Best laid plans

I borrowed a little wisdom from the Boy Scouts for my New Year's resolution this year: Be prepared. Appropriate given the heap of new parenting challenges Santa brought me this year, don't you think?

For the first few days this week I really kept on top of it. I used the two hours in the evening between the kiddos' bedtime and mine to pick up toys, fold laundry, schedule play dates, prepare lunches and think up a dinner plan for the following day. I accomplished this while N held our snoozing baby boy.

I was thinking yesterday, that this all was going great. Well done, new mama of three!

Then today happened. Really, it started with a very wakeful night with little H that ended with him rising at 4 a.m. for the day. This set off his need to nurse incessantly, fight sleep and fuss whenever he wasn't being held this morning. Meanwhile, L and C were taking turns crying about their own personal atrocities and I was trying to put out fires while nursing a mug of tepid black coffee and devising a plan for removing my breastmilk-crusted PJs and rinsing off in the shower in under five minutes. Bible study was an hour away, and I had really thought we'd be able to make it.

My shower lasted all of three minutes, when I heard H yelping from his bassinet and I saw the handwriting on the wall. I had planned the best I could, but Bible study just wasn't going to happen. Even with the best organization skills I could muster, my responsibilities at home were insurmountable. I was a victim of circumstances. It wasn't my fault. There just wasn't enough of me to go around and I knew adding a morning outing to the scene was only going to hinder our progress toward any sort of a "good day."

I announced the change of plans to L and C, who greeted the idea with groans of disappointment. We thwarted ensuing gnashing of teeth with a quick round of: "Let's each think of something that we're not disappointed about." We came up with: "We still get to go to ballet today and gymnastics tomorrow and, gee, isn't the sunshine marvelous today!"

I knew at that point we needed an activity to keep our low-key day at home from slipping into the doldrums, so I turned to L for inspiration. When I had asked her last Sunday what she wanted to learn about this week, she said anteaters. Yes, anteaters. Thankfully, while L was at her weekly class at the community center yesterday, the boys and I had found the only book at the library about this most peculiar animal.

So, with anteaters as our inspiration, I clicked around and found a coloring page, an audio clip of an anteater call on this National Geographic site and had the idea to make our own termite mounds for our paper anteaters to attack.



We whipped up a batch of homemade Play-Doh to build our insect mounds and the activity kept our hands and brains busy until lunchtime.



And Baby H finally did this:



How did I find time to blog about this today? I brandished the laptop while nursing because if I didn't find a way to incorporate a little soul-feeding time for myself, I might have slipped into the doldrums myself. Whew!