Over the weekend I did cross a major parenting milestone. The 2-year-old can now reliably sit and watch a video like Peppa Pig or the wide variety of YouTube offerings (“Hazel’s Mom” is a particular favorite). So when my husband took the 10-year-old and 7-year-old out for the afternoon, I left the little guy in the care of the two older boys while I went for a run in the neighborhood. He sat at the computer with the video on, and I had the 12-year-old sit in the same room with him (watching his phone), and basically neither moved for the 30 minutes I was gone. Success!

Speaking of the 2-year-old, he has been on a strike against napping in the crib. So over the weekend, I gave in and let him nap in my lap both days. In related news, my screen time totals on my iPhone are quite high…

I’ve been showering at night because it makes getting ready in the AM much faster. Unfortunately, I’m sometimes cold at night (though we’ve now set the bathroom heat to come on around my shower time). So I’ve come up with the strategy of hanging two towels over the shower door. When I turn the water off, I immediately wrap one around me. Then I can use the other for my hair without getting too shivery.

I also found my real towels this weekend, so I’m no longer using beach towels, though I did like that they were very large.

The 7-year-old recently celebrated a birthday. Since writing is a source of real tension, we had him record video thank yous to the people who gave him gifts. This inspired far less resistance.

We now have our “real” fridge and freezer, which is great, because we have more capacity. One current helpful life strategy is having set meals for certain nights. Wednesday, for instance, is always breakfast-for-dinner day. This tends to be pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fruit. Easy, and everyone eats it. Friday is pizza night. This will be make-your-own-pizza night again once we get our oven but for now I’m ordering in. We do Sunbasket kits on Monday and Tuesday (usually) as a way to have some variety. We often have steak one night over the weekend, which only leaves two days to sort out. In the morning, I almost always give kids toaster waffles plus fruit. (Some people add milk, or yogurt, and the occasional handful of chocolate chips). Most people have one toaster waffle, though my daughter has two. If you do the math this means we go through a normal box of toaster waffles in two days. This explains the appeal of Costco!

Photo: Ice on a trail from one of my weekend runs.

It is also snowing! The new yard is beautiful in the snow and I went for a good stomp around this morning as a break from supervising virtual school. Yep, virtual is back, though just for the weather — the district has been making do even with staff members out for isolation and such. The older kids have done fine with online classes. The 6-year-old has been diving onto my lap and racing off and declaring that he hates zoom and asking what time it is every 7 minutes and so forth. This with a teacher he absolutely loves. I am hoping everyone is back in person next week.

Today should be the last day of the movers – it has been a four day project with packing and loading and transporting. We have furniture coming next week and no doubt a great many hours of unpacking and organizing but I am telling myself that things are improving. And so far the car hasn’t died again, so there’s that! I have walked away from this blog post — this short blog post — half a dozen times to deal with things. So may as well hit publish now.

(Just a quick reminder to sign up for the Time Tracking Challenge if you haven’t! Link is in the last post. If I go look for it I’ll get distracted again and never publish….)