Taxes!

I finished getting our 2004 taxes ready for the CPA last night, and they’ll go in this morning. I’m so proud of myself! I set a goal to have them done before the end of this week, and I made it! How did I do it? I vowed not to do anything fun with the time after the girls went to bed each night until I finished.

Every year I get a little better at this process, and I’m quite pleased with how quickly I got it all done this year. Go me!

We even went to bed early

Helen has been waking up very early lately. Around 6 or 6:30. And, because we’re trying to get her potty-trained, we haven’ t been gating her into her room. This means that she comes wandering into our room and over to my side of the bed at this egregious hour. Ugh.

Last night, we headed up to bed after watching the weather on the 10 o’clock news, hopeful that almost an additional hour of sleep would help. But there she was, at 6:26 this morning, tapping me on the back. I tried to get her to come up and snuggle with us so we could all go back to sleep, but she was not interested.

Jerry got up and went downstairs with her, and he went back to sleep on the couch while letting her watch a stupid Care Bears DVD (WHY ARE THESE INSIPID CREATURES POPULAR???). Well, she found a bag of Dum-Dum lollipops that I use to bribe her. She ate at least three of them, probably more. So when I came downstairs this morning, she was bouncing off the walls. Chattering incessantly, on a supreme sugar high.

I did what any self-respecting mother would do: I took them both to Mother’s Morning Out and let THEM deal with her. And then I went grocery shopping without them. When I went back to pick them up around noon, I was told that Helen was still bouncing all over the place but they figured she’d crash soon.

I finally got her down for a nap. We’ll see if it sticks. Alice is sleeping, too. I think I might take a nap, too… Everyone else is doing it…

Living Will

Well. First beefy opinionated post from me.

Federal courts made a decision not to re-insert
Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube
. Not sure what will happen now, in light of the fact that the Schindlers (Terri’s family) will undoubtedly be appealing the decision and things will have to happen quickly with these appeals… In any case… I said to Jerry this morning, “You know, I’d rather starve to death than live that way.” He agreed. And we both had living wills drawn up last year.

I cannot imagine the strain that this situation is putting on the family — both the husband and her parents. 15 years is a long time to live like that. As a parent, I know that it would be very hard to let a child go in that situation, but I hope that I would have the peace to do so. I wouldn’t want my child to be trapped in a body that no longer served her well. And if Terri Schiavo can’t swallow anymore, I don’t think her body is serving her. Yes, she cries. Her mind may be active in there. But her body isn’t able to support her properly. In my opinion.

Times like these I’m glad I’m not a decision-maker in our legal system.

I’m baaaaack!

The trip was SO much fun. We just wish that there were more hours in each day and that sleep wasn’t such a requirement. We stayed up far too late that first night and suffered after that. But there was an incredible amount of laughter, which was fun. And it was a blast to get to meet people that I’ve been emailing with for so long.

Last night was a little rough with Helen and Alice, though… Helen was so excited to have me back home that she was a bit wired while sleeping, and she woke up with a night terror around 4am. She couldn’t find one of the books that I had given her while I was gone. Jerry said it had fallen in between her bed and the wall, but Helen was downstairs looking for it. Not sure if she was sleepwalking to get it, or if she was fully aware of what was going on. She was definitely in hysterics, though.

Alice woke up at 10:15 and stayed up through about midnight, and then was up around 2ish, and then around 7. So Elaine didn’t get a whole lot of consecutive sleep last night. That’s not really a big deal, though… It’s spring break, so I don’t have any tutoring on my docket for the day, and Jerry’s mom will be taking the girls this afternoon. So I can take a nap if I need to.

Of course, what I’m going to TRY to do is get our taxes ready to go to the accountant. My goal is to have that done by the end of the week. There, I said it. Lofty goal, but since I’ve been pretty good about putting everything all together, it shouldn’t be too hard to do. The worst of it is getting my home-based business stuff all together. 2004’s paperwok is all in piles, so I will have to sort it and compile the data off of it, but hopefully that won’t be too terrible.