the end of that still motivated and active, then I will be excited, and print out another month! Otherwise, I do not want to waste the printer ink or the paper! ;)
I have NEVER done this much housework! But I haven't had to think about it. It's just listed, and I check it off. I have daily chores, and each day of the week there are a few that are specific to that day as well. The list covers everything, which I hadn't expected. I HAVE to vacuum and mop every week! I don't think I've done either in MONTHS. I am not even kidding - well, I did hoover the living room after some spillage of glitter or something a few weeks ago, but that was a pretty isolated incident! I know, it's terrible. We have some DIRTY carpet! Matthew is hysterically terrified of the hoover, worse than he has ever been, though Arthur seems to have outgrown his same anxiety now. Nathan is my first baby to be unaffected by the hoover (hooray!) and toddles over to it saying, "Doh! Doh!" (his "word" for everything, question or statement!) in a very determined way! He stands there pressing on it and poking it while it's screaming away noisily! It's lovely to have a baby (toddler, aaaargh! How can this beeee?!?!) who isn't shaking and turning purple with crying and screaming whenever I bring out the hoover! Poor Matthew is struggling with it though. I'm hoping he'll get used to it, and I take the older two to another part of the house (upstairs, if I'm hoovering downstairs, for example) to be away from it a bit. Arthur's job is to cuddle him and make him feel better, and help him not be scared. He likes to distract Matthew with fun games like building a "tent" with their bedding in their room, or he even resorts to frantic peekaboo games that work with Nathan (bless his heart!) when nothing else is working! I usually have to remind Arthur a couple of times to be sure he's doing his "job" (looking after Matthew) while I hoover, but he does GREAT. Matthew wails and screams for me upstairs, and I call up reassuring stuff and hoover as fast as I can, but by the time I switch it off and go upstairs, he's having lots of fun with the games Arthur made up to help him :)
Anyway - I do ramble on, don't I?!
So, I have to sweep, mop, vacuum, run the dishwasher, do laundry, plan and cook meals, read to the little ones (yes, it's on the list - it's not a CHORE as such, but I love that it's listed as an important tast each day!), clean the sinks, wipe the surfaces, make the beds, etc, etc, every day. The extra chores for each individual day are proper/deeper cleaning, like over the course of the week by doing as I'm told on the checklist, I have cleaned the bathroom thoroughly, cleaned the windows and mirrors downstairs, cleaned some 8-years-worth-of-GUNK light fittings (yeurgh!), cleaned out some of my "pantry" and the bottom section of my refridgerator, and changed bedsheets. Just this week! Who knows what's on the list for NEXT week! :) I'm beginning to see that if I can keep this up, my house will actually get CLEAN and decluttered! It's not so heavy on the decluttering as FlyLady (by a long way!), but it does allow for decluttering. To be honest, now that I'm really cleaning below just the surface layer, I'm motivated to do more decluttering than I was before, when I was trying to declutter as a main focus rather than clean. I see that the above list of this week's things are actually OBVIOUS things that a housewife should do! But I haven't been able to organise myself to do many of them for a long long time. I keep up with nappies, meals, naps, laundry, and occasionally find time to run the dishwasher, normally. That's been my norm for a LONG time! I couldn't see how I could ever fit any more in, and the house was a complete state! It still is, but already it's so much better.
The boys suddenly have two rooms to play in downstairs (we only have two rooms downstairs - the living room and the kitchen) because since I cleared the kitchen floor and mopped it (which took most of the week, given the amount of stuff cluttering it up!) and kept up with the laundry to the point where I actually had to wait for some more stuff to get dirty this morning to have a large enough load to put in the machine (!!!!!!!!!!!!!), the kitchen is suddenly a clean and safe place for little children to be!! Who knew?! We keep a gate on the kitchen doorway to prevent them going in there, and let them in for meals - how awful that sounds! But it was just a horrible horrible mess all the time. Food was on the floor like I promise you have not seen the likes of before, and it was sometimes mouldy food. Yes, all my warts here! ;) MOST of the floor was covered with laundry, and not clean laundry either. Plus boxes of stuff that needed to be thrown out or cleaned properly. Not a place the little ones could be, sadly.
Now, the kitchen is clear and the floor completely clean. I sweep 2 or 3 times a day on my knees with a dustpan since we don't own a broom (!!), so it stays clean and tidy. There's hardly any laundry like I mentioned, though what laundry we DO have is in load-type-sorted piles on the floor still (we have no other storage space for dirty laundry in our tiny house). The surfaces are cleared, cleaned and kept wiped each day, and the kitchen table too. The boys love it in there! Nathan especially likes all the cupboards that he can open, and the tupperware, and the tins of food in the low cupboard! :) He walks all over the kitchen, round and round. He has improved leaps and bounds in his walking this week, and I wonder if the extra space is the reason, or if it's just a coincidence? The others had just a little space too and improved suddely like Nathan has just the same. He's walking almost all the time now, rather than crawling, and increasing his speed. He can steady his balance if he loses it, most of the time, and today he pivoted on the spot and walked back in the other direction without faltering. It's so sweet to see such a tiny one toddling about. I want to eat him whenever I look at him. He's so incredibly cute ALL the time these days! ;) He has curls at the back of his head. And two teeth now, both top middles. He wrinkles his nose when he smiles at me. I actually physically hurt sometimes with how much I love him!
So, he is enjoying the extra space! They all are. A bonus of having the kitchen clear is that the way is clear to the back garden again. They're getting even more space with being able to go outside as well. When they come in with absolutely MUD-CAKED boots (because the snow has thawed and turned our garden into a mud puddle, which they love!) and clothes, I peel them off in the kitchen, pop the muddy washables straight in the machine, or in line for the next wash if there's something in there washing already, and clean them up at the sink. Then when they're in the living room, clean and playing, I get down on my hands and knees with a cloth and some spray, and clean all the mud off the kitchen floor. While it's drying, I WASH THEIR WELLY BOOTS in the sink!!!! I can't tell you how amazing this is for me to be writing this, let alone doing it! Seriously. It's like I'm someone else! I love it. THEN, I put the boots to dry and clean my sink, since that's on my list to do each day. Then I cannot describe the warm buzz of joy that comes from drying my hands and preparing to play with my kids in the living room, whilst looking at my still-wet CLEAN kitchen floor, with two pairs of shiny clean wellies by the back door, and a clean sink, remembering that 10 minutes ago it was a mud-fest! It's SO motivating!!!! I just stand there in amazement that I'm actually doing it. I soooooo hope I keep this up.
Along with the cleaning has come activity for the boys. In that they help with the chores. Arthur has changed so much for this! He actually whines and pesters me all day to do them: "I just want to do some haaawwwsworrrrk!" or "Mummy, when can we do some choooorrres?!!" I have to ask him to stop whining, but it seems crazy when I think what he's whining about, hehe! Finally it's time to start (like when I've woken up enough (although I'm finding the chores really GIVE me energy, and I have to start them to get to that point, hmmm!) or finished my drink/breakfast, etc!), and Arthur gets so excited! Matthew seems eager as well, especially when he sees Arthur's excitement. They do laundry for me when we're all in the kitchen. They sort loads, load the washing machine and tumble dryer (usually one boy on each as we switch loads), and set them off under my supervision. They also load and empty the dishwasher with me, and set off a new wash cycle with me supervising. They LOVE pushing buttons and setting off the machines! :) Yesterday we had to wipe down the cupboard doors and the machines, so I assigned those chores to the boys, and they loved it! Arthur wants to sweep the kitchen floor, which I'm now letting him help with. Before now I wouldn't let him because it was SO SCUMMY. He takes ages and misses a ton of crumbs and fluff, but he does a great job and works so hard! I give him lots of time and praise.
I make the beds fast when I dash upstairs to the loo in the morning. It's easier to tell the boys I'm just going to the toilet and then whip round super fast making the beds after I've used the loo, than to tell them I'm going to make the beds, for some reason. I'm slower, and they're more apt to misbehave downstairs!
Anyway, it's going sooooo great. I haven't heard Arthur say he's bored much at all, and he seems so much happier doing chores than anything else! He has always had a big thing for housework, from baby-hood, younger than Nathan is by a good few months. He also likes a clean and tidy home, it balances his little head out. Some people are more frazzled than others by a messy and cluttered home, and he's definitely one of them. Not so the other two, but it's still much better for them too! I'm not doing everything on my list each day though, but I am so happy with the improvement with what I AM achieving, and also I know it's only the first week. Practise at it will make it easier in time, right? I'm not fitting in Bible reading, which I added to my daily "chore" list (it's NOT a chore!) - only 1 day out of 5. I do like to read my Bible in the evenings more, but am not sticking to that too well either. I want to make sure I read it in the daytime with the boys. I am also not checking off the exercise box each day (hahaha!!! ahhhaaa hahaha! mwaha... ha.) or the quiet time box - I LOVE that there's a box to check off each day for quiet time, because I really want to implement that properly at some point. I have wanted to for a couple of years, and did implement "big boy quiet time" with Arthur when Matthew was a baby, but it was never very quiet, and became kind of stressy and in the end I just stopped enforcing it. I would LOVE to have quiet time in this house as a permanent thing! There are other things I'm working on right now, though, and so I'll let myself off the hook for the quiet time thing till further down the line, for now.
I have stopped doing my list of 5 Things completely, because suddenly this Motivated Moms thing is eclipsing everything else and is so much more efficient, for me. Also it takes all my time! I am dashing about a lot. I love that it's easily broken into little tiny bits of jobs, so I can do tiny bits of housework between doing things with the boys or changing nappies, eating, etc. If I see a calm scene of little boys doing jigsaw puzzles or stacking toys for a rare 3 minutes (!), I often then dash off to the kitchen and clean the sink, or run upstairs and strip the sheets off a bed. Then I've done a job to check off, or part of one, and yet the boys didn't notice I was gone, and I'm back to continue playing with them really fast. My body isn't used to proper housework, haha! My back and arms and shoulders hurt with the hoovering and mopping and window-cleaning! It's kind of embarrassing!
I just hope I keep it up.
So, things are going better. I have been ever so long-winded tonight! It's so late and I must go to bed.
Oh! I almost forgot! MY TURN has come around on the Bloggy Makeover list!!! Wheeee! I went on Jennisa's waiting list about 6 weeks ago, and now it's my turn!!! Yay! Right now I'm working with Jennisa on how I want it to look. I want COLOUR this time. I hope nobody's eyes get sore, haha! But I want some bright colours. That's just ME, I have always liked bright colours for books or drawings, or decorating things. I do also love blogs with gentle tones and muted colours, but what's MOST personalised to me is bright and colourful. So, changes coming soon, to this blog! I can't wait to have it all done, and to be posting at my new, really personalised blog!! Hopefully it'll motivate me to post more often too! I really don't like leaving it so long between posts. I don't know when it will be finished, but I'm thinking soon. The main layout is finished already and I like how it looks. Now Jennisa is working on sidebar tabs and little touches like that! :) Watch this space!
Also, I haven't updated my pregnancy diary (sidebar link coming for that with the new blog layout) in a while. I will get to that soon, for anyone wondering! I am 19 weeks pregnant - I can't believe it's going so fast! Almost halfway! On Wednesday I'll be 20 weeks, and I have my scan that day too. We still haven't figured out child care while it happens (they are not crazy about small children at the scans!) but hopefully we'll sort that out in time! I am really hoping to find out whether the tiny one is a boy or a girl. Or should I say, CONFIRM that the tiny one is a boy?! I'm sooooo sure it's a boy. I'll be sure to update about it at both my pregnancy diary and this blog if we find out - exciting stuff! :)
And lastly, before I fall heavily into bed, I MUST post photos of the snow we had a week or so ago! It's getting out-of-date now, so I want to get the photos posted here. We got almost 10 inches of snow!!!! We haven't had that much snow in 18 years, and I can't remember more than an inch or so at any one time since my childhood. So that was fun, and the boys were so excited! Here are the photos:
The view out of our front window when we woke up in the morning:
Neil attempted to go to work, but couldn't get the car out! The road was icy under the snow and so he couldn't get the wheels to grip anyway. He worked from home for 2 days. On that first day, he had to take the Chrysler for an MOT (we're hoping to sell it, since it has been sitting on the driveway for EVER and we drive the Citroen C8 now as our family car) and I took a couple of photos of him taking the snow off the car. He used an ice-scraper first, and the sweeps it made really showed the thickness of the snow:
But it didn't get the job done fast enough for him, so he grabbed an old piece of rough wood and did the rest much faster! I can't believe he didn't consider the paintwork in that decision, hehe! But it worked, anyway :) In the end, he couldn't get that car out on the road either, so the MOT had to be cancelled.
Here follows millions of photos of the boys in the back garden that morning! I had planned to take them out to the park for the huge-expanse-of-whiteness experience, but I had NO idea that we'd get that much snow, and it wasn't
safe to drive that day after all. They had a great time in the garden, stomping and falling over in the thick snow!
I bundled Nathan up in lots of layers and his snowsuit, hat and gloves, and sat him in the snow for a minute or so. I held him for ages out there, but my arms got tired and I couldn't play with the other two, so I sat him in the snow for a minute! It was thick enough to just hold him like a Bumbo seat! He just took it in, and seemed to enjoy it. He mostly looked around rather than wanting to eat it or anything like that. There are lots of these photos, sorry! It's his FIRST SNOW! I couldn't help myself! ;)
He set off crawling after a little while, and seemed interested in the snow:
After that he pulled up to stand at a flowerpot, and started to act a bit fed-up and cold! Here he is starting to whimper at me about it!
Neil took him inside for me so that I could stay with Arthur and Matthew. We built a snowman! :)
The boys played on their ride-ons for a bit, and then we got too cold and went inside. It was so much fun in the snow!
There was still plenty of snow on Day Two, so we went out in the garden again while Nathan napped. Our snowman had inexplicably leaned over during the night, but nothing had thawed much. Arthur felled the snowman and stayed out longer than Matthew, dissecting it with a plastic shovel, laughing in a somewhat manic manner as he did so!! Should I worry?! ;)
Matthew was so tired in the last photo! I think he even took a nap that day (he stopped a month or two ago). The snow thawed over the next couple of days, but the snowman lasted a while.
Okay, it's sooooo late and this post is now really long, so I must go to bed! I'll update again soon! Thanks so much again for the supportive comments last time I posted! :)
7 comments:
Oh they are so cute! I love all the photos. And I love your snowman! We get at least that much snow every year, usually lots more! By this time of year it is more a hindrance than anything else. But I do love the first few times it snows. :)
WOW, I can't even IMAGINE that kind of snow! Love the snowman, hehe!
I was so cross we missed that snow! Seven years I lived in the UK and we NEVER had snow like that!! Well done on the housework - I'm trying to be better about mine too as our house is now on ther market and we need to try and sell fast (in this economic climate - scary stuff!) and at any stage of any day I could be getting a call from an agent saying they have a client and will be here in 10 minutes! It is SO not easy keeping the house clean with littlies, and I have the option generally of tossing them out into the garden, which is not so easy in the UK. I have decided I want my next house to have less floor space!
Hope you have a great weekend :-) Love from Durban, soon to be love from Grahamstown... XXX
Yay! I had a feeling things were going much better from your status updates on Facebook :D
I didn't know what to write after your last entry as everyone else got there first. I kind of felt that whilst playgroups and hobbies and all that would be lovely for Arthur and most likely would help, I had a feeling that what really needed to change was you and how you felt about it all. And I knew that you could do it!
Those chore sheets look great, I may have to get a copy myself. It's actually all the things I do every day really but I do it in a harried unstructured way so it would be nice to just have a list. I would add things I think as I hoover EVERY day, I just have to with two very messy kids (and husband) and two cats and silly impractical bright red carpets.. doh. I don't enjoy it, but it has to be done. Lucky only the cats are scared of the hoover in this house. Oooh maybe Nathan isn't scared of the hoover because you used it more when he was new ;)
Well done honey! You're doing so well! I find it hard enough to do the housework with 2 kids and you have 3 and one on the way! You're brilliant :D
Glad you've had a good week Alice. You sound like you're doing great! And as Jemma said, you've got 3 small kids, pregnant with a fourth, and you should cut yourself a break!
SNOWMAN MURDER! SNOWMAN MURDER!
I'm EXCITED hearing about this decluttering, because I think I'm a bit the same as Arthur in that need for order and neatness. I think it will be a huge asset to you in about ten years' time. I absolutely NEED to clean and tidy - ergo, cleaning and tidying occurs when I'm around :)
Hi Alice!! I love your layout here. LOVE IT! It is so beautiful here with your 4 precious little ones up top. I love the colored stripes. I love you!!! I haven't been here in a long time, but need to remember to check here. I like it here. I would like to e-mail you soon. I can really identify with EVERYTHING you go through (except the extra children!) Ava is strong willed for sure though and she pushes me past my comfort level several times a day. I love her with a strong solid love but I am thankful (SO THANKFUL) that I am a Christian. God keeps me from acting on my full emotions with her. I'll email you soon, I hope! Just wanted you to know that I'm thinking about you and remember that the Lord sees your willing heart toward loving them as he wants you to. Love you!!! Julie
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