Happy Independence Day! I am sitting here on my parents couch while they're out watching fireworks. We decided that Evelyn wouldn't appreciate the loud noises, or the late hour, so we're skipping it. That's okay because I watched fireworks from the bedroom window while putting E to sleep... at least a few. I have never seen such large fireworks in a home setting before. Your nation's drug money put to good use. My parents live in a nice brick house that sits on seven acres. After they bought the property, the neighboring property got turned into four rows of trailers (three on one side, one on the other.) Lovely. Actually, the one row was already there, but it has gone WAY downhill. Old LJ friends might remember when we lived next door to that row of trailers, before we moved towns four years ago. We had fun things like drunken college kids pissing in our yard, drunk men shooting their guns off the porch ten feet away from our kitchen window, and Saturday night drunken brawls. ("F^#* you, you F#&#ing F#**#&er!" is still our favorite line from that era.) It's even worse now because it seems that the drunk kids have been replaced by a set of bona fide drug dealers, and last week, someone broke into my dad's shop and stole a bunch of power tools. I just love it when people reinforce those nasty stereotypes! *mgrmbl*

So anyway. Evelyn was not having one of her best days because she refused to sleep in the car on the way up here. She was miserable and making both of us miserable, but she didn't care. She was doing better after got to her Granny. :) My parents bought me a sewing machine at a yard sale, but after I got to play with it, we noticed that it was broken. ;( It ran but then slowly bogged down and stopped after twenty seconds of stitching. It wasn't necessarily a super machine or anything, and I do have one, but it was reasonably priced and better than mine. So I spent part of the afternoon playing with that and then we took it back to the yard sale and got our money back, which was good. It seemed pretty suspiciously like she did in fact know that it didn't work. I guess it might have been something easily fixable, but... I didn't know that for sure, so it seemed a little risky to take that chance with a machine not that much better than mine.

That's about all the news I have. M's sister arrives on Friday so we're planning on spending the rest of the weekend cleaning up the house. I am going camping at least one day this week and probably two (assuming that Evelyn cooperates on the first day.) With my parents, of course, and only during the day. Stay at home mom or not, cleaning for company does not fall on my shoulders so doing it when M is not working? Yes, thank you. And after she gets here? A week of vacation for my boyo! That's pretty exciting.

My lap is getting too hot for typing more, so I think I shall go check on the baby and then harass M, or read, or something like that. Hope your holiday (if it is your holiday) was good!

Happy birthday to my very wonderful husband totte! He is the bestest. :) I would write more about how great he is but I think I'd rather go spend a few minutes with him instead, now that the baby is finally asleep.

My poor baby. She was worn completely out, and I almost had the requisite asleep-in-high-chair photo. Her eyes fluttered closed as M and I looked on in complete disbelief, and then when we made some noise, she opened her eyes and her head popped back up and she grinned at us like, HAHA I FOOLED YOU. But, she didn't. She was completely falling asleep, the little faker.

I just gave myself a self-imposed twelve-minute deadline on this post. We shall see where that takes us.

My mom and aunt came down today and we had a busy day of lunch, shopping, and then a trip to the game farm, where we walked around looking at animals and nature and had a very nice time. E missed her nap, so that's why she was so especially sleepy. I had been thinking of having a no-nap day because she has had appalling night-time sleep habits lately, so I'm hoping this will "reboot" her. Yes, we speak of our child as if she is a buggy Windows-based computer. What of it? I bought one shirt on my shopping trip. I found it... in the dressing room, where I was trying on something that didn't fit. There was a stack of shirts in my size hanging there, and I pretended that my personal shopper had picked them out for me and tried them all on. Nothing like enlivening your day with a healthy dose of crazy. Too bad she didn't pick out some shorts. I desperately need shorts.

Do you think denim shorts are the height of fashion faux pas? M saw that somewhere, that they were ranked right up there with socks and sandals. I had never considered them exactly high fashion but I had no idea that people thought they were terrible. My area is super-casual. Sub-casual, even, but I am not sure that anyone I know thinks that denim shorts are strictly off-limits. These are important questions that keep me very busy.

Four minutes remaining! The pressure, the pressure!

Update on the living room lamp situation: it still works! All five bulbs had to be replaced, but the lamp still works. And no, no one was hurt. I was sitting right there (taking a picture, like the idiot I am) and I was grabbing it as it fell to direct it away from the baby... I just couldn't grab it well enough to stop it from falling. So all's well that ends well.

And I now have less than one minute so I should wrap this up and go watch the tellyvision with the hubbyo.

When we bought this house, it was in the process of being taken back by mother nature. Trees and vines and algae and even the flowers moved out from where they were supposed to be. We've been doing a lot of work this year, and M finally won me over to buying a pressure washer. Did you know that pressure washers are the coolest things ever invented? It's true! They are awesome. M has worked his cute tail off this weekend, cleaning the outside of the house. I am hard pressed to even tell you what the biggest improvement was because ALL of it looks so much better. It took off the vine residue that was all over two sides, the black staining from the vines, the algae growing on the wall in the back, the dark gray color of the back patio, and yes, it even took the paint off the shutters and trim. Okay, that last part is not so good but we have to do a second coat on the porch railings anyway so we can just touch up paint then. A brief cost-benefit analysis showed that it was in our best interest to clean it rather than save the paint. The house looks so much crisper. It's a weird wording but it's all I can think of. We have been bad with the before/after pictures lately but here are a couple I took while M was working on the back patio.



So that was pretty awesome. This is the first year it feels like we're making progress on the outside. We were too focused on the inside on the first year, and on babyshmoo the second.

Speaking of babyshmoo, I am happy to report that she is now actually eating stuff! She has been markedly uninterested in food until say, Thursday. Now she wants crak-kuhs at all times. She even requested crak-kuhs instead of milk just after her nap yesterday, which was shocking. She has always treated food as a pleasant diversion, but it didn't count as something to fill her belly with. Only milk does that. ;) Crak-kuhs, by the way, refer not only to crackers but to any and all dry foods that we offer her (fruit puffs, cheerios, crackers, etc). Everything but cheese, basically, which she will say upon occasion but mainly she signs.

Oob. It's past midnight. Dorko baby refused to sleep (again) until after eleven so I am running late this evening. It's past bedtime now, though, so I will have to save the scintillating discussion about the price of cheese for another time. Too bad!

If you see your kid trying to do something that you have made them NOT do a hundred thousand times (play with the tall upright lamp), while you happen to be sitting there with the camera taking pictures of something else they're not supposed to be doing (ripping all the books out of the bookcase) and you think, gee, I should get a picture of her doing that before I stop her from touching it?

Reconsider.

That's all I'm saying.

In completely unrelated news, we may or may not need a new lamp in the living room.

I need valium. Or liquor. Or both. My baby has decided that walking is the fun, and she is no good at it. This is concerning because there are things like bricks on the fireplace and sharp corners and stuff. She took fourteen steps once when I counted and possibly more than that on one other occasion. Progress! After those first steps a few weeks ago, she rather lost interest until this afternoon. Kids are weird. Also, I grew sixteen new gray hairs in the time it took M to make a tech support phone call.

And why was he making a tech support call? Because his brand new computer arrived again today from its journey back to Gateway for repairs. It was most likely a power supply issue causing it to power itself off randomly. They replaced the motherboard (okay, also a possibility), the processor (you're stretching it, guys) and the.... modem. Uhh. What? They didn't even touch the power supply. But.. the MODEM? Didn't even know that it HAD a modem. He plugged it up, and it failed to boot. Then, it inexplicably came on, but turned itself off after five minutes, same as before. He called them and the tech told him to turn the system off, unplug it and hold the power button in for 45 seconds. This was obviously going to be hokey, but he did it. It's been running ever since. No clue why. Soooo.. either this oddball solution is going to permanently fix whatever the problem is, in which case the previous three weeks of M's computer being out of commission was a total waste of time and why didn't they tell him that the first time he called? OR, more likely, he will have to send the thing back again and STILL be without his computer. Bleh. At least it's under warranty and it didn't cost anything except time and aggravation. We have never really had a computer under warranty before, as they have always been customs. It's novel.

Reba, the sitcom? Is really a cute show. I had no idea. There are nice things about staying at home during the day, it seems. Hehe.

One other thing and then I have to go to bed. My grandfather has this shop across the road from his house. It has wood tools upstairs and a garage downstairs and it's the size of a house. He has an incredible talent for a good many things, especially making things with wood. It's really sad because he doesn't get to spend much time up there anymore because he really shouldn't be working alone in case something were to happen (bad vision, health problems, power tools, etc.) So anyway, this woodshop. It's got a lot of expensive pieces of equipment. Last week some fucking crackwhores broke into his shop and cut the power cords off of most of them to sell them for copper. They'll make three dollars, and for that, they ruined thousands of dollars worth of tools belonging to an 80-year-old man. NICE. It makes my blood boil just thinking about it. Had they taken ONE of those things instead of destroying them, they could have made more money than they're going to get. I would be mad as hell if they had stolen everything (though I would be grudgingly impressed with them for getting the planer out with noone noticing..heh) but I can't believe the sheer waste of something like this. He may be able to repair some of them.. we'll see, I guess. Bastards.

God help me, she is figuring out how to open doors at this very moment.

So it was strongly suggested from various peoples that I get that bug bite checked out, so I ended up going in to the doctor this afternoon. M came home early (nicey nice!) and stayed with Evelyn so I didn't have to drag her in with me to a nasty doctor's office. It's (probably) an infected unspecified spider bite. At least it isn't a brown recluse! I have a round of antibiotics and a skin cream and hopefully that will take care of it. I picked up the prescription but I had two separate (expired, it turns out) tubes of the same stuff in my drawer. How many kooky skin conditions does one person deserve, anyway?

I have discovered something recently that I think all parents of baby girls should know. Your life will be easier if you go buy your kid a pair of khaki shorts/pants from the boys section. This will guarantee that there are no flowers, butterflies or hearts embroidered on them, and they will therefore match anything. I wouldn't have bought them to begin with because they're so plain, but we got a pair with the hawaiian print shirt that we bought her recently to match her father and that is when I discovered that they are so freaking fantastic. She has a lot of cute tops that don't match any bottoms because the shade of pink is wrong or the red flowers don't match the purple flowers or something silly like that. She probably has more unmatched pieces than some kids because we get so many of her clothes from her older cousins, but I have bought her a few unmatching novelty shirts myself. ("My Daddy Is Wrapped Around My Little Finger" for example.) Do it, you won't regret it. I have also heard rumors that boys pants are cut with more room than girls, which is nice for cloth diapered kids.

M's sister will be here in less than three weeks. We have not yet repaved the driveway or any of our ridiculous preparing-for-company tasks. I imagine we'll regret that in about two weeks. ;) She is actually in the US already, visiting with her best friend from childhood, who happens to be an American who lived in Sweden as a kid. We're looking forward to it.. should be fun. And M will have the week off! That sounds fantastic. It's too bad he couldn't take time off last year when his parents were here, but for some odd reason he had used up all his vacation days already when we had a baby. ;)

M and I obviously think our baby is the best thing since sliced bread but we also are fully aware that she is a baby, and thus--a little dopey. We try hard not to attribute too much to every babble she says, or every gesture she makes. It's not that we don't think she's smart--we do! Honestly, she is the smartest baby ever to live, of course. But, those people who assume that there's a meaning to their baby saying "didididididid!" when it is clearly just babbling....well, that's not our style.

Having said that, we had a little shock last night. We were eating at a restaraunt and discussing what to do once we left. I turned to Evelyn and asked her where she wanted to go next. She pretty much ignored me, so I asked her if she wanted to go bye-bye. This usually elicits a wave, and a string of "buh bye bye bye"s, which is cute. The girl likes to go. I'm not sure she's mine. Anyway, M commented that she probably wanted to go home and take a B - A - T - H. She is really obsessed with her bath lately, and begs for it all evening long. Since we were at a restaraunt, forty miles away from the possibility of a bath, he spelled it out so she wouldn't get started whining about wanting a bath.

Except...

When he said "B - A - T - H"... Evelyn's eyes lit up and she said, "BA!!!!" and started making the sign for bath.

Thirteen months old and the child can spell. Who knew? I am pretty sure that Harvard will be calling any day now.

Seriously, I know that she can't quite read yet but we have no idea how she knew that. It's not like we normally spell it to her. We thought maybe it was the "take a" part of the sentence so we started asking her if she wanted to take a bus or a train or a picture, but she didn't respond to that in the slightest. She has done it several times since, too.

In related news, she definitely has some Swedish language knowledge. We didn't know for sure if she had picked any up (other than the random words that she is learning solely in Swedish) until today. Every night, M reads her a book in Swedish.. one of three Totte or Emma books. Two of them have references to brushing hair and/or teeth. M taught her to pretend to brush her teeth (with her finger) and smooth (or ruffle.. Emma is very contrary) her hair. It is SO cute. Anyway, it was neat because last night, she made it very clear that she did not WANT Daddy to read her a book, she wanted Mommy to read to her*. Sure enough, when I got to that page, she started brushing her teeth. We started wondering if it was the picture or the words, and have figured out that she understands both of them. She definitely follows along with the picture, but randomly, no book in sight, we have asked her in Swedish to brush her teeth or hair and she will totally do it! It is teh awesome. I am so happy that it is working out so far.

*When I was young, and envisioned reading to my child, I did not actually visualize reading in Swedish. Funny how things turn out.

One more thing. I have an insect bite on my belly that popped up yesterday morning. It's been very red and itchy, but nothing particularly unusual. The red mark is a bit streaky, though. It looks kinda like a red playboy bunny, with a round bite in the middle. Anyway, tonight, I noticed that it is now bruised around it. Ever have a bug bite that gets bruised? Should I see a doctor? Possibly pertinent facts include: I am allergic to mosquitos but have never had anything like this sort of reaction to one, and also, there are brown recluse spiders in Kentucky though I'm not sure I have ever seen one. Ahem. This is largely because I am too spider phobic to spend much time looking at pictures of them. I tried to google for info on bug/spider bites tonight but my skin was crawling too much to continue. Soo.. I am turning to you since you know everything anyway. What do you think?

10:45 – begin the processing of getting the baby to sleep, because she is rubbing at her eyes and whining. eat and eat and eat and eat, as if falling asleep.
11:14 – eyes drift closed.
11:15 – phone rings. Eyes pop back open.
11:30 – fight with baby over nap. sleepy but resistant.
12:05 – give up, go have lunch
12:50 – begin feeding the sleepy baby for naptime project
1:00 – wailing
1:01 – singing
1:04 – crying again, but eyes closing, so give her milk again
1:15 – eyes drift closed, continues to eat.
1:35 – phone rings. It's M, but we hang up promptly to keep the baby from waking up.
1:47 – pain from the continued sleep eating so I pull away.
1:48 – baby screams indignantly
1:49 – baby back asleep but not ready to be put down
1:55 – put baby to bed. Eyes pop open immediately. Cries.
1:56 – sitting with sleeping baby on chest.
2:02 – phone rings. Dad. I promise to call him back in a minute.
2:03 – put baby to bed. Eyes pop open immediately. Cries.
2:04 – sitting with baby on chest.
2:05 – umm, baby not sleeping
2:06 – baby REALLY not sleeping.
2:07 – milk?
2:08 – no?
2:09 – damn.
2:10 – forced snuggling?
2:11 – crying baby.
2:12 – singing.
2:13 – talking baby. Da da? Ba! Dadada.
2:14 – give up.
2:15 – call Dad back. He doesn’t want anything.
2:19 – cry.
2:21 – spend four minutes saying NO repeatedly while yanking baby hand away from electrical outlet.
2:25 – Move baby.
2:26 – deposit baby in crib and turn on Swedish CD
2:27 – PEE. FINALLY.
2:28 – maybe cry a little more.
2:30 – email husband
2:41 – ?????

On Friday night when my parents and niece were here, I announced that M, my niece (W) and I had a little project that we needed to go work on while my parents kept E out of trouble. She had had an extremely odd sleeping day (following her three hour plus wakefulness in the middle of the night) so she was up way past her bedtime. So, we closeted ourself in the bathroom, where we proceeded to do unspeakable things to M's hair.



That's dyed with Kool-aid, and it's still actually in his hair at this point. It washed out much more than we wanted--it was stinging (possibly because we had just shaved his head) and it was bedtime so he rinsed it out sooner than he probably should have. There was still a red tinge the next day, though.



I love how unimpressed Evelyn looks. We were a little afraid that she'd be afraid of him with a mohawk and so we were prepared to shave it off right away, but she didn't much care either way.

M goes to work in shorts and sandals, so there is really not a dress code at all that he needs to follow, but even he was a little leery of showing up with a red mohawk and calling himself a manager. He did actually have to work on Saturday for inventory, so his work buddies did get to see his glorious new 'do. They were also... surprised. My family was also a little on the shocked side, as were the people at the restaraunt and grocery store when we stopped in on Saturday. M is really just not the type that you expect a mohawk from. :)

On Sunday morning, we sent Evelyn off to church with her Granny and Grandpa while we finished getting ready and yes, shaving M's head. He had been planning to shave his head, just to see what it looked like, all along. The red mohawk was just for fun. He doesn't look horrible with his bald head, but he does look better with hair, so he's growing it back out and it's already long enough to almost look like he has hair again. ;) Even if he really liked it, it is totally not the right hairstyle for him because it requires way too much work on keeping it shaved.



So yes, she looks like a boy in that picture, but how could we NOT buy this outfit for her? She is totally M's little mini-me! :)

On one hand, you know that letting your kid take a 1.5 hour nap beginning at 4:30 is a really bad idea. On the other hand, you also know you can't keep her awake for an entire car ride since she is exhausted. And thus, it is nearing eleven and the dorko baby is being walked by her father, as if she is again a teeny tiny (as much as she ever was) baby. She is worn out but resisting the notion of sleep. She has been SO cute, though. She has been rocking her bunny and calling it baby! baby! baby! and giggling when we kiss her and talking to us so sweetly that I melted into a puddle of warm goo on the floor. Then she laughed uproariously and sat on my head. Motherhood is awesome.

We are home from our customary third weekend wtih my parents. It started a bit before normal this time, with my parents and niece arriving on Friday evening to spend the night. M had to work on Saturday, so we took off yesterday morning from here with M scheduled to drive up by himself when he got off work. We stopped for some shopping and lunch and..well.. M beat us there after working all day. Aeropostle, what crazed hold do you have over my niece? I had my dad drop me off at Target while they went in there. I looked around, walked next door to Old Navy, looked around, walked over to Goody's, looked around, and then walked back to Target and stayed awhile before they came back to pick me up. I do not shop like my mom and niece do, I'll just say that much.

AWWWW. She totally fell asleep on M, clutching her little bunny. She fell asleep halfway through the second time he sang Sov Lilla Totte (otherwise known as the song he has sung to me since before we were married, and every night to her before she was even born.) Sometimes, when she does not want to fall asleep for me, I have wondered if she just wants M. Tonight, I really think she did. Maybe she knew it was Father's Day because I think that was just about the best present she could have given him.



Oh, yes, and I shaved M's head twice this weekend. I think the story there will have to wait until later, though, because I am ready to see if he will carry me around singing, too. Or at least tuck me into bed, because I'm so sleepy. I rarely sleep well at my parents house, which is stupid since.. hello.. I slept there for over two decades.

Why won't it sleep? I have been up for almost three hours. I just came back from a mini regroup, where I dumped her in bed with M for a minute while I put on warmer clothes. We turned the A/C down when I got up (at 2:30) and when I then got cold, my baby took offense to my blanket. Apparently, as she kept shoving it off me. I felt this was particularly unfair because I had four bare limbs and could only (due to how we were sitting) cover one or two at a time anyway. I am still unhappy but at least I am warm. I have read the entire internets already so I am also bored. Being awake when you don't want to be really brings out some lovely feelings. I have had a really hard time being sympathetic with her for about the last hour and a half.

You know, it's all about expectations. When she is up in the middle of the night, it usually takes a full hour to get her down again. If she's sleep and I ty before that, she'll often wake up. It's one of her little oddities. I am generally ok with it because she desn't (usuallly) wake up that often at night. Sooo... I can spend an hour reading things online while holding a sweet, sweet baby...but after that hour, Mama gets sleepy again, and then patience falters.

holy moly, it worked. 3 hours and 15 minutes. Off to bed with me!!!

I cannot believe that Evie is still asleep. It's been three hours! And I have had such a nice time! She has been so high-maintenance the last two days. I think she's sort of having a little developmental growth spurt or something, what with the walking and talking and all that. She is thirteen months old today, by the way. I still can't believe that I got pregnant, much less that my baby is over a year old. Life is funny sometimes.

I have a new hobby. It's getting stuff for free. I have been tipping my toes into the world of coupons and rebates. I don't think I have it in me to get too far into it, but I have been enjoying the process of making lists and matching coupons to sales (read: mostly just reading a few sites and buying what they tell me to buy.) So far, I have brought home a free box of cereal, body wash, mouthwash, ear rinse (haha), lightbulbs, two boxes of Zantac, a Glade plug-in, a toothbrush and dental floss... and I have saved money in general with the few coupons I've used so far. It's an odd little hobby, but for once, it's a hobby that pays for itself. I may even subscribe to the Sunday paper if this keeps up.

M and I have been sort of slacking off with all of our little projects lately. I think it's because we are just so darned comfortable with life that we don't have the energy to work on things. I have actually been kind of freaked out for a few months about how GOOD things are. I mean, if your life is this great then there's nowhere to go but down, right? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know? And M has not been as busy with his other job lately as he was for a while... at least not in the evenings. He works in the mornings and then while I'm putting the baby to bed, and then the rest of the time is ours to whatever we want with! Somehow, more time has translated to getting less done. That's pretty weird, now that I think about it.

Speaking of weird, I am a real oddball. Last fall it started bugging me that my towels were falling apart. I finally got around to replacing them this spring. (Okay, I'm not the spontaneous sort, what can I say?) Let me just say that we almost never have people over who will see my towels. M doesn't even see my towels because he uses a different set. (He likes big ones, I like small ones, and I'm not a huge fan of reusing towels before washing. Between the two of us, we could dry the inhabitants of a mid-sized state.) So I throw my raggedy, bleach-stained ones into the rag pile, and then decide that I am going to cut them up to make unpaper towels out of them. That evolved into using them for that and for cloth napkins (not for company, of course). So I am doing a quickie zigzag stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying and just using them as they are. It's all super environmentally friendly and stuff! Except, it occurs to me that what I have done is take my ugly invisible towels, cut them up, made them even uglier, and then paraded them in front of anyone passing through my kitchen. WOOHOO! I am all about the classy. (But they are excellent to clean up baby messes with.)

There we go, the baby is awake. I'd better go get her before she starts eating her crib again. (Which.. wtf? Wood = not tasty.)

A couple of weeks ago, E and I drove over to meet M for lunch. We ate at a Chinese buffet, where she got charged for a meal for the very first time. (It looked like they just charged seventy cents, which I was okay with, though it was still more than she ate.) Anyway, they brought out the ticket, and gave us three fortune cookies. Ha! Her very first fortune cookie!

Guess what it says!

If you wish good advice, consult your mother.

I am totally putting it in her baby book. How perfect is that for baby's first fortune?! I will drag it out when she is a teenager and wants to go do something stupid.

I woke up early this morning (after being up for nearly an hour with salmonella* in the middle of the night ) with a scratched eyeball/eyelid/something in the region of the eye. It is not terribly uncommon that I have issues with my eyes but this time, it has been persistent and fairly terrible. It pretty much wrecked my whole day, because I kept wanting to DO things but I just didn't feel like it. Then Evelyn napped for three hours, which was great, but I would sure have liked to have been productive for those three hours. We went out to Rite-Aid to transfer a prescription that I didn't really need because they give you $30 for doing it (with coupon) and to pick up some Visine, and that is about as much excitement as my day has had. Then I made them price match the prescription I didn't want. I was a real problem customer there this afternoon! The original pharmacy apparently repeatedly hung up on them when they called in for the transfer, too. Nice.

*I don't have salmonella. I shouldn't make light. It's sort of a family joke because my niece is inexplicably terrified of salmonella, and I DID eat, despite my better judgment, raw cookie dough. It is so hard to deny the raw cookie dough. Yum.

I forgot to follow up on the car registration expiration thing. I stayed home all week, and then I ended up going out Friday morning anyway to pay the thing. I called them to ask about how legal it was to drive down there, and the lady said that usually, if you get pulled over and ticketed, you can go to court after you pay the registration and they'll throw it out. I figured that the chance of getting pulled over was slim anyway so I really just wantonly broke the law and drove down there illegally. Woot! After I paid the bill, I asked on a whim if you could pay the registration in advance for another car. Apparently you can pay a month ahead of time, so I paid M's while I was there! Now I don't have to go downtown again for this next month! You can mail in your payment but they charge you $2 for the privilege. Nice of them.

I am currently campaigning to get M to shave his legs. He's been eaten alive with chiggers this year, and I am assuring him that the only way to make sure they stop biting him is for him to shave. Truly, I don't want him to shave his legs, but it's good to have a project. Convincing him to do it is my newest one.

I am not sleepy and I am definitely enjoying the nice baby-sleeping time, but I am going to have to go to bed to get relief from this stupid eye thing. If I were brave enough, I would squirt some breastmilk in my eye because it sure seems to help with anything else. (It did, for example, do a better job on E's diaper rash than her prescription cream...though it took hydrocortisone to finally (knock on wood) clear it up... I've been battling this stupid rash--her first--for a month.) Alas, I am short and wimpy.

Okay, being short doesn't really play a part in that, but it does make my husband laugh and I am still working on that leg shaving thing, and spreading good will is part of my master plan.

Am I drunk?

This has been a fun weekend! We never did really get a whole heaping lot of traffic yesterday at the yard sale, but we did okay. I mean, we made more than if we were just sitting around the house, right? (Actually, this is not technically true in our case, because M has a job that he does from home that he could have done for a few hours and made the same amount, but still! Let's not think too hard about that.)

His new computer decided that it would like to be contrary and shut itself down randomly and repeatedly this weekend, which is a bad bad thing. Crappy crappy crappy. We're guessing that something is getting overheated/hardware malfunction. It's a little different from usual, having these purchased computers. Normally, we have built our own systems and can troubleshoot a little more easily. Sucks to not be able to open things up, get our hands dirty. Anyway, as much as that sucks, there was something good about it! I did a brief search last night relating to the problem, and noticed that Circuit City (which is where we bought them) had this system on sale for fifty bucks less than we paid for them last month. And... they guarantee their prices for thirty days! So, we headed off today to get our $106 (tax) back! While we were going, we also took all of the books that I had packed up from the yard sale yesterday. (Sidenote: I wish I could go to yard sales where there are books as neatly displayed as mine were. I had a LOT of books for sale yesterday--I have been in a de-cluttering mode lately.) We took them to the used book store and made another $30. (They won't take ex-library books, or books with certain issues, and many of the ones I have came from library sales and other places where they sell used books so were of questionable quality.) Soo... we had a profitable weekend on both days! Of course, then Boyo headed off today and bought a pressure washer so... easy come, easy go.

Moral of the story is: when you buy something expensive, add it in your calendar to check a few weeks later to make sure the price doesn't go down. There's also a website that does it for you, but I don't remember what it's called. I'm sure Google knows.

And, I have just found out that the library here is having a book sale this week. It is getting time for a restocking since I just got rid of so many. :) We might try to go, but how can I run into Staci if she is in Taiwan?? Come home. :p It makes shopping more interesting when you might run into someone you know!

Anyway, that's about all I know. I have a really messy desk so I should try to work on that for a few minutes before bed. I got quite a bit of sleep last night because I fell asleep on M ridiculously early into the movie we were re-watching. (Groundhog Day... and he was still living his day for the first time when I fell asleep, if that tells you anything.) Falling asleep on him on the couch is one of my very favorite things to do, though, so it was worth it.

I am live yard sale blogging! Sitting in the front yard with all my lovely, lovely junk worthwhile items strewn all over. It has been really slow today. It occurs to me that we don't have that much traffic in front of our house. But we did put an ad in the paper, so we've had some business. One customer said that last year, her sister had a yard sale during this weekend (competing with a local festival) and it was really slow, so maybe that's our problem. I wouldn't have had it this weekend if I had known that was going on... not because I wouldn't have wanted to compete, though. I would like to go downtown today! We'll probably wrap it up fairly early, though, so we can still go down there if we want. It's pretty muggy, though, so I don't even know if I'll want to by then. Right now all I want is a cheeseburger or something, for I am starving.

M has gone absolutely crazy, and is shooting our vehicle with a gun. Woot! I think the stress of no recent sales is getting to him.

My parents came down to help us with the sale. My dad is a professional at this sort of event, so our yard sale got upgraded a lot from what we had planned. He's got signs and tables and sawhorses and clothes rods.

Now Boyo is hunting locusts. Damned locusts. He's failing to hit them, unfortunately, but it's a noble project. I approve greatly.

So anyway, my parents left and went to hit a few other sales themselves. Evelyn cried for her Granny when they headed out, so they ended up taking her. She is completely inconvenient to go to sales with, but Mom was tickled that she wanted to go buh-bye with her so she took her. It is kind of nice to have babysitting but it's not really how I would have chosen to spend it.

Maybe M is hunting the locusts because they have been attacking him all morning. Several have flown straight at his head. I think they believe he is their leader. Either that, or they believe (from his colorful, leafy shirts) that he is a tree. He has reloaded, so I wish him luck. Also, I hope that he doesn't hit me with a stray shot. It's an air-soft gun, so really nothing more than a toy, but I think it would probably not feel too nice to get hit anyway.

More customers! The last set didn't buy anything so we shot them, and sent them away. Ha. No, we didn't. Such a thought would never have crossed our minds.

Maybe there is a reason more people do not do live blogging from their yard sales.

Of course, most people probably have actual customers at their yard sales, so it wouldn't ordinarily be feasible. That's it. We are having a slow day for YOUR sake. Don't you feel guilty?

Do you have locusts this year where you are? We are overrun. They are huge and disgusting. They come up from the ground and leave round holes, and then they leave carcassy bits laying around on the ground or on the trees or wherever they can find, and then they fly around clumsily, and then they die, and litter up your yard. Yuck.

Sales for $4.50, of which $4 belongs to my parents. We are actually not doing too badly considering how few people are stopping. And most importantly... we sold the stuid cabinet that goes around a toilet. We bought it at the last place we lived, and don't need it now, nor does it fit. I would have given it away if I had had to, but someone gave me actual money for it! $10 of actual money! When he picked it up and started carrying it around (it is as tall as he was so it looked really funny) I grabbed hold of M's hand in sheer delight. Yay fpr de-cluttering!

I think I need to go shoot locusts now. It's too warm to sit with a laptop for long.

We were up pretty early on Sunday morning because Evelyn decided that she had really had enough sleep, thank you. Instead of lazing the day away, I pestered M into getting up immediately and heading off to home improvement stores to get materials for one of our most recent obsession project plans. We make a lot of plans, the two of us, but usually we neglect to carry through with them until we lose the motivation to get started. Admittedly, we have a lot of other stuff going on (yard sale prep!) this week so it really wasn't the best time for it, but we are sort of fickle and cannot stay committed to only one crazy project.
( This is VERY image heavy. )

I am so excited I can barely stand myself but there is no one here to get excited with! I have sent a link to M but I can't call him. She has made a step or so a couple of times in the last day or two, small enough that I couldn't even be sure that it counted, but this? It totally counts! Especially since it was like the fifth time she did it, and she did something similar (elsewhere) a few minutes before that. Not that I picked her back up and stood her at the bookcase to see if she would do it again or anything. No, no, not me. She is so proud of herself, too. It's adorable. The first steps were one of the things that I was so heartbroken that I might miss seeing when I thought I was going back to work. Then I was afraid she would do it when she was with M or someone else.

...

That was written this afternoon, just after the walking began. I got sidetracked (calling my mom to brag) and I didn't post this like I had planned and the excitement and home alone aspect was time-sensitive. ;) Not that I am not still excited but I have settled down.

Just before the walking incident, I had another little bit of excitement today when carrieb called me so I could save her from a tornado. I am a superhero, saving the lives of two people from a remote location a few hundred miles away! You don't think it's too strong to say that I saved their lives just by checking weather.com and suggesting they hang out in the bathroom, do you? Just because a tornado did not, in the end, materialize in her area? No, I didn't think so. Superhero it is. We chatted for a few minutes before the phone died (which might have freaked me out had the storm not mostly blown over by then) and during the conversation, Carrie asked me if Evelyn was walking, and I said no, but she wants to really bad right now. Twenty minutes later, I took that video clip. I thought the timing was funny. I know that she is not walking super-early by any means, but I was expecting that. Ancedotal evidence shows that big babies are slower with moving around and she sure is a big baby. It really doesn't bother me at all except I feel awkward when I tell people that she isn't walking because I don't want to sound like I am defensive or concerned about it, or that I think they are judging her, because I really am not. Anyway, she still has a long way to go but it's a step in the right direction!

We made huge progress on the super-secret project tonight (again, by "we", I mean "M") and we are so close to done now! It is so awesome! I am thinking tomorrow I will be able to post pictures, unless it rains and we can't finish it up like planned. That would be unfortunate. We have been rushing this project because my parents are coming down on Friday for our yard sale on Saturday (did I mention the yard sale? We're having one. There. Mentioned.) and we haven't mentioned it to them, so we really want to get everything done. It would be pretty sad if we finished everything but the last part, which involves a coat of paint.

Evelyn threw a royal two-hour fit over going to bed, and I have this horrible feeling I'll be up in a little while with her, so I guess I should hop off to bed while I still have the chance. I'm falling asleep anyway.