March 5: Balloons, boots, and bicycles


It’s a beautiful Monday morning and despite my post about being completely ready for this morning, we still had our issues… you never can really be completely prepared (as you know). Red woke up in the middle of the night last night so I’m dragging a bit.

Highlights of the Morning and Commute:

  • I woke up to a discussion through the “kid monitor” about Daddy night versus Mommy night (from Daddy) which really bothered me since we both agreed that the kids should not be put into the middle of such discussions.
  • I then walked out of my room to Twin Crazy crying since Red accidently hit her with a baby doll. Accidents happen. Daddy was consoling Twin Crazy and asked Red to apologize. Red did nothing and eventually Daddy just walked away. This “discipline” drives me crazy. I am very focused about the need to follow through with what I start since it teaches kids authority and to actually listen to what we say. So after greeting the kids for the morning, giving them kisses, I asked Red what happened and if she by accident hit Twin Crazy and made her hurt. I asked her to apologize to Twin Crazy as Daddy had asked. She sat there, motionless. I said she needs to apologize since she hurt Twin Crazy but didn’t mean it. Twin Crazy was on my lap at this point. So I suggested giving her a big hug as a way to apologize. This, she agreed with. So both girls were on my lap with Red hugging Twin Crazy and Twin Crazy’s tears a thing of the past.
  • Big Bro was having a problem upstairs. He lost his Star Wars “Storm Trooper” lego and was fighting coming downstairs because of this. He needs to get his own way and little things like this just throw him into a REALLY nasty mood. I tried to get him to come down and said he needed to get downstairs to eat his breakfast for energy so he could ride his bike. After several minutes, he was still not downstairs. We were running late at this point. I gave him until the count of 5 for him to come downstairs or else he was going to lose his bike privilege for the morning. He got up, was wailing, but made it downstairs by the count of 3.
  • Vitimans for the kids all around. Big Bro was getting happier.
  • Red got dressed without a problem. Big Bro was going slowly. Needing help (Mommy time). He didn’t like his jeans which threw him back several minutes. He was running late. The thought of missing the bike drove him past his issue with the jeans and I was feeding him toast and jelly as I was helping him with shoes and jacket and backpack and helmet. He finally made it out of the house to catch up with the Motley Crew.
  • Red wanted to ride with me to daycare. Daddy wanted to ride her in. She was hanging onto my sweater. Daddy had to pry her off. Daddy talked to her saying that he wanted to drive her in and that he wanted a turn to drive her in. She was still crying and throwing a fit and clinging on to my leg and my sweater. It turns my stomach to hear him beg for the children’s attention.
  • So that was my morning. I have 3 months left to stay in this house. This will be a hard 3 months. And it will get worse from here on out.

    I think I’ll have a good day at work today. A colleague is returning from maternity leave so I will be able to get her up to speed with one of the forums we are working on together and will be able to delegate some of the survey work to her. She was involved with the previous work so it will be more efficient for her to take this piece on. I will continue to focus on securing speakers and also selling additional guests/ memberships. I’ll do some more outreach for the other forum as well. Finally, I need to connect with my team for the client project I am leading and I want to see their progress in applying the market sizing methodology to several segments as a test. I want to see if it is working, believeable, and defensible. I’m hoping they come to the meeting with me prepared, since we need to put this work in front of the client tomorrow. If the work is seriously flawed, this will throw a wrench into my working day and I will not be able to accomplish everything that I want to.

    My goal over the next few months is to shelter the kids and be successful at work. I will need to go through the divorce process which will bring its ups and downs but I need to be resilient and strong. I can do this knowing that there will be better and brighter days awaiting me on the other side.

    Highlights of My Working Day:
    So busy!!!

  • I met with a colleague who is back from maternity leave and got her up to speed with a conference we are having in April. I delegated the survey work to her – it needs some focused attention up front so this is perfect for her to get involved with.
  • I continued with speaker outreach for the two conferences. I secured one speaker and need to set up details to confirm story and content to be discussed.
  • I arranged for a conversation with one of the speakers to set expectations on content.
  • I spent a good 2 hours on sales outreach for one of the forums, now that I have the topics/agenda almost settled. The best way to sell new membership is to invite the organizations as guests and then they (hopefully) convert to members.
  • I led a team connect over lunch and we talked about the office move and also staffing needs.
  • I met with my team on the client project to review and vet the methodology they came up with for market sizing. I think it’s good. It’s creative. I made some suggestions to make it better and it is headed in the right direction. We will be ready for our client call tomorrow – we need just two PowerPoint pages…. one page on methodology and another page on how we tested the methodology with real data and the results. I will review with the team tomorrow AM before sending off to the client.
  • I did some personal things…. setting up some activities for myself for the weekend since ex-Hubby is taking all the kids away to his folks’ house for the weekend. My plans are falling into place and I am looking forward to the weekend.
  • So now I’m on the ferry. The sun is out. I’m feeling good. I need to think about dinner. I’m thinking cheese quesadillas with a mixed combo of side dishes of shrimp, black beans, sliced cucumber, olives. And anything else that I have leftover in the refrigerator.

    Dinner and Bedtime:

  • I picked up Red first, then Twin Husky and Twin Crazy. They were talking about how Twin Husky lost his helium balloon during the day. How it went up in the sky. And how he said “bye bye balloon”. The kid didn’t even cry. He just waved goodbye to his balloon.
  • We picked up Big Bro last. I did this on purpose. I knew he would want to ride his bike home. So we all waited for him to get his bike. While waiting, Twin Crazy was looking at her balloon and Twin Husky requested to wear his boots (instead of his sneakers). Big Bro arrived with his bike and we talked about the route home. So again we followed him in the van with hazards on, in our slow neighborhood streets. When we got to the last 5 minutes of the ride, Big Bro asked me to go ahead without him. He said he was OK. So I did. I turned the hazards off, pulled into the street, and drove away at a normal pace….. looking at him in my rear-view mirror until he was a speck. As I got the kids out of the van and gathered the bags, Big Bro came riding on into the garage, with a smile ear-to-ear. He was cooperative the rest of the night.
  • I got dinner ready. Warm tortillas, grated cheese, shrimp, black beans, olives, cucumbers. corn. It was a make your own quesadilla/burrito kind of night. Very easy. And the kids like the variety.
  • Afterwards the girls were loud and rambunctious. The boys were quiet. A balloon was floating. I changed the Twins and made them jump. Red put up some pictures in my clip-frame in my room. I love this thing… the kids pick what art/pictures they want to hang/clip and it goes on my wall on display.
  • I had the Twins for bedtime tonight. They went down easily. Big Bro cried “why do we have to take turns?” and then settled in to the routine with Daddy.
  • 20120305-203710.jpg

    20120305-203727.jpg

    20120305-203739.jpg

    20120305-203754.jpg

    20120305-203802.jpg

    20120305-203815.jpg

    I’m in bed now decompressing from the day. I will have a very busy day tomorrow with back to back meetings and I’d like to also get some more work done in between those meetings…. I’ll need to get a good night’s sleep tonight. Hopefully the kids stay asleep. I also need to get some personal things done and meetings set. It seems like everything is happening all at once… everything hitting from now until end April… and in the meantime living in this house and trying to keep my distance.

    Til tomorrow –
    – Mama K

    Comments

    1. sounds very challanging Kim, why are you not going to stay in the house?

      • Can’t afford it! We rent and it is really expensive. I’m looking forward to buying a smaller house all on my own. Low rates, low(er) real estate costs. Things are going OK here. It’s awkward living under the same roof but we keep our distance, especially at night. I just go into my room and keep myself busy on my iPad and reading books. Not that bad, really.

    Leave a Reply

    Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

    WordPress.com Logo

    You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

    Twitter picture

    You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

    Facebook photo

    You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

    Connecting to %s

    %d bloggers like this: