Saturday, January 26, 2008

Finally finished

The kitchen is basically done. And, I have to say I sure love it. There ended up some more drama than I originally predicted when the fridge came and was damaged. There was what looked to me like a kind of minor gouge on the side… but the delivery guy was saying “you paid A LOT for that fridge, you want it perfect.” The guy running the gas line was here at the time, and he was suggesting I bargain with them for $500 off and take it anyway. The next day the guy who I called to talk about redelivery suggested they might have taken $100 off… well for $100 I want a NEW fridge!!! The new fridge came Saturday, but not Saturday morning, we were their last delivery on Saturday and it didn’t come until 4:45. Of course they didn’t let us know that, they didn’t communicate with us at all except when I called periodically to ask where the heck they were. But when they did come they were very careful not to ding up the house, or the new fridge, and it took till about 6:30 to get it in and installed. They had to go through the back door because we couldn’t get the swinging door into the kitchen unhooked. I spent an hour on it Saturday, trying to dismantle it with no success.

But that’s all part of the past now. The new fridge does hold less, but I can see everything in it as opposed to the dark mysterious cave that was the old fridge. I spent the rest of the Martin Luther King holiday weekend rearranging the kitchen and cleaning up, and it is wonderful. For the first time in…well, probably since we’ve moved in, the kitchen looks straight and clean and has for a week.

The girls are doing great. Thing 1 said something I found rather funny, she was telling me why she had a band-aid on her finger from school. She very casually told me she got “a random paper cut.” I laughed. But the later when I was trying to explain why that was funny, I realized her usage of the word “random” was completely appropriate, just completely not what I would have expected a first grader to use.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Cold and flu season

Unfortunately, on his way out of town Hubby’s cold jumped to all of us. Sunday, the same night he left, the girls and I started feeling crappy, and yesterday it settled in good and hard. I woke up to find 8 inches or so of snow on the ground. Luckily our very kind neighbor shoveled the front, but before I can go anywhere in the car I’m going to have to dig out the back. Which sounds unappealing, as I’ve got a nasty cold and all I want to do is sleep. I am afraidI’m going to have to do it sometime, though.
Thing 2’s colds have a tendency to turn into croup, and last night she cried that she couldn’t breathe. I dragged her mattress into my room and set up a croup tent for her. That’s another advantage of those little IKEA mattresses, they’re somewhat portable. She doesn’t like it in there, and whined a fair amount, and at about 5:00 in the morning when I was coming back from helping Thing 1 with something I found Thing 2 crawling into my bed. She told me “I’m finished.” Finished with what? With the croup. She didn’t want to be in the tent anymore. Poor little rabbit.
I hate feeling this crappy, hate when they feel this crappy, and there’s all sorts of things we’ll be missing out on. I don’t imagine the girls will be healthy enough to go to school tomorrow.

Oh, and did I mention that taking asprin for my headache has launched a nasty case of hives? I look like some twisted human dalmation, and can barely control the urge to rake my fingernails across my welted spotty flesh…

Oh, and Thing 1’s tooth is hurting her again. I think this is one of the previous ones we’ve had filled before… one that has already abscessed once before and had to be refilled. Poor little muffin.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Post Christmas wrap up

Christmas was wonderful. And a long ways away now. One of the things I wanted to write down before I forgot about it was about a little teapot set from IKEA that Zoe got, a very Japanese little ceramic tea pot with little matching mugs which came on a bamboo tray. It was just so darling. It has rested securely in its shrink wrapped plastic until yesterday, when I noticed it and opened it for her. We had a brief tea party, I showed her the very Japanese gesture of pouring the tea with one hand while holding the lid on the pot with the other, and it was so cute. Then I left her to play while Thing 1 drew, Hubby took a nap, and I cleaned up the kitchen. About ten minutes later there is horrible crash… Zoe had taken the teapot into the bathroom to ‘clean it’ and was trying to dry it out on the towel that hangs from the cabinet handle, and dropped it onto the tile floor. It broke into way too many pieces to glue back together. She cried, but I think I felt worse that I shouldn’t have given it to her so young. She played with it less than an hour.

Hubby bought me a new camera, which I really did need but hardly thought we could afford. It’s a 12 mp Canon, which is exactly what I’d have chosen for myself if money was no object… He also bought me a Roomba which I’ve really liked, and again, we can’t afford. I have it to vacuum the upstairs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, and it is such a wonderful feeling to go up there and see it so clean.

The girls got Nintendo DS games from Santa. Thing 1 got the Zelda game she wanted so bad, but it is kind of hard for her to play since she can’t read, and I can’t help her because the screen is so small I can’t really see what she’s doing. Not like the TV version where I can sit there and tell her want to do because I’ve played it all before. Zoe got Nintendogs, and we ended up buying a copy of that game for Thing 1 so they could each play it at the same time with their own dogs, and they don’t have to know how to read to do it.

I didn’t really do as much for Hubby as I should, but I did get him a really nice watch I had a coupon for at Costco, and a bunch of little things, some of which are kind of for the house, some of which are really for him. He is so hard to shop for.

He left this morning for New York, despite having a 104 temperature this morning. We’ve stocked him up on Echinacea and this Emergen”C” powder, but he’s been battling this cold since sometime Friday, I think. Poor boy, but he just couldn’t think of any way around going.