She did it!

Yep. E slept through the night last night.

It felt good to spend the whole night in my own bed...with just Rick...ok, well, there was that 15 minute span of time when R crawled into our bed after a nightmare at 4:15 this morning. But, she put herself back to bed after that short cuddle. So, life is good today. Sleep is a wonderful thing. Sleep deprivation is such an insidious, evil black cloud that hangs over your head and won't let you think clearly or rationally. I've spent a good deal of time under that black cloud this summer. It is nice to see the sky again - even if it is raining out there today. I shudder to think of how my mood would've been on this rainy day if I had that sleep-cloud hanging over me yet again.

I am, however, bummed about the rain because it meant that I missed my first opportunity in about 2 weeks to take my morning walk with Lauri.

Grumble, grumble.

Just when I felt like I was catching up on sleep enough to get out for that early morning walk, Mother Nature thwarts my efforts with the first rainy day in quite a while! I have been skipping the morning walks in favor of sleep lately. Sleep deprivation just gives me a serious sweet tooth and the munchies. So, it's either cut out the exercise and try to maintain better control on the eating by getting marginally enough sleep - or get up early to exercise and then eat myself out of house and home - thus killing any calorie-reducing benefit the exercise would've provided. Either way I'm kind of just stuck on pause in my journey out of the Elastic Wasitland. The last two nights has me hopeful that we are on the way out of the sleep difficulties with E - and with school starting soon perhaps I can find some time to get out with E in the stroller for some serious exercise and get back on track soon.

This morning I got a few things accomplished (but only because I let the girls' brains fry in front of Nickjr.com for about an hour -- it kept them from fighting and gave me some free time during E's nap). I cleaned out a couple of kitchen drawers -- we are gathering stuff for a September tag sale -- and got them reorganized. I cleaned the kitchen and put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. I put some clothes in the wash and folded a large mountain of clean clothes that were just sitting downstairs for the last couple of days (and I had to put away some clothes that were sitting in baskets in my bedroom for a few days).

Oh, and I had a great thought on the laundry process the other day. I usually fold AND put away the girls' clothes for them but sometimes they like to help. I decided to capitalize on this willingness to help and I decided that I needed to find a way for them to help without needing my intervention. Usually, I put all R and A's clothes in one big basket - one side is R's clothes and the other is A's but they usually get kind of mixed up in the middle. So, I went to target and found some of these:


They are the perfect size to put kid-sized clothing into and they are lightweight and fairly easy to carry (it would be better if they had two handles - but since they are meant as storage drawers they only have one...I might have to find a way to remedy that). They also fold down flat for easy storage when not in use. So far, the girls have been pretty excited by their new laundry cubes and happy enough to help me out by putting their clothing away all by themselves. We'll see how long the "new and exciting" aspect of this chore lasts. But, hopefully it will become like other chores that they just see as a daily part of life - putting their clothes in the hamper, emptying the hamper into the laundry chute when full, clearing their plates from the table, nightly clean-up time, etc. So, now when I do laundry, I fold and pre-sort into the laundry cubes and deposit the cubes in their room and tell them to put their stuff away. Once they are done I fold the cubes and put them back downstairs until the next load of laundry.

Now if I could just convince them that cleaning the bathroom was nonstop fun and excitment I'd be golden!