I'm tired.....

1. This was Nicolas on his 100th day of school.  He doesn't look too excited, does he?  His class did one hundred exercises to celebrate.





2. This is why I'm tired.  Efraim.  Luckily that bb came out easily.


And thankfully Leo cleaned up the vaseline.



This was Efraim when he was supposed to be napping the other day.

And this.

And this.

3. This I just posted to remind myself I have made a few good dinners lately.  I think we might have grilled cheese sandwiches tonight.







4. Jubal's been in swim lessons at the rec center on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Efraim likes to lock himself in the lockers.  I'm tempted to leave him in there.




5.  Boys never stop.

6. Lando counted to 100 so his teacher sent me this picture.  I thought it showed his newly lost tooth well and he is so cute!

 7.  Elena started swim team this last week.  I'm glad she decided to do it.

8.  Really the main reason I'm tired is because I've stayed up late the last three nights working on projects, both of which are hugely frustrating.  Project 1 is Elena's stays. I spent a long time on them trying to be precise as possible did all this hand sewing and they don't fit at all!!!!  The lining doesn't even fit them by a good half inch.  How is that even possible?!?!?  Anyway, so after spending 3 days filing and cutting and sanding plastic boning, purposefully staying up late and not exercising or cooking or cleaning--just trying to finish them which shouldn't take that long anyway--it's just I'm so busy with kids' stuff now and Efraim is a pill-- I think I'm going to have to redo it all with thinner boning.  Sometimes I think I'm getting better at sewing and sometimes I think I should just give it up all together.  I literally feel like crying.  Instead I'm just being a grumpy, ornery mom to my kids.  Sigh.

Project 2 is Leo's family history.  I have a friend who similarly to me is the only person working on her family tree so she just adds it straight to FamilySearch.  I thought this would be good to save time and so after our trip this fall I spent HOURS adding a lot of the records to FamilySearch.  Only I have many different records that don't tie directly in to the tree so I can't add them on FamilySearch and I want to record them in case they tie in later.  Plus I need a better way to keep track of godparents because sometimes that's my only clue to who the father is in a non-married couple.  So I didn't realize you can't download a gedcom  file from FamilySearch and Ancestry will only transfer over four generations, so I'm retyping in all the records back into my genealogy program.  Hours and hours and hours of work again.  I'm not even half way done and I also realized after my idea about the godparents that I'm going to have to go back through and do that to all the other previous records which is days and days and weeks of more work on it.  It all is so overwhelming and Leo said he would help me on the FamilySearch part at one point back in November when I was entering the stuff the first time and that lasted for one time.  I just want to cry about it all too.  Obviously I need more sleep to deal with anything and so me staying up late to try to finish the stays is not working.  But during the day its impossible with Efraim and Jubal.  Those two are destructive machines and we're just cooped up in this apartment and it's freezing outside and no playgroups and stupid ringworm.  So yeah, I guess I'll stop whining now.  Ruff.

9. Our new piano teacher is not all I hoped for.  Very unreliable and doesn't provide extra music for the kids to do interesting songs--basically my kids will never learn piano well because they've never had a decent teacher to push them.  I wish all of them could take lessons from Ana's teacher in Provo.

10.  I got a job at the Rec center in the child care center for 4 hours a week.  I'm hoping it will earn me enough money to hire someone in Colombia to extract names for us.  This way I won't feel guilty that it's taking money from our budget elsewhere and I won't have to choose between my sewing project money and genealogy.  Win-win?  Hopefully?  Jubal and Efraim can just go with me and I get a free pass to the rec center and free child care when I go.  My sister said I should just go and sew while I put them in the child care center.  So tempting.  Hee. Hee.

11. We did go to the next concert in the concert series that we bought season tickets to.  It was a classical string quartet + clarinet.  The clarinetist was a comedian though, at first I didn't think it was going to be that good, but Leo and I and all the kids were cracking up the whole time.  It was great.  He was from Canada so he made a lot of Trudeau jokes.  And jokes about pot--that was my favorite.  Hee. Hee.