The New Nanny

Tonight's photo is of the twins at dinner - this is our new set up at dinner time. Forget those bulky high chairs, and they're like real little people at our dinner table which makes me laugh. It really is easier to use these boosters and have them eat at the table with us. They seem to like being included too. We've also got them eating our food as much as possible (rather than making lots of separate meals) so tonight they're eating chili. They immediately got baths afterwards. Claire decided she wanted to take a shower at the same time so she got herself clean which was quite handy.

Today was our first day with the new nanny. I spent all day acclimating her to our home and schedule, but I did have a meeting in the afternoon so I left her here for two hours alone with the kids. She seemed to do pretty well, and Claire enjoyed playing with her. It's impossible to say on the first day whether someone will work out, but it was a good first day. Nevertheless, everyone is exhausted. Transition time is tiring. I just got invited on one of my coveted nightly walks and can't even find the energy for that.

So my new work schedule will be Mondays and Wednesdays in the office with the other days at home (conveniently my WFH days are the preschool days so I can do drop off/pick up), unless my boss bows to the pressure of the new 1-day WFH policy and requests a change. This still remains to be seen. No update from work today - I'm still in a holding pattern.

Molly has a new "trick" - if she hears the word "bye" she immediately starts waving, so she's put that together. Lily will wave on command (as will Molly) but Lily hasn't made the connection between 'bye bye' and waving yet. I really, really thought Lily would be walking by now but she is surprising me by not progressing to that yet. Sometimes it's the fast, efficient crawlers who don't want to walk, and this might be her deal.

My surprise (sort of) is that neither baby seems to be using any words yet. Claire was saying three words by her first birthday (dog, daddy, ball). The babies aren't. Of course Claire had nonstop one-on-one attention and only adults in the house, so that encouraged her to talk. The twins' environment, I suppose, isn't the best for learning to talk. My question for their 1-year check up (coming up soon) is to ask the doctor whether twins tend to talk in a delayed manner compared to singletons. It seems logical.

Costume Purchase

I love the internet. We recently got one of those Halloween costume catalogs in the mail and it has a Cinderella costume in it for $50. Fifty dollars!! But Claire was begging for it. Begging. So last night, I spent half an hour combing the internet for cheaper Cinderella costumes, and lucky us, I figured out our nearby Target store has a version for $17. So today Claire got to buy her Halloween costume - a bit early, I agree, but you know Target will sell out of these things in no time - and she is so happy. We even went to the mall today (a brief outing for the whole family, but the babies were crabby), and Claire made us go in the Disney store, and she wasn't even interested in their $60 Cinderella costume because she already had her Target version! Long live Target and the internet.

Last Christmas Claire got a small ballpit from Santa Claus, but it's got a slow leak in it, so it doesn't get used anymore. Tonight, however, Molly showed extreme interest in the deflated ballpit, so I blew it up again and Claire and Molly had a blast playing together! Molly thought it was hysterically fun. I was genuinely laughing watching her enjoy rolling around in the balls. We need to find that slow leak and patch it now that I saw how much fun this could be for the babies. Lily was napping so she didn't get a turn in the balls tonight.

Back to the grind tomorrow and the new nanny will start her first day with us. I will be home most of the day coaching her through our usual schedule. I hope she can handle our circus.

A Kitchen Break

Today was Claire's second tap dance lesson (see photo). We are also officially in the minivan now, with the carseats set up and the Volvo getting prepped for a good cleaning and for sale. In fact, the carseat event took most of our afternoon (repeat of 4th of July), but at least it's done. Kyle finally drove the van for the first time and he complained (as I expected) but he'll get over it once he's writing that much smaller car payment check each month.

It was a dreary, rainy day here. Claire and I had the tap dance and lunch outing, but then we were home all afternoon setting up the carseats in the minivan. To ease the cabin fever, we got the kids out for dinner and then walked around the open-air mall afterwards before rushing home for kid bedtimes. I cleaned the baby bottles for the day, but other than that I did absolutely no cleaning in the kitchen which is amazing - but with a lunch out and a dinner out there was no need.

I have gone back and hired the other nanny candidate so we actually have childcare coverage for next week. I was so desperate to line up care that I haven't even checked her references yet, so I'm still a little anxious about her. All in all, this round of nanny hiring has been a bust. Not fun at all. Summer nannies are so much easier to find with all the college kids out of school.

Yesterday, Friday, my manager was on vacation so there is no update from work on this new work-from-home policy and how it impacts my schedule going forward. So the work stress remains.

Friday night we took the kids out for pizza so we got a break from the kitchen last night too! Photo of the twins is from last night after dinner. Their outfits are adorable (a baby gift from a family friend).

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 ...

Holding Pattern

I'm in a holding pattern as I wait for my manager to make a decision about whether he'll defy convention - our new one day work-from-home policy - and allow me my same flexibility, or whether he will walk the line and require me to be in the office four days (which won't work for our family). I believe he'll walk the line. Whatever the case, it was a stressful day and I didn't sleep very well last night either. I didn't have the focus for my job or for the kids. I just needed some peace and quiet to think through my options, and I didn't get any of that. At 9pm, I'm just now getting some peace, but I'm too curious to watch the RNC and see what this Palin candidate says so that will kill my thinking time tonight.

It just felt like a loooooooong day, and it's not over yet. Claire is wide awake upstairs and singing loudly.

And I don't have the minivan yet either. It was pouring rain today (thanks hurricane Gustav), so I didn't feel like dragging the kids out without Kyle's help to go sign papers for 45 minutes. The plan is to do this tomorrow.

So tomorrow is the second preschool day and I was wrong - it is a "full" day until 11:30am. Tomorrow Kyle is also home with the kids while I buy the car and go into the office. I'm just having a hard time getting excited about work when I don't know what's going to happen with my job. It's very discouraging, and scary too.

Tonight's photo is after dinner (hence the diaper-only babies again, we do strip them down for meals), when the twins were chasing each other around doing the same thing. They like the handle on the freezer door. It's a handy bar for help in standing up.

Back To School and Back To Work

Today was Claire's first preschool day. It was only for an hour, and Kyle didn't notice when dropping her off today there was a parent meeting during her one hour class, so we looked like fantastically involved and caring parents today. Yikes. When I picked Claire up at 10am, I apologized to her teacher, last year's teacher, and the lady who runs the school about this. I promised them that we do care about them. I also wanted to ask why this meeting wasn't noted in the Open House packet I picked up last week, but I wasn't going to make that point because then I'd look like a rude and uncaring parent. Good communication gets good involvement though, don't you think? Although I hear from my friends with new kindergartners this year that the real school system tends to over communicate so maybe I'll be wishing for the opposite in two more years. And my friends assure me that when the twins make it to "real" school that I'll really be annoyed by all the over communication in duplicate.

Claire told me she had fun, and a girl (also named Lauren, but a different Lauren from summer camp/dance class) from last year's class is in the same classroom so that made her happy. Tonight she went into full meltdown, however, so clearly we have a few transition issues going on, though she put her best face on it for the daytime.

Lily also went into meltdown at dinner time, and it stretched well into bedtime when she wouldn't settle down and screamed in her crib. My guess is this amazingly mild head cold is turning into our first earache for the new school year. Lovely. We're back to the earaches, antibiotics, and poop factories from last school year already. Molly might even be in the same boat. I'll see how they do tomorrow but it may be a clinic day for us.

It's also a minivan buying day tomorrow. Yes, we're taking the plunge, and for you money types, we'll be saving over $3000 annually just on car payments. Gas will hopefully be cheaper too than my small SUV, though that is debatable. And we get free oil changes for a year or two. The questionable part is the maintenance - we are buying a car with no warranty, so if something goes wrong, we're in the hole. But as long as we're in the hole for less than $3000, we're still coming out ahead of the Volvo costs, right? I just cannot yet wrap my mind around driving one of these vehicles yet - I've lost all sense of cool now for sure - but it just makes practical sense. And all the more financially practical when I detail my latest news from work today ....

... And so from work today, my larger group is moving to an official "work-from-home" policy. The horrible, awful, but always-has-been-expected-would-happen news? It's ONE day. One. Not even two. Usually when news like this comes out, my boss quickly calls and reconfirms his commitment to my work flexibility (i.e., WFH three days per week) but today I got no call. And no instant message. Nothing. It was pure silence. Reading between the lines, and knowing Corporate America, I know that he will not extend my amazing flexibility now that there's an official policy going into effect. He won't stick his neck out for me, and he shouldn't have to - if I were him, I wouldn't do it either as a manager. So he's feeling badly, knowing that in the past I've stated we can't afford a nanny for 4 days per week, nor do I want to have a nanny for 4 days/week for my kids. I want time with them too, and not just three rushed, crazy days a week. I like my schedule, even if it is a challenge working from home with three kids, because I get the best of both worlds - I get the intellectual stimulation and paycheck, and I get time with my kids.

So once I talk to my manager and confirm my worst suspicions, then I have some horrible decisions to face this week. I always knew I'd end up here, but I just didn't imagine it would happen so soon.

Ah, stress. What a rude awakening after my week of vacation last week. Not the best way to return to work today. I think Claire's first day at school was better than my first day back at work.

Labor Day

Happy Labor Day! Another low-key day here for us. I got to sleep in (yeah, and much needed) and then I took Claire out for lunch and errands for a couple hours. We then packed the family up for another trip to Antioch Park just to get out of the house for a while.

We had to pull together an early dinner so Kyle could attend his Fantasy Football draft night (oh yippeeee, sorry guys for the lack of enthusiasm here). He left the house before 6pm and I've been on my own with the kids ever since. Molly was over-tired because she missed her second nap and for some reason Lily went into meltdown mode too. So I had my hands full getting kids to bed.

Photos are from the park today, and also from dinner tonight. We're trying something new, where we put the babies in portable high chairs that attach to our regular seats so they can eat at the table with us, and so we can get rid of the two high chairs that take up too much space. I bought "placemats" that suction cup to the table to ease the mess on the table but Molly immediately figured out how to pull it up and chew on it. So we had to place the food directly on the table which was a bit of mess tonight. I haven't decided if the regular high chairs are easier to clean up or if I like this new set up yet. If they'd quit dropping food the new set up would be a ton easier for cleaning purposes. I just can't remember when the dropsie game becomes less interesting to babies.

Tomorrow Claire starts her first day of preschool. The crazy thing is they're only doing one hour of classes all week, so that means she gets dropped off at 9am and picked up at 10am. How insane! Impossible with my kid and work situation. So Kyle will hopefully do drop-offs this whole week while I do pick ups.

We also hired a nanny - the French girl new to Kansas City. It was really a toss up between the two main girls I interviewed, so maybe the French mystique swayed my opinion a bit here. I am concerned the long bus commute from up north will frustrate her after a while, but I'm willing to give this a shot. Downside is she can't start until next week, so Kyle and I have to negotiate who is staying at home and who is going to work each day this week. I despise these negotiations. I usually lose.