Multi-tasking

Peter often accuses me of not being a good multi-tasker. He says this because he'll ask me to do stuff and I won't always do it right away. HOWEVER, many of my mom friends have praised me for my multi-tasking abilities. I've decided that I'm good at multi-tasking mom stuff that I've already planned out in my head. If he asks me to do something that I haven't thought about and worked into my schedule earlier, it throws me off. Hence, I simply ignore his request with the assurance that if he really needed it done, he'd do it himself (since he considers me so bad at multi-tasking). Catch 22, but in a way that's beneficial to me both ways. Heh heh.

The other night, Peter said he'd be home at 6:30. So I was hanging out, playing with Ellie and stuff when he unexpectedly came home at 5:15. From 5:20 to 6:20, here's what I did. Baked two loaves of pumpkin bread I'd made from scratch (I'd already made the batter earlier when the kids were napping), fold a load of laundry, do a sinkful of dishes, make Matthew's butternut squash puree, write out a new grocery list, throw away some stuff in our fridge that had gone bad, make rice, make kimchee jigae, pan fry some fish for Ellie, cook more fish for me and Peter, look up and print out a recipe online for house church that week, set the table, and serve dinner.

Of course, I was doing all of them at once. Mostly because I have no brain these days. I would start the bread, put the mixing bowls in the sink, start doing dishes, the dryer timer would go off, I'd stop dishes, go to the laundry, fold and start putting it away, be reminded by Matthew's clean bibs that I needed to finish his food, puree some squash, think about the fact that I needed to get more vegetables for him, write out a grocery list, check the fridge to see what I needed, get grossed out and start throwing stuff away, see the fish and start cooking it, make the rest of dinner, go online while it was cooking, save the dinner from burning, etc.

Anyway, I got sick this week. I don't get sick very often, but when I do I'm just the biggest baby. Totally non-functional. This was weird, though. I'm sure my mom will say it's due to the fact that I wore tank tops and went barefoot after having babies, but I get this chill down to my bones. One night I was in flannel pajamas, covered in two blankets, and had Peter holding me. I couldn't stop shivering for half an hour. I finally stopped because I fell asleep from exhaustion, I think. My skin gets super sensitive, too. I can only wear flannel pajama pants, or I feel like my clothes are chafing my skin off. It's really weird. I feel like an old lady. Oh, the cold weather's puttin' a chill in me bones! Apparently, I'm an old pirate lady.

What was my point? (No brains) Oh yeah. So the house has been in complete disarray since I've been nonfunctional (although Peter said it didn't look that much messier than usual, I knew it was). Finally I'm feeling normal again, so I went and bought some plants for our front yard, pulled out some dead ones, weeded, met some neighbors for the first time, made dinner, did dishes, spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to collapse the bassinet that's been sitting around for months, collapsed the bassinet, put garland on our bannister, put up some other Christmas decorations, organized my bathroom counter, refilled my diaper bag, organized Ellie's Pull Ups and Matthew's diapers, learned that I could've earned a whole lot of money for my kids' college education through UPromise, signed up for UPromise, discovered I maxed out my monthly uploads on flickr, and uploaded some videos. Here they are: