And no...

...I didn't just spend all night typing up those posts. These were written over the course of several days. What did I do tonight?

Tucked 8 kids into bed (4 borrowed, 4 natives). That took 90 minutes.

Cleaned up with my new enormous dust pan. WOW.

Finished up (and start!) my holiday menus and shopping list.

Tallied up our learning to date to see what we have to finish in our "month." (I'm counting August/September as one month because of all the holidays and our mid-August start plus a visit from savta - YAY!)

Started the dishwasher. Again.

Realized that we'll never make it through three days of shabbos/yom tov meals with our current quota of tablecloths. Then I remembered plastic covers. :)

Realized that I'd better figure out how to turn on the sabbath mode on our oven so that our oven doesn't turn off during those three days rendering us unable to bake.

And now, finally, bleary-eyed, I will go to sleep. Even though I really ought to run another load of laundry.

But through it all, an overwhelming sense of gratitude to Hashem. For all these messes, for my husband's long hours, for our friends and family, for having parents that figured out what a family should be so we didn't have to, and for all the many, many, otherwise improbable things that brought us to this moment. BARUCH HASHEM!