Still Here

Oy, sorry I've been neglecting the blog. Gussie is suddenly super active: he can crawl as fast as the other kids, stand up by anything, and climb stairs, so even when Catherine volunteers as a second pair of eyes on him, he'll eat half the house if you leave him unattended for a moment. The kids are also being surprisingly slow at grasping the "don't leave it on the floor if you don't want Gussie to eat it" rule, so I'm spending a good portion of the day interrogating him about what happens to be in his mouth. Gussie also wants to be outside anytime the rest of the kids are outside, but he's not satisfied with being confined to a stroller or any kind of toy, so him being outside means me standing by regulating the amount of rocks, dirt, sticks, grass, bugs, flowers, mulch, leaves (you get the idea) that go in his mouth. On the upside, he's still extremely pleased with himself and totally adorable when he has a clod of dirt in his hand and a mud mustache from chewing on it, so, let's just say it makes him stronger. He's also interested in real food, of course, but this is no less messy than him eating dirt, so every meal usually requires a head-to-toe cleanup when he's done.

Catherine, Mary, and Michael Jr spent their first weekend with Grandma and Grandpa on their RV last weekend. I'm pretty sure I missed them more than they missed me! They appear to have thoroughly enjoyed themselves and had no problems. Good kids. I had great expectations for catching up on house work and work work while they were away, but if you read that first paragraph again you'll realize, like I did, that me + Gussie doesn't exactly equal free time. Since he also won't sleep on his own for more than about ten minutes, accomplishing anything other than sitting after he goes to sleep is also pretty much impossible. So I feel pretty good about the fact that I managed to fix my washer and do a dozen loads of laundry over the weekend. I think I ate once also.

I just dug my camera out and it appears that this is the only picture I've taken in about a week:

It's our park. I like it. Too bad it's 40 degrees and raining again - yikes! I don't know if I'm ever going to turn my heater off, let alone get my garden starter plants in the ground.

So besides Gussie and kids and homeschool and cooking and that other job I have, the thing that's been keeping me busy is trying to start a company. It's kind of a long story, but back before Easter I was looking for some cute stainless steel cups to replace some of the kids' old plasticware, and I couldn't find any, but eventually I did find some and they were made by a company in Australia (Ecococoon) who wanted $25 to ship them from Australia, which I didn't want to pay, so I kept searching and discovered that a company (Little Modern) had just that week started importing those cups from that company in Australia to distribute in the US, and now that company is getting the US e-commerce site up and running and I started a company (Leave Happier) in order to be the local distributor in the St. Louis area. See, I told you it was a long story. It would be exponentially longer if I told you what one has to go through in order to start a business in St. Louis, so let me just say that it is enough to drive one to lying, bribery, and exploiting cute baby smiles in order to obtain the necessary licenses. But I think Gussie and I have it all straightened out now and I'm just about ready to start contacting local retailers, so if you have any ins with any managers/purchasers in the area, well, I'm clearly not above exploiting personal relationships.

My other new goal is going to sleep by 10pm every night, which I ignored in order to write this little catch-up blog, but now I'm going to sleep.

I promise to start taking pictures of children again. Sometime.