Status update

....phew.

I am finally caught up at work, the nanny continues to show up every day and Eli had a good night last night. Things are good, today. Last night was probably the first night in a month that I sat down and watched TV for a couple of hours and it was so nice! This weekend I finally got (mostly) caught up at work, which to me means no outstanding reports or things to follow up on. It took about a month of working all day, then putting the kids to bed and once again going to my office to stare at my computer for another hour or so. I'm so glad I am finally caught up because I feel like I can start living again- cooking dinners, getting back to the routine of working out, etc. And speaking of working out, I dream of the days where I get up at 6 to work out instead of promising myself all day that I'm going to do it after the kids go to bed and find that I cannot fight the siren song of my computer or bed. I had hoped to be much further along by now, in terms of running a 5k. Frankly, I'll be lucky if I'm able to comfortably walk the entire 5k that I want to do at the end of April, the rate I'm going. For me, it's so hard to establish a good workout routine when Eli is still sleeping so badly at night. He is such a fantastic baby, but he can't seem to figure the sleeping-through-the-night thing out. When I look back at my posts about Gray at the same age, it seems to me that I probably didn't get good sleep at night until about 6 months. Hopefully Eli will do the same (or better?) and I've only got a couple more months to go.

The nanny is still wonderful. I am so thankful that we ended up with her... ironically, she is a lot better than the other two that I had hired. I'm totally comfortable having her in the house, which is a big deal when you work from home. She is good with the kids, even when Gray is being a total a-hole (like right now, I can hear him shrieking "NOOOOO!" at her, over and over. I would have lost it by now), and our quality of life is SO MUCH BETTER. I may be losing a little bit in terms of work hours (since we can only afford her for 42 hours per week, and if you think about it if my kids were in daycare they'd be there a lot more than that) but it is so worth it, and I can just make it up on the nights when I travel. The kids spend less time in the car, they get to nap in their own beds. We are setting her up with memberships to the zoo and museums, so they will be able to get out every couple of weeks on little field trips. Really, what more could a kid ask for? I feel so good about this decision, which is a welcome relief after all the crap we went through!