I'm so needed!

This morning all three kids ate all their breakfast without arguing or crying!

It was amazing.

I got all the cleaning done early that I like to do while the kids are gone. Baby I has explosive diarrhea so after mopping up his thighs and putting him down for his nap, I took my lunch hour for two hours in front of the TV.

Over the weekend T and I had talked a lot about food and since she cooks primarily Persian and I cook...everything else, we thought it would be fun to make all these different ethnic foods for each other.

So tonight I introduced the kids to Mexican food and made tacos.

That's right. These kids had never had a taco before.

I made the tortillas with R and then got everything else started. R helped me bake some oatmeal raisin cookies for dessert and all this time Baby I played with T while she worked in her home office and J slept on the couch.

Dinner wasn't as blissful as breakfast, but R ate after some discussion. J ate rice and since anything Baby I eats later runs down his legs, I let him have a tortilla and a banana. Not as Mexican as the rest of us, but I told him to pretend it was a plantain.

I don't think he did.

E had a long day and got home hungry, bearing the news that there's been a break-in in the neighborhood. He ate tacos while I took the kiddies upstairs and wrestled them into the tub.

E and T then had to make an appearance at a funeral so I put the kiddies to bed and quit for the night.

On the whole, it was a very routine and normal day; uneventful and productive.

But the little things that came up, like T asking me to text her the shopping list she forgot, and how many times she thanked me for doing things throughout the day, and how careful she is to not get in the way of something I'm doing, and how E ever so politely asked me if he could eat the dinner I cooked and how they both gushed over my cookies (which did not come out all that great as far as my cookies go) really make me feel needed here.

Sometimes I think things with the last nanny fell apart so suddenly that they are afraid I might just up and leave the way she did.

We still have some kinks to work out but T is being careful with me. She doesn't want to offend me. She doesn't want me to be uncomfortable. She doesn't want to be the stuck up housewife who bosses her nanny around. She wants to be friendly, even if she doesn't think of us as friends.

And her approach is working.

I feel welcome, I have my own space but they've balanced things and included me in their family already. And even though the kids aren't the well-behaved little angels I like to pretend my nieces and nephews are, they are doing their part to make me feel useful here.