This was the view from my kitchen window Monday morning. Is it not beautiful.
Monday mornings I'm always a bit surprised by how long it takes me to get everything in order after the weekend. If I get the house clean Saturday night, and we are away much of Sunday, how can the house need hours of cleaning? It is a mystery.
But that is something I'm realizing, as I try to use my 168 hours a week well: if I don't include any time for general organization, life rapidly devolves. I'm trying to find the happy medium.
We've been doing a lot of school work lately. The sunny days are few and far between, as we continue to have days of snow and cold and grey. We are trying a new math program with the middle three boys, and they are having a good time with it.
On Monday, Phil spent time cleaning his office and doing paperwork. He has plenty to do.
Tuesday was a town day for Phil. He gets to lead the men's retreat with our church this weekend, so there is much to think about and plan.
I had made muffins for breakfast. Caleb grabbed for one, and Phil gave him a little piece.
I wasn't very nice about that, I'm afraid. Some allergists suggest that babies cannot easily digest gluten until they are about two, and so recommend holding off on gluten foods until then. I wouldn't have expected blueberry muffin to be Caleb's first food, but I will hope that a tiny crumb will not mess him up for life.
I then made him some eggs, thinking that he is clearly showing signs of food readiness. Nourishing Traditions recommends boiling an egg for three minutes, tossing the half-cooked whites, and feeding the baby the runny but heated yolks, sprinkled with sea salt, as a first food.
I was ready to cook six eggs (this baby does seem hungry, after all), but in the end, even the two I made was two too many. Caleb isn't ready to swallow, so all that bright yellow yolk came right back out again.
One benefit of muffin as the first food is that it probably won't stain clothes like egg yolks, provided the muffin is what's offered, and not the blueberry.
Caleb is scootching well. It is amazing that anything with that much friction from contact with the ground can move along, but he gets where he wants to go now.
On Wednesday, we spent the whole afternoon trying to get our family financial books in order. I have hesitated to use QuickBooks because I can enter an entire credit card bill into Excel in a few minutes, and I always have Excel open for other purposes, so I stay quite current. But to open QuickBooks and enter the various information: that has been a longer project than I have wanted to undertake.
But, as part of our hoped for orderliness, we are going to try actually keeping careful books starting this year. It was a tiring project for the two of us, and took something like seven man hours to enter four months of one credit card's expenses. Phil has hopes it won't always take that long. I think it would have to get faster, because I don't think that many hours is sustainable, realistically.
On a completely different note, we think that, should Jadon go to college, he might need to take Caleb with him. What will the baby do without his beloved oldest brother?
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