On Being Domestic

At home in Canada I am not domestic.  I have a career that I enjoy, I have two wonderful children, a house and hobbies.  I am not domestic.  Dave and I share the chore load pretty evenly and we hire in domestic assistance to do the things that neither of us wants to do.

In Mudgee, however, my job is to be domestic.  This is new for me.  I mean, I can make breakfast, pack a school lunch and get dinner on the table like a boss.

I can also run errands, pick up children, fill out school paperwork, insure vehicles, manage international insurance claims... I CAN DO THESE THINGS, they are not necessarily things that I excel at.

Here I am also in charge of planning vacations.  Now PLANNING is something that I can get behind.  I can come up with schedules and plans and all of that.  I am just used to having other people around to implement it.  Now I have a home staff of, well, me.

I've been running errands.  Stuff needs to get picked up dropped off, signed up for, purchased...
 OH MY GOODNESS that takes a lot of time!!  A couple of quick stops and I've lost an hour.  Yesterday it was on both ends of the day.  I can't get everything done!!!

Successes so far:

1. I found one of the missing spiders with my size 11 Croc
2. the children, especially doodle, who has several changes of uniform, have school uniforms and have yet to attend school in the nude. Many of those uniforms were acquired for free or left behind by our awesome exchange family.
3. there has been a healthy, planned out supper on the table every night
4. the laundry baskets are empty and the laundry line is full
5. the children have been dropped off to school and no one has had to spend the night there as I have also picked them up (though really you could see how I could cut out some errands if I just skipped both of those some of the time).
6. the insurance claims are almost ready to be mailed off (we dropped almost $2000 in Vancouver on lost medication and the doodle had that Australian emergency room visit last week)
7. a day trip for this weekend has been planned
8. THIS LUNCH that I ate today

I am clearly a "wrap sandwich over achiever"

Winning!!

    9. My awesome neighbours (the same gold star achievers that boosted our car, loaned us their car and fed us last week) have booked travel (accommodations, flights, van rentals) for the Sydney Spartan, Melbourne Spartan AND the Brisbane Spartan.  There is NO WAY I would have wrapped my head around that yet at all.

   10. I created this beauty of a map of where we are planning to go so far. It is colour coded by who is attending and who is arranging it.  Each post it note states the location, the date(s), the things we will do there and the distance from home.  There's still more to go up, but this is how far I've made it to date.

Australia is a shockingly large country!!

Opportunities for growth and development so far:

1. not a single person has shown up to clean the house
2. the insurance claims are not yet mailed off
3. I have locked myself out of my on-line credit card access and need to call Canada to resolve it
4. I have not yet filled out a pile of paperwork for a weekend in Sydney coming up soon
5. We've been here two weeks and I have YET to get to a wine tasting and there is a place less than 1K from my house that I have my eye on.  Last night while I was out running I noticed that they have a special on where you can get 6 bottles of wine starting at $59.  I would never have noticed that from the car as there is far too much going on when I am driving (I hit the mother trucking windshield wipers today), so running the area proved a good idea.
6. I never found the second spider that went missing.

So the plan for next week seems obvious.