I really did a lot!

I read through last week's post with fondness. I was in a great mood when I wrote it.
I didn't get to the fans like I promised I would, but I did better than that. My mom decided that she wanted to organize her garage so she went online, found some rolling shelves that she liked and I went to the store and bought her 4 of them (because I work right down the street from Costco.)
The next day was my day off so I put together the first one (I didn't do more than that in case she didn't like them.)
I loaded it up with all of the household goods she had. (1 full shelf plus 3 feet in front of it, all stacked and disorganized) then I went through the other shelves that line the walls of her storage shed. . . I mean garage and pulled out all of the other household items that I'm sure she didn't know she had.
She ended up with a total of 2 4-packs of the large iodized salt containers if that tells you anything about her organization skills.
She also had about 18 different packages of various types of lightbulbs. (All indoor and all the same wattage)
I filled the entire 6' by 5' space, but it was nicely organized. This cleared out an area of about 8' by 4' along the back of the garage. It was an amazing change.
Then Thursday I built the second one. With this accomplishment I cleared out almost everything else that was cluttering the right side of the garage and brought a little bit of order to the left side. I emptied one of the left-side shelves completely, but my mom says she wants it arranged differently, so I'm sure that will change.
Then today she and I built the third shelf and completely emptied the right side of the garage, shelves and boxes included. there was a decent amount being sent to the DI, but, sadly, most of the items stayed :)

It looked a lot better. She shelves are imposing, but the idea was that they are on rollers, so when not in use they can be compacted into a space of about 5' deep and only about 5' wide. It leaves a lot more room than she had before. Plus now we can tackle the left side of the garage and see if we can whip it into shape. The last shelf is still nearly 1/3 empty, so there's plenty of space to organize better.

As for work it was a good week. We have on client that is amusing me greatly, but I finished the business part of their work on Friday, so all I have left is their individual returns so it shouldn't be too bad. Sadly they use QuickBooks for their personal finances as well as their business, but they don't really sort the expenses properly so I basically have to go through every transaction and try to see if it's something deductible or some sort of income item that I need to worry about. . .
Everything is going very well this tax season, we're not really stressed at all yet, and my boss says he's getting about the same amount of revenue as last year, so that's a good sign.
I will probably start working a little more after this next week just because it's 1 month until the deadline and it's crunch time.

Alisabeth is doing well too. We enrolled in a mommy-and-me tumbling class on Thursday mornings and it is so fun to watch her learn and love it. She is so eager to try and to do. She has learned how to balance on one foot, how to do a tummy roll around a bar and how to walk the balance beam. The teacher is great. Apparently he has at least two small ones at home and his focus is getting the parents to understand how to exercise their children's muscles correctly. Each week focuses on a different area of the body and he starts by explaining to the parents why that area is key and the excercises that we're going to do. He doesn't expect or demand the kid's full attention and his directions and "focus" time is really limited so this allows them the freedom to be themselves with the structure of a class. Hopefully this will help her learn the skills of focusing on and listening to an instructor when I'm not around. Usually there's at least one child that is all over the gym during the sitting time, but he doesn't get bothered by it, and he encourages the mothers, who are usually embarrassed and scolding, to just keep involved and show them that the fun is happening with the group.
They have a new schedule each week and I REALLY love the program. It's one of the medium-priced ones that I found when I was researching, but it seems worth it so far.
Alisabeth loves it, she has mentioned it several times before and several times after going. She calls it "thumblin" though we really don't do much of that, it's more like structured play.
The other exciting thing we did this week was a play-day at a friend's house. Crystal has been my best friend since she came home from her mission which was shortly before I left for mine. She's been great to me since I got home and organized a day out at her house (which recently emptied out when her parent's moved out to Utah). We had loaded baked potatoes and hotdogs. The kids played really well for several hours inside and out. All in all it was a very fun day. I hope we do it again sometime.
The only battle we've had is bed-time. If anyone has any ideas let me know. She plays hard all day and does great, she drinks a glass of warm milk, lays down and we sing some songs and after about 3 I say "Okay, all done, sleep well."
Then she goes ballistic. Suddenly she is screaming and crying and fussing, she won't stay in bed and there's no way for me to stop her from opening the door besides standing there and holding it. Getting angry or yelling doesn't work. I even tried (in my desperate attempts after 2 hours of this) laying on top of her enough so that she couldn't move around in hopes that she wouldn't enjoy it and therefore would not want to get out of bed. Yeah, that didn't work. She seemed to be content to lay there as long as I was with her, but as soon as I stood up she went insane again.
So seeing this I understood that she was craving more time with me so I instituted the last half hour before bed as a time for us to just be together and I hoped that maybe this would fix the issue, but after another 4 days of this I haven't had any luck yet.
My current answer? I sit outside her door with my book and read while holding the door-knob until she stops crying and I can be fairly certain she's not going to get out of bed again. This takes about 45 minutes but it's a lot faster than the 2-3 hours that I was dealing with before. I have no idea what the issue is, and I have tried everything from soft words to loud and hard ones. I can bet she'd be happy to go to sleep with me laying there beside her every night, but I don't want to be that mom. I want her to be able to put herself to sleep, and she used to do it really well. It's a stage, it's only a stage.

Jason is doing well too. He signed up for a few more of his ASE tests and is studying hard for them. His classes are going well, and he was recently asked to serve in the temple until he leaves in April so his job is to sit at the front entrance and be a greeter and scan everyone's recommends. He says it's really peaceful and that he gets a lot of time to read the scriptures (he's there for the later shift on a Tuesday night, so I guess there aren't a lot of people going.)
He has also been working on his two cars. One is about the size of his hand and the other is full-size. They're both going well. He's going to put something like $100 more into the full-sized toy to get it in better shape for when he moved back down here to me. Then we should be able to sell it. With the money from that he'll buy a new toy. :)