You know how on some days all you want to do is get just a few things done and no matter what you do, you can't seem to accomplish anything? And when you have those days (which sometimes seem to happen a lot), it starts feeling like you're never going to get on top of things? Well, today was not one of those days.
I went to bed last night feeling like our house was just out of control. I spent every free moment last week working on Ed's Father's Day gift and neglected cleaning. And of course, last weekend was just as busy as all our weekends always seem to be lately. So this morning, I decided to reclaim control of my house. I woke up before Avery (a whole hour, amazingly), and picked up as much of the strewn-about things as I could, then unloaded, loaded, and ran the dishwasher.
Once Ave's was awake, I focused on her. I'm still nursing, so we did that first thing. Then we played a bit. After that, she let me know that it was time to eat breakfast by appearing in the living room with the sleeve of crackers that had been lying on top of a stack of books on the kitchen table. How did she manage to get those crackers down without knocking over the stack of books or making any sound at all? I'm still wondering.
After we ate, we played some more. This morning, she decided that she wanted to play with her riding Pooh train in the kitchen, which was a great idea because it's so much easier to push on the linoleum. She went between pushing it, going to the window to watch Finny, having me push her, and walking herself on the train. At some point, she started leaning her head on the train - a big sign that she's tired. This was strange because it was a full hour before I expected her to be ready for a nap. But she's been cutting molars and not sleeping well as a result, so it wasn't completely out of the blue.
So I nursed her to sleep at 11:30 (which means that she fell asleep eating, then woke for long enough to cry for a couple minutes when I put her in her crib before falling back to sleep). And then she slept. For two hours. Yay!
In that two hours, I cleaned the bathroom. Meticulously. As though it had never been cleaned before. (I also finished picking up my bedroom, made my bed, had a nice long conversation with Amy, flossed my teeth, and got dressed for the day.)
Once Avery was back up again, we ate lunch together. (For those of you who are interested, it was leftover homemade mac and cheese, broccoli, carrots, and fresh mango.) Then, we went to the grocery store. By the time we got home, Ed was home, too. We spent the next hour before dinner kind of playing in the living room. I say "kind of" because Avery had gotten tired again and was going from happily playing to quick-to-crying (it was still cute though).
We had a dinner of black beans and rice with more fresh mango (so Daddy could enjoy some, too), which Avery loves. Then she had a bath, which was followed by a really drawn out nursing-to-sleep because she simply did not want to go to bed (can you blame her?).
As I type this, it doesn't seem like any kind of special day, but it was. I accomplished a lot. Cleaned a lot. Managed to help Avery take a two-hour nap. Took us to the grocery store. Played with my baby. Had great family time. And stayed in a fantastic mood the entire day. (And took a bunch of pictures along the way, as usual.)
It was a good day, indeed!
