Friday wrapped up another fantastic run of 7 Days. I wasn’t really in the mood on Day 1 last weekend. But as usual the week of taking self-portraits; viewing everyone else’s creative, silly, honest, fun shots; and commenting up a storm worked its magic and brought me right out of my funk. It’s a fact: 7 Dayers are the defunkifyingest group on Flickr. I’m already looking forward to the next one in December.

This was my alternate for Day 7. I felt left out of all the dottery photos, so I took a photo of me, drinking my tea, looking out at the rain. This photo has two 7 Days connections: I was with Lauren C. when I painted this mug, and the tea that I’m drinking is the PG Tips that Lauren H gave me when we met up with her last summer.

Just for kicks, here’s a short video I shot at the Ontario airport in California last month, right after Elliora learned to play peekaboo. It cracks me up how she doesn’t quite get that she needs to cover her face for this game to work, though she’s gotten better since then.

Part of the reason I’m randomly posting this second video now is because I was scrolling through old blog posts today, looking for one I was sure I’d written about our three-day power outage last January when my parents were here…and I didn’t find it because I never wrote it. I also never wrote about Elliora’s baptism and Rachel coming to visit! I can’t believe how many things have gone unblogged in the past year. Sheesh. I need to just start blogging things, even if the posts aren’t well-organized and the photos aren’t all edited and uploaded yet.

While we’re being random, we might as well end this post with an adorable photo of Elliora and Annalie driving a grocery cart at the store recently.

Just for kicks and out of curiosity, today I kept a log of my day.

Today I spent 698 minutes between 7am and 1am caring for my kids. And today was pretty easy, aside from the fact that Troy didn’t get home till almost 8pm. Neither of the girls were overtired or sick, and my cough is almost gone and I’m feeling better. Everyone was in a pretty good mood all day. There were no tantrums or lost tempers.

Still, I spent nearly 12 hours nursing Elliora, preparing food, cleaning up after meals, changing diapers, attending Annalie’s gymnastics class, getting Elliora to sleep at various points during the day, encouraging Annalie as she did her chores, and just playing and talking and being a mom.

I’m taking two big things away from this exercise: (1) No wonder I’m so flipping tired all the time! That’s a lotta hours for an extraverted introvert like me to be on duty and around people, even two of the people I love most; and (2) I’m never feeling guilty about not blogging* or not getting laundry done again, not while my kids are little. Clearly I have more important things to be doing.

*That doesn’t mean I still won’t wish I had more time to blog, though. Just today I had great ideas for two blog posts—even took photos for one of them—but didn’t manage to download the photos to my laptop or write a single word of either one. Oh well.

Every one of your caption ideas was fantastic. I really wanted to pick a winner outright but I couldn’t do it! There were too many good ones. So just for kicks, I picked the four captions that made me laugh out loud and created a poll. Help me pick a winner!