Claytonopolis: 7 Quick Takes

I forgot how fun quick takes can be.

1. The yard sale is on! My husband, ah, gave me a stern talking to about all the stuff I have been stuffing into the guest bedroom. On the weekends I have been particularly miserable about being pregnant and I have not wanted to go ahead with the sale, in the heat I might add. I was hoping to have a baby this weekend. But I said, fine, I have not had a ton of contractions, so I think it’s pretty safe to go ahead. So I went into full force yard sale mode, tagging, purchased an ad, and permit…cue contractions. Yep, as soon as that permit was purchased I pretty much cannot stand up without feeling like I am going into labor. I have been trying to lay low, keep my feet up, and canceling all other activities. After all my longing for the baby to be born, I am now trying to keep her in until her actual due date. Life is full of humor and irony.

2. From dining room table to new house? After we bought our new dining table, some of our other furniture started to look really shabby and really inappropriate for our space. I am also trying to simplify things and somehow that translates to limiting and replacing old furniture (when I say old, it’s no exaggeration). I am, after all, trying to to make room for another person in our lives. Along with our old table I am putting in the yard sale a couple of arm chairs and our coffee tables (the tables have been in a closet since Christmas). Which helps the yard sale a lot, because furniture are always big ticket items. We plan to buy Alex a bike with earnings.

2a. After assessing the furniture and the state of the economy, the size of our home per child and so forth, we determined our townhouse is too small. We could buy a larger, new construction home, with a good first time home buyer deal and stay in Texas forever and forget about dreams of moving back to be near family where there are no jobs. We went and looked at the homes again. We first looked at doing this back in January, but the time was not right. We are seriously trying to discern. We know God brought us to Texas for a reason. Pray for us. This all started with one broken dining chair. Life is ironic.

3. The kids have been sick! Which makes for no sleep for anyone. They both came done with a nice respiratory cough, but since Alex has asthma that means difficulty breathing and round the clock nebulizer treatments. It seems every fall we see asthma rear it’s ugly head. After what we went through in his first year of life, if we only see his asthma in the fall, I think we will take it and not complain. We’re just practicing for round the clock feedings.

4. Cravings – I did not really have cravings with the other kids pregnancies, aside from potatoes, but this pregnancy I have craved a lot. Right now, I really crave fruit. I have also eaten a lot of canned, smoked oysters. Weird.

5. Exploding Pyrex – Has this happened to anyone? I bought a set of pyrex dishes at Wal-mart a year ago (At a bargain price, I might add. Therein lies the problem.) and one-by-one, randomly, these dishes have exploded after baking. It makes a mess and destroys whatever we have worked so hard to make. I am not exactly sure what the defect is with this set, but I cannot be the only one this has happened, because the whole set exploded one-by-one over the last year. I should have thrown away the other baking dish after the last time. I will not be buying pyrex baking dishes again.

6. Not a baker – This sort of a confession. I am not a baker. I can cook the finest gourmet meal topped with a perfect hollandaise, but I have never been very good at baking. I can barely manage a decent cake out of a box. If you ask me to bake something, it’s going to be burnt, dry, not quite right. :-( So why did I sign up to bring a baked good to my MOPS meeting this week. Actually, coffee cake sounded really good to me and I thought I might be able to produce it. When it came time to bake, I said, I am not a good baker and I am going to make the one thing I make well. Scones. But, I decided I would add cinnamon and sugar to make it coffee cake-esque. The scones looked great. I took them with some butter. A spread and a cup of tea or coffee are essential with dry scones. Lots of people took one, but without butter. They didn’t get it. I tried one after the meeting. They were awful. They were okay with butter, but awful otherwise. I don’t think anyone knew they were mine, so here I am outing myself. I promise to just buy the darn coffee cake next time.

7. Shoe Queen – The other day we were out buying Alex a new pair of shoes, because he grew out of his last pair. Kristiana insisted she needed new shoes too, even though she doesn’t. But she whined us into it. Her joy at seeing the girls shoes was precious. Whose toddler can talk them into a new pair of shoes? She LOVES shoes. Just get her shoes for Christmas. We picked out a lovely pair to the tune of $13, which is really expensive considering the last pair I bought was $2 and she will grow out of them quickly.

The next day we tried to put of Kristiana’s shoes and she started saying, “No, no, hurt, hurt.”

“What?” She had never said hurt before. “What is going on?” The new shoes had rubbed big blisters on her heels the day before. Ugh. Hopefully, Annie will have different shaped feet and they won’t rub her feet.