Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Hired Help

Our city has a once a year "bulk item" pick up day. You can put almost anything out on the curb and the trash trucks will haul it away. We've seen the sides of the streets covered with water heaters, furniture, excercise equipment, and random junk for the past week or two.

People drive around and pick up anything they want. Guys with flatbed trailers hitched to their trucks go by with all kinds of broken lawn mowers, appliances, and what not. They fix them up for resale or sell them to scrap dealers. On a whim I stopped and picked up a beat up toy plastic kitchen and dishwasher for the kids. We also found another chair for the desks in our school room at a yard sale on Saturday. Danya and Gloria volunteered to help wash it all down. Latte helped wash the toy kitchen.

This week I also got an advertisment in the mail for a housekeeping service. They had a good coupon, and I've been toying with the idea for quite a while, so we decided to try it out. They'll come for the first time tomorrow. It will be an every other week thing where they come out and do the more time consuming parts of the house like the kitchen and bathrooms. We'll see how it goes. I'm excited about it. As somebody once said, "You don't ask the public school teachers to also be the school janitors." On top of foster parenting I'm trying to be a full time teacher to multiple grade levels and also work as the "bus" driver, head of the cafeteria, secretary, curriculum committee, school nurse, laundry service, janitor, and everything in between.

We're getting two kids ages 4 and 5 next week for a short term situation that may turn into something long term if we feel like these may be "the kids" for us. So we'll be back up to 6 again for a little while at least. Today I also met a 17 year old foster girl who lives up the street from us. Small world, huh?

1 comment:

I have a good life said...

Great finds and I can't wait to hear about the housecleaning service. I've thought about having someone come in just to do the bathrooms as well! Let me know how it goes!