I have been working on my budget spreadsheet, so I’m starting a bit later than I’d hoped. Since Kraston died, I have not been keeping as detailed (obsessive) of an eye on my bank account and have been spending just a bit more than I would prefer. I really like only working 6 hours per week and would like to keep it up as long as possible. So I’m revamping my budget spreadsheet in order to make it a bit easier to maintain and a bit more accurate since my expenses have grown a fair amount in the last year. Nerd.
Church
This morning everyone slept in, even the baby! She rarely sleeps past 6am and slept until 8:30! We just puttered around the house until it was time for church. After the big kids did so well inside the sanctuary during the parish mission nights, I wanted to keep that up. We’ve spend the past few months in the vestibule so the baby can wander around and also the give the boys a bit more space from each other. Younger brother has a tendency to want to ‘hug’ his older brother during mass which ends up being more like a wrestling monkey on the back time move.
So I made a pretty big decision to send the baby to the nursery for the first time. Older brother never did well in the nursery, so I never bothered attempting it with the others. And with Kraston around, I never had to. But now in an effort to keep us in the sanctuary, we might try it for a bit, until younger brother settles down a bit more.
Gym
We had lunch at Hideaway with my parents and since baby needed a nap and I was planning on heading to the gym, baby went with Nana and Grandpa for the afternoon. I had decided I would try two (back to back) classes at the gym this afternoon.
The first was a bare barre class (a barre class with no bar, kind of random, I know) with my trainer. I had taken a bare barre class with a different instructor last month and didn’t care for it, but I enjoyed this class. My trainer has a bit of a quirky style and as such (as I had hoped) this class was much more enjoyable than the other. I mean, the last “move” of the day was an irish dance to Cotton Eyed Joe.
The second was a dance class, that normally I enjoy, but we had a sub and I didn’t connect with her style. Some dance instructors get a bit too choreographed for my taste.
Grandparents
Pretty much every Sunday evening we visit my grandparents, so the kids’ great-grandparents. Pretty much the 3 big kids watch TV and the baby wanders around playing / messing with various things. I order in food from whatever restaurant on GrubHub strikes my fancy and then visit with my grandma while we wait on the food to be delivered.
I’m trying to remember how long we’ve been doing our Sunday evening routine, but I can’t quite recall. I would say sometime between older daughter and younger son, so at least 4 years. In the beginning we would take my grandparents out to eat at a restaurant, but then my grandpa stopped wanting to leave the house. It got too hard for him to hear at a noisy restaurant.
So then we transitioned to Kraston going out and picking up food. After he got sick and couldn’t drive anymore, I became the one to go out and pick up food. We were pretty cheap and didn’t want to pay delivery fees if we didn’t have to. After Kraston died, I couldn’t leave the kids with my grandparents to go out and pick up food, so GrubHub delivery it is.
They both have varying degrees of dementia and my grandfather has some physical limitations. They made their kids promise to keep them in their house and not transition to a facility, so they have 24/7 caregivers and a nurse manager who supervises everything.
Grandma has a 20-30 minute short term memory right now, so she has her 3-4 default questions that she asks me and I get to think up creative ways to tell the same story over and over. Or not. Sometimes I just tell it the same way. It doesn’t make much difference. One of her default questions is whether I am going on any out of town trips this week. I haven’t gone out of town on any trips for probably over a year, but I got to tell her 4 times this evening about how we are leaving for Branson on Thursday.
Grandpa was pretty agitated this evening. He kept saying he wasn’t feeling good and wanted to go. Where we never quite figured out. He has big issues with word finding most weeks. It is so tough when he is confused like that. He was extra confused when we showed up without the baby. He kept asking where the other one was. Then my sister and my parents showed up to drop off the baby and that threw him off too, having the extra people around.
We ordered in Chimis. Yum.
Final Note
Well, it is spring break this week, so the big 3 will be home, but the baby still have preschool M-W, so we do need to get up in the morning to get her to breakfast on time. So I’m going to finish up for today. Happy Sunday!