I am a domestic goddess

So often these days I think about what life was like last year - no kitchen, cooking on a hot plate in my spidery laundry room, everything from the kitchen cabinets stacked all over every other room in the house. I had a four year old and a six year old, both going to different schools. It was stressful. And the only thing that kept me going was imagining now - a year later, with a completed and paid for kitchen, kids at the same school and a year older.

And here we are. And I am leaning in and enjoying every minute of it. I’ve been on quite a baking spree lately, making apple crisp, a Dutch apple cake, and persimmon cookies; next up I want to make persimmon freezer jam and start making bread. 

The boys have been extra energetic lately and the only thing I can attribute it to is the nightly Halloween candy. I only let them have a couple of pieces a day after dinner, but...I’m starting to wonder if this is why they’ve been so loud and boisterous (one night last week I just had them go in their room to play after dinner; I couldn’t handle the yelling and thrashing around one more second). I’m considering throwing the rest of it out. 

In better news, both of them are having more instances of being dry at night than not. Theo is down to maybe one wet night every 7-10 days; Bobby’s at maybe two nights a week (where Theo was a month ago). Is this all it takes to get kids to stay dry at night - just tolerating a few months of constant bed wetting until they stop...? At any rate, I’m pretty delighted. It was definitely one of the things I felt a lot of shame and failure about (and perhaps they did, too) - now there isn’t anything about them that I feel is behind their peers. Is sleep away camp in our future...?

This week I’m having the two house projects I can *kind of* afford done - removal of my long-peeling bathroom wallpaper and application of new (old) wallpaper, see below, and painting my bedroom so I can finally hang some pictures and finish that room, three years later. I found a kick-ass female handy woman to do these things for me. Very excited about that.