The witching hour

In Denmark also called; the wolf-hour
It's the time from when you pick up the children from daycare/school etc and until you can put (throw) them in bed. I have received a lot of advice from magazines and family members but people tend to forget that each child is different and now that the terrible twos are entering our little household I swear we need a meddler to stand in the line of fire. A personal thing I discovered yesterday was that because I have a cold and I was getting really tired, there had been no nap, I found that my fuse was shorter than normal and that just made things even worse. I think that parents often forget that the children are feeling just like, if not worse, than the grown ups. They are tired, a bit icky, hungry and having no chores they must force themselves occupied with, they are in limbus. A semi-dark place filled with nothing and a slight fog clogging the brain - kinda a hopeless situation and you feel alone. No wonder your kids are hanging on your trouserleg, whining and unable to tell you what they need because they do not know. Imagine if you got home, tired, hungry and icky and just had to wait...

Male logic

I am not one to complain.. ok - sometimes but seriously, male logic makes not sense to me, I know that men suffer from our way of seeing things but they are not too normal themselves.
Examples:

When asking Steve to take the kids to the playground his reasons for not doing it is that Kate doesn't want to leave when it comes to that and Quinten eats sand...
I have argued against the by saying that if we'd take them more often Kate would know that we would come back, maybe even tomorrow, and it's not an annual thing and about Quinten and the sand, well, it comes out again and it might even clean a bit on the way :P

When Quinten doesn't want to go back to sleep in the middle of the night Steve fumes about the boy being difficult, I insist that he check him, like does the diaper needs a change, is the boy running a fever and so on and the man stubbornly insists that none of those things can disturb ones sleep...

Bread - to leave it in the paperbag from the baker will cause it to go dry quickly, not according to the hubby but when proven wrong he denies making that statement along with a comment about Danish bread and bakers....

I want a kitchenaid, to make baking easier, Steve argues that I do not bake enough to have one, it would just stand around collecting dust, I argue that I would bake more if I had my hands free instead of holding the hand-mixer (which sound freaks Quinten out meaning I have to hold him) He still sticks to his statement: it would be a waste... ergo: I do not have a kitchenaid.
I can update this one: my mother brought me a kitchen-aid and Steve now claims I have an easy life because it does all the work for me... oh yes, but off course... :/

More updates to come

2½+1+1=??

First there was 1½, then I entered the family, then came Quinten and now Lily. We're 4½ people in this family, in a 2 bedroom apartment and making it work is exciting - not always good exciting but never the less. When Kate turns 4 this November we've lived here 2/3 of the time on the lease and we cannot wait to get out of here, as much as I love Mortsel I hate the traffic and I hate the neighbours, Steve probably hates the traffic more than me but then again, he gets stuck in it every single day he has to go to work - poor guy!
We have Kate every second weekend and to be honest, I don't always think it's enough, Quinten loves his sister and she loves being here, not sure she always loves him but that's children right?
I love all my children and I consider Kate mine as well - to a certain extend. I enjoy that sometimes I can 'hand over' the responsibility of her to her father and throw my hands in the air with a "Fine! Be that way!" Simply cannot do that with neither of the other two, I am the problem-solver when it comes to them and the safety net.
We are, at best, harmonic and at worst.... don't get me started. Steve and I do not agree on the rules, he says I'm too strict and I say he's too soft. Maybe because I expect so much from Kate, because I do not know what she can and cannot and so little of Quinten because I know exactly what he can and can't. Steve sees Quinten as a mini Kate and gets frustrated when he does not understand or does as told, he sees Kate as his little girl and I think that it often scares him when she grows up and develops as quickly as she does. Not having her on a daily basis is frustrating for him I believe, he misses out on so much and being a man, his eye is not for the details but for the whole picture. I see the details, I see every little thing. I think it's because I'm a mother :P A mother of 2½

The info I didn't get...

When you become a mother things change, well, everything changes. A whole night sleep is not something you can look forward to for a good few years but I think I recall someone who mentioned that - thought they were exaggerating but no... they weren't...
Completely forgetting about yourself, a shower is something you are okay with once a week, make up is overrated and your hair lives it's own life... no wonder new mothers and mothers in general look worn and tired because they are! Extra time, if any, gets prioritized for sleeping, cleaning and preparing for next rush-hour. When your mother calls for a chat you rush into the kitchen so you can have a cigarrette in peace while you do the dishes or sanitise the bottles. Sitting down with a cup of (warm) coffee is someting you dream about but also know is not going to happen until the children either move out or at least know how to go get some food themselves. Then there are other things to worry about, laundry "where's my favourite shirt" and which one is it this week? "The dog ate my homework" We do not have a dog "Mom, can you drive me to the mall/Melinda's place/to school (because it's raining/I'm tired/I cannot find my bike/buspass etc) !" and the list goes on.
Being a mother is an ungrateful and highly underpaid job and until your own children have children of their own they to not apreciate the work you've done for them, until they move out from their childhood home they do not understand the work laundry is, dishes, grocery shopping and don't even get me started on meal planning because let's face it, how much planning is dinner for one?
Todlers or teenagers, it's the same amount of work, diapers for fights over curfew/new phone/haircut and so on, scrapes, bumps and bruises for lying sleepless because they're out all night, sleepless nights with a sick child for broken hearts and hangovers.
A mothers job is never done and you never stop being a mother.

After switching Q onto a different formula, this one in tins, I found myself throwing a lot of this decent sized tins in the recycling bin and with the rubber lid it came with I found the link between always lacking boxes for storage of bits and bobs and these nifty up-cycleable tins.

This tin became a holder for all Kate's crayons....

 And this one for the coffee pads

I used acrylic paint, first a coarse white as a base (normally I would have sanded it a bit with a fine grained piece of sandpaper to get the paint to stick better but the basecoat was enough) I then just coloured away and finished it off with a shiny topcoat, also the bottom even though not painted but I didn't want to risk it rusting or something  knowing that it would be exposed to water and other liquids.

Upcycling - Kate's room

When Kate turned 3 her grandmother bought her a new bed and with me as a 'consultant' in the process of choosing we settled on a lovely white, French country style bed from Ikea which can be pulled out to a double bed, has storage underneath and when I'm turning her bedroom into a teenage bedroom, it was double as a couch. Grandmother would liked to have bought a junior bed, pink and shaped like a carriage, which would also have been lovely but let's face it, we only have her every 2nd weekend and 2-4 weeks of vacation a year, she will not be able to use that bed enough before she's grown out of it and finds it childish. Here should also be mentioned that when she has trouble sleeping it's easy to pull it out to a double and Steve lie with her until she's calm and/or sleeping.
Now for her 3 year old birthday I decided to make her room a real girl's room, to make it more like home and less like somewhere she only stays ever so often - making it more like home. I spend little money decorating it because I had a lot of paintings I did myself and the rest we had from random purchases. I would like to say that one of my more brilliant ideas was to buy decoration flags normally used for parties and I hung them from the ceiling.
 

The butterflies on the wall was something bought by my mother years ago which I never got to use and I love hos they break up the white of the wall.
The flags hanging from the ceiling cost me 3 Euroes
The plastic lei's (Hawai'an flowerbeeds) are from a beach party years back which I was going to use for a painting but never got around to.
The lovely bed is from Ikea

Her wardrobe was a hand-me-down from her grandmother and looked, well to be honest, boring so I painted it. Using acrylic paint I did a Hello Kitty which she loves and a part magical-forest inspired motive
It took me a few days to paint it all but I am happy with the result.
All in all I'm happy with the result of her room, she loves it, it's very pink and girly and after doing this one I cannot wait to make the same for Quinten when we move to a place where he can get his own room and when his little sister arrives and is ready for her own room, she gets the same.

Upcycling - the dining room set

A new trend and something that has caught my mother is upcycling - just a fancy way of saying: smarten up your old stuff and/or giving used items a new purpose. So that means anything from repolstering your old chairs to using old conserves tins as pencilholders. In a consumer, use and throw out, society and with the growing piles of waste land I think it's a good idea - not to mention the financial crises helps in seeing new purposes of old things.
When Steve and I moved into our first and present apartment we didn't have couches or a dining table so we got his grandmother's old sets and let's face it, she's halfway through her 70's and modern is not in her genes - personally I don't really care, I go by the saying: "Beggers can't be choosers" Our budget was tight and it beats sitting on the floor. Now at the local marked I found some nice furniture fabric so I repolstered the chairs and made a table cloth to match, had I had more time and money, I would have painted the wood as well but polstering did a remarkable difference.

 The chair before

The whole set before

The chair after

The whole set after

It's still an old dining room set but I think it's brightened up a bit and the reason why I made the table cloth like that is that I have children and with the ruffled edges, the little one can hold onto it for support without pulling it off the table (and everything with it) He has one time almost pulled it off but he was also hanging from it with his entire body weight (all 10 kg/22 lbs) but it still stayed on long enough for me to get a hold of him and pull him away.