Day: March 6, 2006

My babysitting gig is coming to an end. A relative of NotMyBaby’s mother has moved into town and expressed an interest in watching NMB. The relative will probably do the childcare for free which will be a big relief for their budget and completely undercuts my prices. I’m actually glad for this development. I’ve been wanting to throw myself into household and yard projects, but have been prevented by NMB’s needs. The extra income was nice, but doing book keeping for Chalain is going to provide about the same amount of money with less impediment to my desired projects.

The biggest of these projects is the forthcoming Schlock book. We’ve decided to self publish the book and handle all the inventory and shipping ourselves. This is a huge undertaking. I’m excited for the challenge and extra glad that I don’t have to figure out how to do it while watching an increasingly active toddler. The book will be off to the printer in just about a week. 30 days later we’ll have preview copies. 30 days after that we’ll have thousands of books to store, package, and ship.

In the next 30 days I need to:
discuss bulk mailing options with a USPS customer service person
Figure out what format I want the pre-order mailing lists to be in
Figure out how to quickly create mailing labels from mailing lists
Calculate shipping to various locations in the world so we can set up pre-ordering

In the next 60 days I need to:
price and order mailers
Make space in the storage room for thousands of books
create a workspace where I can regularly be packing books for shipping
set up financial software for inventory tracking

All of that is in addition to the impending spring yard work projects. (I always long for warm weather so I can be outside, but I forget how much more work my yard is during warm weather.)

I’m very excited to finally be so close to having books. The time is right. All the pieces are falling into place. And the sample pages I’ve seen look wonderful.

Today I broke out my zoo pass to take the kids to the local zoo. They had a day off from school and it seemed a good day for it. I was frustrated and dismayed to discover that the local zoo does not honor the zoo pass that I have. Grr. That completely derails my plans for taking the kids to the zoo regularly all summer long. Fortunately the local aviary DOES honor the pass, so it isn’t completely wasted. I would not have minded this discovery so much if I’d made it by phone rather than at the zoo entrance with 4 children hyper to see the animals. I decided to just spend money on admission and let the kids see the zoo. I then had to prevent myself from spending the rest of the afternoon making mental price/fun ratio comparisons.

Fortunately the kids had no such mental arithmetic to disturb their enjoyment. They ran gleefully from exhibit to exhibit admiring animals. They also got joy from the running I think. Each trip to a zoo has a different highlight from previous visits even if the zoo is exactly the same. The highlight this time was the small animal and reptile house. I think part of the reason we spent so much time there was that the kids were worn out from all the running. They were ready to stand still and watch squirrel sized monkeys at play. Also it was warm inside the building and outside was a bit chilly. Patches favorite exhibit was the one labelled “This exhibit is empty”, to further emphasize the emptiness of the exhibit some employee had placed a toy godzilla, a toy airplane, and a toy car on the rocks. Patches thought the purple car was the coolest exhibit in the zoo. He likes animals, but he lights up for machines. I need to take him to the aerospace museum.

The kids all had a great time. I did too once I managed to let go the frustration. The museum had an art exhibit that completely wowed Kiki. Some of the art was done by children her age and we spent a few moments learning how to submit art for next year’s exhibit. Kiki is fully capable of doing something show worthy if she decides to devote herself to it. Kiki was also much struck by the old houses in Salt Lake City that we drove past on the way to the zoo. She has decided that she never wants to live in an apartment. Instead she wants to move into a little house like the ones that we saw. In fact she intends to start saving money for a down payment so that she can achieve this goal.

I’ve definitely come away from today’s trip feeling inspired to take my kids to more zoos, museums, and other cultural places. They think new thoughts after seeing such things. And I’ve discovered that my crew have reached ages where it is possible for me to keep track of them all without feeling frantic the whole time. I love that my older kids help me keep track of my younger kids.