The times of me being reckless and not caring about measuring the body temperature of a sick child are gone. Long ago, I used to rely on my gut feeling about it. I prefer to control a situation now. Besides, I want to be able to tell the doctor how exactly the illness developed.

Marge was ill for the past two weeks, her temperature was going up and down all by itself, and I just couldn’t keep everything in my head. So I drew myself this handy template to fill and it actually helped me a lot when we had a doctor appointment. And having a true picture of what is happening helps not to panic beforehand.

If I were a poet, I would definitely write a poem about Latvian weather. It has so many faces and it changes its mood like a patient of a psychiatric clinic! We have weeks of tropical heat in July, we freeze to our bones in February. October either pours or drizzles on us and we have thunderstorms each night in June. Then we always have a whole week of rains around midsummer holiday time, that’s for sure. Our weather is truly unpredictable (except that rainy midsummer week). Yesterday we could easily go for a swim. Today we are wearing jackets (and some of us even gloves). Yep, one can’t be bored with our weather. It’s really inconvenient though when you’re trying to plan outdoor shoot. So when you have a sunny or at least partly sunny evening, you must grab it!

I am a cleaning freak. I like pleasing my eyes with a beautiful interior around me instead of trying to find the couch behind the mess. And I like tidying up things. And I actually do it all the free time I have while my littlest one is awake, so I also believe that I deserve some rest when she goes to sleep. Well, this is me.

I’m raising my third toddler now, and this stage of her age is the hardest for me as for the cleaning freak. She can mess everything around us much faster than I can clean it. She is much skillful of messing things than me of cleaning our rooms. Usually I like having my floor washed at least once in two days (don’t like feeling sand under my feet in our home), but now I can’t get to actual floor washing for weeks! Well, this is her.

I have two bigger girls on a summer break in addition to Marge now. They can clean, I’ve seen them doing it. But the sad truth is, they don’t seem to see any point in doing it. Besides, they have so many things that it’s no wonder that their young minds just can’t cope with the cleaning process. I must admit, there are times when I feel lost in their room too. Well, these are them.

As you probably already know, Anastasia celebrated her 8th birthday recently. Making birthday party invitations by ourselves has already become a tradition in our house. We try to think of a different way to do it every time, as Anastasia’s writing skill evolves. This activity always involved a lot of drawing, cutting, glueing, designing and writing. But this time I drew the templates on the computer and Anastasia had to cut and glue them together, so as write her friends names in.