So many things, and they came to me in full throttle during the last month of the year.  What a memorable December.

1.  Do not rely so much on househelps.  We are renting a 3-bedroom house (well one is used as a home-office so it’s really just 2 bedrooms), and there are 4 househelps to assist us, a family of 6.  Well, okay, 5 househelps including Manang Labandera.  Yes, I am serious and I am writing this not because I wanted to let the whole world know that we are a bunch of lazy creatures, but things are so chaotic around the house that having all 5 of them around keeps the home in order (sort of…)

Until 2 of them went home after they decided to quit working, and the other 2 went home on December 24 to celebrate the holidays with their families. Which really made things worse when my husband was rushed to the hospital in the early morning of Christmas day and stayed there for 2 days because he suffered chest pains.

I was alone in the house with the kids, my husband was picked up by his parents to rush him to the emergency room.  With 4 children all under the age of 6, it was pure chaos.  Thank goodness my mother-in-law was there to help me watch the kids while I was doing chores around the house.  She also let one of her helpers sleep with us for a night.

Not having any of our helpers around was not just the problem, it was more of the difficulty in getting household chores done and taking care of my little kids because I relied too much on our helpers.   I would like to be honest and say that I don’t even cook for my family.  Cooking is  not my cup of tea, and as I always say, I would rather clean the entire house and do all the dirty laundry, just don’t make me cook.  My sisters and I grew up with my mom or a helper doing all the cooking, and I just realized now that my mom wasn’t the type to force us to learn how to cook like all other “good girls” do.

2.  Take care of your health.

It was my husband’s first time to be admitted to the hospital.  I remembered joking that I, too, has never been hospitalized since I was a kid and that the only times I was admitted to the hospital was when I gave birth to my kids.

We later learned that he experienced the early symptoms of a mild stroke.  Further test revealed that his heart is still in top shape, but his blood sugar, blood pressure, weight, and bad cholesterol levels are all bursting beyond normal levels.

All is well now, except that my husband keeps bitchin’ around when he realized that he could no longer enjoy eating whatever he pleases.  There’s now a different twist to “eating to his heart’s content”.

My realization is that I couldn’t keep “postponing” my plans to learn how to cook, even simple meals.  There had been and there would always be situations when helpers are not around and there’s no one else who could cook for the family except me.  Even my 5-year old keeps bugging me with her innocent remarks that I should be cooking for her, that she wanted me to be like those moms in TV ads who cook nice meals for their kids.  So, I am taking this further and in fact, this afternoon I was googling for simple Pinoy veggie meals and I think I have found my first recipe.  Will keep you updated on this.

3.  Do not take in too much work if your schedule is bursting at the seams.

During the last days of the year I got a client who wanted me to customize his WordPress-based real estate website.  I have been doing that with previous clients and it was my previous work for a Sydney Travel site that got him interested in getting me do the job for him.  The problem with me was that my workload for the remaining 2 weeks of the year was already a choke, and I still said yes to the client.

Turned out that I could only spend a total of 3 hours to work on his blog, and I could not meet the client’s deadline.  The client ended the assignment and sought out other providers.

There are other realizations that made me think in retrospect, and how I would address this in this new year of 2009.

While I do have these realizations, I really am not sure if I can do something about it, positive or otherwise.

Nevertheless, I am glad to have given this much thought now because I’m afraid I’ll forget everything about it until I remember it next year.