The Minivan

It's here. The white, uncool monstrosity is now parked outside our home. But let's face it - this is just all too practical a vehicle for our number of kids and our financial situation. The exciting news is I was able to get a 5-year bumper to bumper warranty (Kyle's concern was lack of warranty) thrown in without adjusting our monthly payment too much so this has turned out to be a pretty good deal after all. If one of those power sliding doors goes out, for example - a $2000 fix - then we're out no money other than a $100 deductible. Not bad.

Claire is so excited about the sliding doors and the DVD she can barely contain herself. We haven't had time to switch out carseats yet, so the Volvo is still officially in use. I guess I need to post some car sale ads on the internet for the Volvo.

I spent the morning finalizing the car sale, ran late for preschool pick-up, took Claire out to lunch, and then went into the office for the afternoon stretch (Kyle was home with kids today). We had our weekly team meeting this afternoon and my boss didn't shed any new light on the new work-from-home policy and his thoughts around my flexibility. I have slightly more hope than yesterday about whether my flexibility will stay intact, only because I listened to the boss think through ways to be more flexible with his team while staying under the radar screen, but I can tell he's very, very conflicted. I know he doesn't want to stick his neck out for me/his team and he shouldn't have to. I have a feeling this indecision will last for a few weeks until the official policy is released by HR and then he'll begin to feel out our real options for additional flexibility beyond one day per week.

So the bad news is that my anxiety around my job isn't going away any time soon. I have a few more weeks of this, at least. Sigh.

I don't feel like I saw my kids much today, but I did give three kids baths tonight. This is because we gave Molly and Lily some ranch dressing to eat (for amusement purposes at dinner), which they smeared everywhere. Can anyone explain to me why ranch dressing makes baby faces turn red and irritated?

Oh Lordy. Oh Lordy. Live update from Kansas City: the new nanny candidate just left me a message while I was writing this that she can't start next week, and probably can't start for another couple weeks. This is turning out to be a cluster - the nanny, the changes at work, and so on. I want to scream. I'm signing off now, because I must go inform Kyle of this news. This ought to be an interesting discussion ...