Big news

1. PEANUT BUTTER is back in my life! Pregnancy has caused me to hate peanut butter for the past 8.5 months. If you’re at all familiar with Normal Shaina, you know that she adores peanut butter. These past few peanut butterless months have been rough all over. I always have PBJ for lunch! What could possibly fill that void? I kept trying to eat peanut butter, but I never got past the smell. Then on Sunday I decided to try again. Strategically, I packed myself a PBJ sandwich to eat in the parking lot right after church, when I’m usually desperate enough to eat anything marginally palatable. It worked! I have had PBJ for lunch every day since Sunday. Today I actually had two PBJ-wiches for lunch because I used the skinny end of the bread (I’m notoriously bad at making normal, evenly sized loaves of bread).

2. Rose and I went to the library yesterday. We have not gone since school started almost 2 months ago. It is so hard to get out when I feel so heavy and slow, especially when the library has weird operating hours which are mainly during my afternoon naptime. But it was open yesterday morning, so Rose and I braved the unusually rainy gloom and drove the mile down the street to our library. We had to restrain ourselves only to check out our usual 13 books. My strategy to get all the books back in time is always to check out the same number of books so all we have to do is count them and we know if we’re missing any. Easy. So yesterday, we picked our 13 books and Rose relished being able to have the self-checkout scanner all to herself (when Jay comes they have to take turns). She carefully scanned and swiped each book. She was so careful, in fact, that the computer kept timing out and it took like 10 minutes for all the books to be scanned. Eventually we made it back out into the rain where I had to work hard to remember how to even use the windshield wipers in the van because it rains so rarely here. Fresh reading material reminds me how much I actually do like reading stories to my kids.

3. After a relaxing [lengthy] phone conversation with my Mom this morning, I found myself with a new hairstyle:

"Mommy, your hair is dun (gonna) be so byou-tay-full (beautiful). I wike (like) your hair. It's so pretty. Your hair is so turful (colorful)."