And this despite a sick 4 year old (Day 2), a mopy cat (The Bean, and he’s a big baby), and a cat who somehow caught a claw and made her paw bleed on the glider but who somehow has no contact pain and no sign of injury (Pickle, who really would be the one to get the Kitty Stigmata).
I woke up this morning, extricated my feet from Bean’s warm, gooshy belly not once, not twice, but thrice and got myself to the kitchen wherein I made Lucy’s breakfast and lunch simultaneously, nuked coffee from yesterday while making a fresh pot, and even managed to shove some apple in my mouth before heading over to the computer. When, of course, my child came bearing a tissue caked in Exorcist-esque nose spew. And so, we’re home again from school despite my best intentions to get her back in today. She’s feeling better for sure, but I’m damned tired of this revolving cold bullcrap that comes along with school so we’re having one more Take It Easy Day and then it will be back to the grind tomorrow. I would really hate for her to be sick through the Halloween festivities and Grandma visit (assuming her brother decides to show up one of these days.)
I also decreed last evening that from here on out, we are no longer on Baby Watch. Quite frankly, I don’t know how I turned into one of those ‘Is He Here Yet?’ people but clearly it doesn’t make anything happen any more quickly so I’m going to try my hardest to get back to ‘He’ll be here as soon as he’s ready.’ Speaking of which…the other night at bedtime, Lucy looked up at me and said, ‘Mommy, I think The Baby Brother is ready to come out of the tiny tunnel (birth canal) now.’ Now if this isn’t a brilliant reminder that babies are born when they are good and ready, I don’t know what is. I assured her that as soon as he was ready to come through the tiny tunnel, he would.
What else, what else. I gotta milk this mood while it lasts because I could very well end up a Little Black Raincloud by midmorning…
Um…in reduction stuff, I’ve been (slowly) going through and changing all of our train mileage from gas to electric usage, which is actually far easier than I expected. Still haven’t plugged all of the numbers into the spreadsheet though. This has reminded me that I need to look at our regular electric usage, though. We should be pretty much on track for the year since we have green power (we get 4x more than with non-green), but I’ve still been counting it as regular power. Turns out that we’ll have 2 electric figures because of transit–one coal and one wind/water (household) so I’ll have to alter my percentages accordingly. I may not bother with this until the 6-month mark though. We’ve been reevaluating household electric since it bothers me that we use so much, and are now trying out an every-other-day dishwasher program along with being far more vigilant about turning lights out/not turning lights on. We’ll have to see what our kWh totals are for the past month and figure out what else we can do going forward. At this point, we’re sort of nickel-and-diming it anyway since our usage is between 7-10 kWh per day.
Consumer goods have indeed evened out this past month, and I set up a spreadsheet to track the categories of my spending. The bulk over the summer was spent on clothes and furniture. Furniture was all one-time expenditure stuff, and clothing mostly the same (at least clothing for me–Lucy will keep growing, although Xmas will take a lot of the edge off since everyone loves to buy her outfits).
Garbage is still way higher than I’d like, and I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to get it down much lower. Big culprits are Pull-ups from overnight and cat litter, and we’re not ready to do without either. I’m going to start tracking what I throw out, I think.
And that’s all I got. I’m off to putter and snack and hang out with my poor, not-quite-well baby girl. Don’t worry, I’ll definitely be one of those Liveblogging Labor folks, so no news means I’m not at the computer 
