Setting Goals {3} - Mission Complete

I accomplished stuff!  WOO!

I recently decided that I need to get my butt in gear with life in general.  I set some short-term goals and actually accomplished some of them and more.

First goal - Have a yard sale.

Soon after writing my goals and posting them I trecked down to the basement and started bringing my junk treasure up to the garage to get set up.  Considering we really didn't have much stuff to sell and it was fairly last minute, we did alright.  We got rid of a lot of big stuff and it went to people who could really use it.

An old friend and former co-worker from my YMCA days in Kitchener responded to my Facebook post about our yard sale.  She said she was in desperate need of an office chair for work and noticed the picture of ours.  Knowing how bad her back is and how comfortable the chair is, it was a perfect match. 

When I was cleaning up the left overs of our yard sale, 2 women pulled up and asked about the coffee table and end tables (with crappy paint jobs) which I had set all the small junk treasures on.  I had been using them for my home child care when I had it set up in the basement, but with the babies I have now, there is no way I'm hauling them up and down the stairs just to play in the basement - so they were currently not in use.  We settled on $18 for all 3 and they told me they were going to their "camp" where they have a lot of people visit.  They will get more use with them than me, so I'm happy I got rid of them.


Now I have less stuff in my house and more moula in my pocket.

I still have to take some stuff to the thrift store and take a couple old tube televisions to the electronics drop off, but when that is done, this goal is complete!

Second Goal: Do some gardening during the yard sale.

This didn't really happen because we ended up getting a lot of customers so I chit-chatted a lot.  I pulled a few weeds, but nothing compared to what I NEED to accomplish.  Ugh.  It is pretty much fall now so I don't have much time left either....

Third Goal: Clean garage during yard sale.

I tidyed a bit while getting ready for the yard sale, but like I said above, I did a lot of chit-chatting instead of cleaning or gardening.

FAIL

Fourth Goal: Write 2 blog entries that week.

They aren't anything special but I did complete this goal.  You can see my Wordless Wednesday post here and another post from the week here.
I really want to write more often, I'm just having trouble organizing my thoughts to actually complete a post in good time.  I had been writing and contemplating the I'm not a Babysitter post for about a month.

Fifth Goal:  Walk my dog more often.

This may seem silly, but I really have been slacking on this.  She is used to 3-5 walks a day and I have maybe been getting 1 or 2 in a day.  She still goes out in our yard, but I feel bad.  When Sloan arrived, Wicket got pushed aside.  We still love her and pet her, but she is an old girl.  She turned 15 in July which is around 92 in human years so her eyes and ears aren't working like they used to.  She didn't always notice Sloan on the floor.  I may have freaked out a little and yelled at her when she almost stepped on my newborn bundle.  She was number one and then everything changed when Sloan came: less walks, less playing, no more laying on the carpet (Sloan's play area). Now that Sloan is walking and oh so gently pulling the dog's tail, we keep Wicket in the front hall - for her own safety.  She likes being by the front door anyways.  She is going deaf, so when the door hits her when it opens she knows someone is here.  Sloan is at an age now where she likes to "pet" the animals. (Sloan's definition of petting the animals: Grab fur and/or flesh and pull.  OR Open-hand slap them repeatedly.) She also likes to play with Wicket's tags and collar.  For her own sanity and safety, we keep Sloan away from Wicket.

 I know my dog doesn't have a lot of years left - she is a Grandma-dog!  I need to make sure I still show her love and one of the best ways of doing that is taking her for a walk.  Seriously, we had to stop saying walk because she would get so excited.  We even had to stop spelling w-a-l-k as code.  She knew.  She LOVES walks.   We had to start calling walks "seven".  Now that she is hard of hearing, we don't have to worry as much.

I've been trying really hard to get Wicket's multiple walks in.  Now that I have re-opened my home child care (bye-bye maternity leave *sigh*) it has been a little more difficult to work around the babies' schedules.  They are on nap shifts.  So Wicket hasn't gone out as much as I would like.  Once I get back into the groove and get the babies on a schedule together (it is M's first week so it will take her a while to get used to not being with mommy) I will be able to take Wicket out.  This is an on-going goal that I am very determined to do.

Other Goals

I got a little bit of crafting done last week too.  I made some t-shirt yarn which will later become a rag rug.  My husband and I started a painting together and I started a present for an old friends' new baby girl.  Pictures of all those adventures will come later.

Hair Donation - Wordless Wednesday with Linky

I FINALLY GOT A HAIRCUT!  WOOO!

10 (ish) inches donated.  

Needless to say, I feel a bit lighter.

 

I'm not a babysitter

In my field of work you will receive a lot of ridicule, intentional or not.  When children are not in a formal school with desks and chalkboards whiteboards, all of a sudden in the eyes of parents, you are not a teacher, you are a babysitter.  Having graduated from the ECE (Early Childhood Educator) program 7 years ago and working in child care the entire time since graduating, I have come across my fair share of ridicule.

Since opening up my own home child care in 2011, the term "babysitter" gets thrown around a lot more.  All of a sudden, because I am caring for children in my home, I am not a teacher, I'm a babysitter.  "When will you start babysitting again?" people asked me when I was on maternity leave with my daughter.  Before my daughter it was, "How is the babysitting going?" or "How many kids do you babysit?".  I politely smile and answer their query and gently remind them that I do not babysit; "I think I will start doing child care again in the fall."

It's a little quibble, I know, but it demeans me and the time and effort I put into my career.  Not my job, my CAREER.  This is my life's work.  Teaching children about the Earth, nature, animals, themselves, respect, compassion, honesty, common sense and everything else they need to know to become well-intentioned and functioning participants of society.

 I spend more time with people's children than they do.  It's sad, but that is what parents have to do to support their families.  I know there is a lot of guilt on the shoulders of parents who work long hours and don't get to see their kids that often.  Which is one of the reasons I chose this field of work as my career.   When I was a child, I sometimes went a long time not being with my parents.  We were in the same house, but we weren't together.  Let me explain.  My parents were antique dealers, which means they had to go to auctions to get a lot of their product.  Auctions that were sometimes hours away and went late into the night.  (you have no idea how hardcore antique dealers are).  My bus trip home from school was a long one (the one to school was long too, just not AS long as the ride home), so by the time I got home around 5pm my parents were already gone to an auction and didn't get back home until 2 or 3AM.  Because they were hard workers (long hours and having to lift furniture weighing hundreds of pounds) they were very tired.  My mom would usually sleep while my dad helped me get ready for school in the morning.  Go to school all day, then repeat.  This didn't happen all the time, but there are definitely busier times of the year for multiple auction sales.   I remember walking into my parents room as a child and just standing there, watching them sleep.  I knew they were tired, but I just wanted to see them.  I just wanted to be with them; listen to their breath, watch the sun reflecting off of my mom's hair.  They probably did the same to me while I was sleeping.  We were in the same house, but on different sleep shifts.  Being a latch-key kid made me realize that when I "grew up" I wanted to be able to stay at home with my kids.  I missed my parents and I didn't want my future children to feel the way I felt.  Being at home alone, living in the middle of nowhere with only 2 close neighbours didn't help my feelings of lonliness either.  It's scary when it gets dark in the country. 

At 17 years old I already knew what I wanted to do with my life.  I chose ECE to better prepare myself for opening up my future home child care.  I wanted the knowledge, the experience, the confidence and I was a teen who wanted to get away from small-town living for a while (which was a blessing in disguise - it turns out I hate cities and moved back to my home-town a few years after graduating college). 

Now that I have the knowledge, the experience, the confidence, I consider myself an in-formal teacher.  I don't have desks, I don't have a lesson plan.  I teach the children about what they are interested in, but I still TEACH.  I don't plop them in front of the T.V. while I eat bon-bons and talk on the phone.  I am an educator, a teacher, a resource.  I am NOT a babysitter.

Summer happenings - Wordless Wednesday with Linky

I've been busy the last 2 months and haven't posted much.  I recently wrote about getting my butt in gear and posting more often (among other things) but it seems I have a lot to catch up with.  So hear are some adventures we have gone on the last month.   Epic sandcastles, ancient ships, birds of prey and the fall fair have kept us busy the last few weeks.

After Sloan's birthday we went to our friend's cottage at Wasaga Beach.

Tall Ships of 1812 was in town.

The beginning of our epic sandcastle

regular sand buckets just won't do.  Recycling bins all the way!

snuggles for daddy

Dig, dig, dig, all day long.

Our masterpiece and  most of the gang

complete with moat and drip castles.

and a guard turtle

by the time we brought Sloan down to see it after her nap, kids had destroyed it.

the turtle was still in tact.  Bad guard turtle, you let he kids destroy our castle.

For the first time since I was a kid I saw a

praying mantis.  It seems he likes our front porch

because I have seen him/her in the same spot a few times.

Went to the fall fair and saw a falconry demo

Bald Eagle with her hood on to keep her calm.

I got to hold her!

3 year old, female bald eagle

entries in the tallest sunflower category.  My husband is 6'1.

biggest sunflower head

Sloan was scared of it

I have opinions on this "participation ribbon" trend, but I'll save it for another day.

beautiful quilts make me want to learn how to quilt!

At the fall fair, there was a lovely mini-market of local organic produce, honey, eggs and crop share programs.  Here are the websites of the wonderful farmers I met:

Terra Verde Homestead 
(owned and operated by a family I know - took care of their kids for a little while)

Tin Roof Rusted Farm
(their website is under construction currently - this is their Facebook page)

Levendale Farms
(I bought a Lemon Cucumber from them - unique looking and delicious!)

Ontario Falconry Centre
(Sam is a professional Falconer and lives to entertain and teach children about his birds - he does birthday parties too!)

Wellington County Safety Initiative
(Just found about this at the fair.  Important and great initiative!)

Setting Goals - Part deux

My goals for this week are:

1)  Get as much stuff together as possible and have a yard sale.  This includes, making signs and posting them, bringing stuff up from the basement that I have already set aside, scanning the rest of the house for crap I can get rid of, getting change, bags and newspaper for purchases, setting up, then taking whatever is left over after to the Cancer Patient Services Thrift Store in town.  Hopefully this is a good weekend for a yard sale - long weekend and the fair is in town.

2)  Do as much gardening as possible while outside taking care of the yard sale.  This only makes sense, because I will be outside anyways.  Might as well get something done.

3) If it is raining, clean the garage instead of gardening (I was going to write“instead of doing number 2”, but my inner 10 year old quickly realized what that could be interpreted as, so I put gardening instead.  Hehehe....number 2...)

4)Write at least 2 blog entries next week.

5) Walk Wicket (my dog - for those non-nerds out there, my dog is named after the Ewok on Star Wars) a minimum of twice a day.  I have been seriously slacking on walks lately.  We have a fairly big backyard, so she does get lots of outside time, but she still needs her walks even though she is an old girl (she turned 15 on Canada day.  I think that is around 90 in human years.  Grandma dog!)

These are very short term goals.  I am starting off small.  I am, though, working on some longer term goals that I hope to post soon.

Setting Goals. AKA Getting my ass in gear

I have been lazy lately.  I mean, other than taking care of another human being, I have been lazy.  Although, the way she climbs my leg to be held makes me wonder if she is entirely human.

I have not just been lazy on my blog, but I have been lazy with my projects that are half started (and have been for months and some even years), I have been lazy about walking my dog, lazy with getting things together for the yard sale I have been wanting to have all summer, lazy with doing gardening and housework....the list goes on, trust me.   I am sure many other fellow mothers can relate to feeling behind or lazy, like me, but I have realized why I have been feeling (and acting) this way; I have not set any goals for myself.

I have realized that I really need to buckle down and get my butt in gear and in order to do that I am going to have to put myself back in the mind set of a student.  Deadlines, expectations, scheduling, goals.....I need that again.  

The last year I have had the time of my life taking care of my daughter.  I love her - there are no words to adequately describe how much, so I will just leave it at, I love her.  I love spending time with her, teaching her, watching her brain work and figure things out.  Even though sometimes I think she is a creature sent from the evil pits of Hell to steal my soul by not letting me sleep, I love her and being with her.  In becoming an observer I have thrown schedules out the window and have just been going with the flow and I have stopped doing the things that I used to spend a lot of time doing, and enjoyed.
 Creating - if you check out my Pinterest boards you will see some of the objects that inspire me to create.
Gardening - I still have not finished what I started in the Spring and the weeds are taking over.  Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew.
Writing - I started this blog to get back into writing (and reading) and I have not set any goals for it.  I want this blog to be something I can look back on and be proud of.  I would also like other people to see it - friends, family, strangers - and want to stick around.  I would like to think the adventures I write about and show are interesting to people, but most of all, helpful.

 So far, what I have posted has not been helpful.  I mostly post about my daughter, because, truthfully, I had no idea what else to write about and obviously she is the main part of my life right now, since it is just her and I 70% of the time.  As cute and wonderful as she is (save the times she turns into Demon-spawn when I put her down for a nap) I know that a very small audience is going to find pictures of my daughter pulling the tail of the cat interesting and make them want to stick around for more.  Although, I am sure it would make the people who pa-rouse Youtube for cat videos stick around.  Maybe I need more cats on my blog.....

So, the next few days, weeks, months, I will be setting tangible goals for myself to accomplish.  I hope to post them because that will really hold me accountable.  I am a visual learner so lists are good for me (especially with this lingering mommy-brain, lists are very helpful).

Have you set any recent goals for yourself?

First Birthday Already! ~ Wordless Wednesday with Linky

This teeny little thing...

is now a big ONE year old!

She got to eat her fave food all day...cheesies.

and I made her a special present....

with buttons!

and a special birthday wreath...that I burned my finger on real good.

More details to come from the party at a later date....
Happy WW!