Organizing toys.

Easier said than done when you have two children who are at such different stages. My oldest is 6 and is naturally into toys that have accessories meaning lots of little parts (think Barbie shoes and similar items). My youngest is not quite 18 months and is more prone to EATING those little parts than playing with them. Then we have the two kids I'm watching now. One is nearly the same age as my youngest and the other is a boy who is not quite four. All four kids are VERY good at destroying an apartment and leaving toys strewn from one end to the other. NONE of them are good at picking up (though the toddlers are actually a little more willing to help than the bigger kids).

So I'm trying to establish what we have so I can find a place to put the toys. We currently have four large totes that toys have been going into (I have a massive tote system going on here; it's rather disturbing). We also have smaller totes all over the place. Today I have tackled the larger totes and I at least now have it to where I know what we have for the most part. There's just now a tote with a bunch of miscellaneous crap in it that I will at some point have to deal with but it's a start. Now, knowing that I'm hoping I can put some of the toys that are out away and get this place organized enough so that when the other two kids show up on Tuesday, I won't have toys all over the place by the end of the night (or at the very least, when I do, I will know where to put them). I'm hoping to make the appearance of little toys reduced and done at times when little toddlers eating them aren't as much of a concern (like during nap time). I'm also hoping to have fewer toys available to the older child I watch (as he's even worse about putting things away than my older daughter is). I'll get this all figured out eventually but I have to say, the whole toy thing was MUCH easier when I only had ONE child! And definitely easier when she wasn't into the Barbie/My Little Pony/plastic princess/Strawberry Shortcake and friends stage.

Going to hide this blog for now.

At some point, I still may make it only available to certain readers but I'm not entirely sure. We'll see. But for now, I'm just going to make the other two blogs visible.

Be sure to check out my other blog and follow me there. I can also be found on Twitter @SimplyJaneen.

Link to new blog.

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Sipping Life One Day at a Time

This will be more on the daily going ons with me and the girls though I'm not great about updating it every day but I'm hoping to do better at it than I have in the past.

This has been a crazy week!

Not as crazy as last week but still! Last week was Christmas, of course. Two days after that was Natalie's birthday. The week ended with the old year ending and a new one starting. Natalie turned six this year and is very much into My Little Pony. It started long before now with me finding a few ponies while we were still in Beaver Dam. I had also gotten one from my older sister to give to Natalie. Just before we left for Korea, I had found a few more. If I remember right, I left them all here though because I had enough to carry to Korea with us. They were put into the locker though and left there until we returned to the US. This was pretty much the extent of her collection until I stumbled on a whole bunch of them at a garage sale last summer (almost didn't see them too!). That added quite a few to her collection. Before her birthday, she had somewhere around 20 ponies. Between Christmas and her birthday, she managed to get about 15 more (give or take a few). I happened to find an ad on Craig's list with quite a few ponies including a rather large one. My one older sister bought her a couple in the store. I bought her a couple more from the store and found two for her on eBay. Well, I found a lot more than that but I only got two. She loves them all and plays with them constantly. So does her sister only her idea of playing with them is to steal them, chew on them, and bang them on the table. It's all in good fun though.

Natalie also enjoys looking them up online and finding out what their names are. Of course, she wants more, especially the ponies that are currently on the My Little Pony show she enjoys watching. I don't find them the most attractive though and would rather get ponies for her off of eBay. I think they have gotten considerably smaller than they used to be and not as well, pretty. Their eyes are one color and there is absolutely no imagination really as far as their design at least not compared to the ones that used to be made in the past. Hasbro really has lacked in imagination as far as ponies go this current generation which I find kind of sad. The ponies all pretty much look the same. Which is too bad because when I was growing up, there were all kinds of different ponies and all kinds of styles and designs. There were ponies with full body cutie marks (if you don't know what a cutie mark is, it is the picture that is on the flank of the pony). There were ponies with fuzzy bodies, with jewels for eyes (okay, I think those are kind of creepy like Total Eclipse of the Heart kind of creepy), ponies that were scented, etc. Now, most ponies you find in stores are just slightly larger and with a little more hair than the ones you can find in your child's happy meal. And for the amount of money that is charged for these little ponies, I can find some really pretty ones on eBay. And I have.

Fortunately, she loves whatever ponies she gets and plays with them all day long. I think I could get rid of pretty much the rest of her toys so long as I leave her ponies. And that I can understand as I remember my younger sister and I playing with ponies all day long back when we were kids. Do not ask me why ponies are so much fun to play with when they are more limited than Barbies are as far as dressing them and stuff but they are and I still wish I had my old collection of ponies, especially since some of them would fetch a pretty penny now! Of course, I wouldn't sell them. lol

So the girls got all their new toys and things Christmas Day and really, we didn't do much else. I didn't plan to do a Christmas dinner because as far as I was concerned, Thanksgiving was enough! Plus, we were pretty much broke since Christmas was right before payday. Two days later, we had Natalie's birthday and Natalie and her dad went out to Target and to the local party store. They picked up some things at both places and Natalie got a very large My Little Pony (big enough to be a pillow). While they were gone, I baked her cake (which, like last year, failed to come out looking decent. I think the problem is is that my pans are not quite large enough and there's a tilt in the oven or something so the cake spills a little over the top which means it sticks to the pan at the top and then fails to come out cleanly. But, it's a tasty cake and along with my cream cheese frosting recipe, tasted really good. But before we could eat cake, we needed to have dinner. We had talked about going out to eat but didn't quite get that far so we ordered pizza for dinner. Finished that, lit up the candles, had the cake, and opened the presents.

Wednesday, we got a break since nothing was planned but Thursday Natalie's friend came over and they got to play. Friday was a New Year's thing at the local children's museum and so we went there and got a year long membership. Both the girls got to run around and play and Natalie even had a chance to climb on the climbing wall. Saturday night was New Year's Eve and she got to have her friend from next door spend the night. My town also does fireworks which she still gets very excited about and so both girls were up at midnight watching the fireworks both on TV and outside.

We got a couple of days of rest before this week really got going. A friend of mine asked if I could babysit her two kids: a boy who is almost four and a girl not quite a month younger than Isabelle. She's not able to pay much but it's extra money. It's also chaotic having them over. The little girl plays with Isabelle and they're both pretty quiet. The boy, however, is very rambunctious and active. He cannot sit down and because he can't sit down, my older daughter starts getting very hyped up. This is definitely one of those cases where the place we live in is a huge problem. I can't send them outside because there is really nowhere for them to play and nowhere for me to really watch them either. So they run around the apartment, climb on things, jump off of furniture, and scrap like a couple of siblings. It definitely gets chaotic. On the other hand, it has helped me get the two girls on a better schedule. Now, they're getting lunch earlier in the day and Isabelle is taking regular naps at a fairly consistent time. Still need to work on breakfast but that gets tricky when I'm not able to feed all four kids since we're pretty limited on food. Still, they're getting something to eat in the morning and they get fed an early enough lunch now that there's not going too long before getting a full meal. And they do eat before then, just things like fruit, bagels, basically anything they can carry around and eat. I won't be getting them tomorrow or any other Friday. That day I set aside for ME to get a break from children and to do things that NEED to get done (like the eight loads of laundry I'm planning to do tomorrow). Next week they'll be here four days. I'm sure as time goes on, it will get easier to get things figured out. I think the biggest challenge though is figuring out how I'm going to be able to do ANY kind of homeschooling with Natalie. Not that we have been doing all that much but watching two other kids is definitely not going to make that any easier.

Making some changes on here yet again.

If you've been reading my blog, you'll notice I do post about a lot of stuff that's been going on with me and I've lately been wanting to change the focus. I still do not know exactly what's going to happen with my marriage. Right now, things have been okay. They're not perfect because my husband is still involved with his religion but deciding not to let his beliefs influence what I do and what I do with the girls has helped out a lot. We still have our fights and our issues but I'm not so miserable as I have been. I celebrated Christmas this year for the first time since 2006. And I didn't do a whole lot. I didn't buy a lot of presents for the girls (they got more stuff from their aunt than they did from me). I bought a small fiber optic tree and put it on a book shelf in my office. I didn't do a ton of Christmas like activities but it was different in that I wasn't isolating myself from everyone because I couldn't stand to see anything regarding the holidays at all. And I took the girls trick-or-treating back on Halloween, something my husband STILL does not know about. Thanksgiving wasn't much different than it had been because that's the one holiday that's been okay to do. New Year's is at least tolerated and he'll somewhat celebrate with me though he probably wouldn't do anything if I didn't and all I really do is make munchies to eat at home and do the countdown thing with wine and sparkling grape juice for the girls (if they're up). This year, I also had the next door neighbor's little girl over since her parents wanted to go out.

Like I said, it wasn't much, I didn't go crazy but it was enough for me though he did start in on me one time because he really didn't like the idea of my doing presents with the girls on Christmas Day. Well, that's too bad. I'm not giving up holidays anymore and that's something he just need to understand. He was okay with it all and had no issues with me celebrating holidays before we got married. Just because he changed doesn't mean I did and I don't have the issues with holidays he does. I don't see them the same way he does. I don't have the beliefs he does. In fact, I'm getting farther and farther away from having any real beliefs in God at all, at least in as far as actually following a bunch of rules out of some book. I'm sure some people will be offended by my saying that but it's the truth. That doesn't mean I don't try to be a good person but it does mean that I'm not going to do something because the Bible says so. There has to be more to it than that.

Naturally, the new year tends to bring on the feeling of a clean slate and the need to make changes (and make resolutions). And for sure there are things I want to work on this year. Though I have done some posting in this blog, the blog I have for the girls has been largely neglected. This I plan to change. I want it to be more of a family blog than just a blog about the girls. I also want it to be more of a positive blog and to just have more to it in general than just me relating the going ons. So, with that in mind, my focus on this blog is changing to one that is more of a venting place. Because of that, I'm going to make it a little less visible and possibly even change the settings so that it can't be accessed by as many people, hard to say. But if you do come on here and read and sometimes respond, post a comment at least so I have somewhat of an idea as to what my next step with this blog will be.