Fun at Home

So when I go to take a darling picture of Daisy reading to her baby in her pajamas and red sandles (which she loves wearing with socks. This hearkens back to a few days in college when I wore Tevas with socks...I can't believe I'm admitting that now), the camera won't focus, but when the girls get hold of it and goof around, the results are much more successful. I guess it's true about kids and technology...

Lizzie photographing Anna (mind you, it's well before Halloween when this was taken. Anna just has a style all her own and we don't mess with it except on school days or for church).
Anna photographing Lizzie, perfectly focused...if not centered.

This is actually a fairly accurate portait of our life these days. I haven't blogged for over a month because, well, I haven't even been online. Our computer is randomly crashing and I've been a little scared, but I've also been so incredibly busy that I haven't had any time. Please don't ask what has been keeping me so busy because I don't honestly know. I wish I could say that it's because I let go of Yolanda, the woman who has been coming in twice a month to clean my kitchen and bathrooms. She was a great cleaner, she used straight bleach so I was buying big Clorox bottles every month, but she didn't speak a word of English. I'm pretty sure she is here legally, but since I don't speak a word of Spanish, I'll never know. She always spoke to me as if I understood her and I got really good at either nodding with what I hoped was the appropriate emotion ("Si, si...") or leaving as soon as she arrived. I had to let her go for two reasons. First was that she ruined my linoleum in my kitchen. This was a trend with her. She tended to ruin things as she cleaned them. She dunked my next-door neighbor's toaster oven underwater and broke their vacuum, and she took a Brillo pad to another friend's plasma TV screen. She has already scratched the control part of my stove and left a little (big enough) bleach spot on my bedroom carpet, but the kitchen floor was the last straw. She felt horrible about it, I think, but I couldn't understand her so she might have been telling me to just get over it and appreciate that at least the floor was clean. Anyway, that and my desire to save a little money made it so I had to let her go. This is done by calling her phone and leaving a message which her husband, whose English is as good as my Spanish but is still better than hers, hopefully interprets correctly and translates for her. She must have gotten it because she hasn't come since, and I am starting to notice it. I'll never get the chrome in my shower to sparkle like she does, but I also will never clean with straight bleach. With the money I'm saving, I'm buying huge amounts of Clorox Bleach Wipes and that shower cleaner that cleans for you. It's cheaper than paying someone...

Now that school is really underway, I am feeling overwhelmed, not with our schedule or first grade homework, which seems oppressive, but with the amount of paperwork involved with two kids in school. Does anyone else feel like huge forests are wasted on papers that come home? The thing is, I don't even know what they all say. By 4:00 they are all a blur, and frankly, most of them are in the recycling bin. I wish that the school would start communicating via email. The Girl Scouts do it, our ward does it, and if the school did it, parents wouldn't be able to use the excuse that their children never gave them the note about school picture retake day, which I didn't get this year. Last year, Lizzie's picture was so bad that I got three notices about when retakes were. This year she kept her hair looking cute all morning and actually smiled. Hooray! Maybe this means that I should be on the school council and propose such an action. I would really like to be involved in school affairs, especially at our charter school where parent involvement is so important. However, that goes directly against my goal to simplify my life this year, so maybe next year when both older girls are at the same school.