A Bit More Orderliness

As I continue to try to juggle my life, sometimes less successfully, Phil has had two brilliant breakthroughs for me. First, he has started to enforce an 8:30pm bedtime. I read to the boys in bed until about 9:15. This is shockingly different from what we've been doing. I found myself last week reading to them until 10:45. It was a good book, and we were having a good time, but that is really late if I want to get any productive work done after they're in bed.

After three nights of this, I can't say I've noticed much earlier rising, so it could be that they actually have needed an extra hour or so of sleep.

The other breakthrough has to do with the dishes. Much though I like having a clean kitchen, if the option for twenty minutes is to either clean the kitchen or play the piano, I opt for piano every time. My pattern throughout married life has been to have a kitchen that is never fully clean and never fully messy. I'll get to 80% and lose interest or need to sleep or get called away to a sad baby. So Phil is instituting an every other day cleanup plan for the boys. Jadon and Joe took today, and they did a reasonable job. I was amazed that while I worked and ate breakfast, they spent that 15 minutes cleaning up 100% of the way. Excellent!

Phil took the boys on errands today. I had a gift certificate for the almost local Edible Landscaping nursery that expired today. Phil bought a lemon tree and a coffee plant, both of which we had bought the year we moved here, and both of which have died some years since. It was a good day to run errands because we were in our third day of deluging downpours, which has made the land a muddy morass.

Our local hamlet of Esmont had several fields almost entirely underwater.

While they were gone, Caleb took advantage of the silence and took a four hour nap. This from the child who took three cat-naps yesterday on my back, each about 15 minutes long. Maybe a white-noise maker is in his future, as apparently he has no ability to sleep if there is any sort of excitement going on. And with four brothers, there is always excitement going on.

The cows were bawling all afternoon. Although Phil had brought them two hay bales on Sunday afternoon, those were long since pounded into the mud, and the cows, cold, wet, and hungry, spent their afternoon yelling at me. When Phil got home, he realized there was no hope of a hay delivery today. Thankfully, the grass has begun to grow, so he wired up a lane and the cows eagerly went to start grazing. It's earlier than we'd prefer, which will necessitate further adjustments in the days to come, but for today, we're thankful they have pasture provision.

And I, once again, was thankful to the depths of my soul that I have not had to go back and forth between trailer and RV these last three days of monsoon. I can prep food in dry comfort, and that is a treat.

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In other news, Phil finished emptying the construction trailer, and it is ready to go. Phil managed, on his own, to push it backwards, but with the rain, it soon sank down in a soft spot. He'll need some help to get it out.

Another thing he's accomplished is electrification of the milking shed.

I joke, without too much bitterness, that it took a week to get the milking shed electrified, but more than two months to get our trailer electrified when we first moved here.

I do realize that the level of complexity is not identical.