Wow, I am feeling very uninterested in writing this week. Any time I have lots of conversations with friends/family, it saps my desire to write. I guess I only have so many words in me, and I have to "spend" them wisely if I want to have anything in writing! Yesterday Amber and I met friends at the park and stayed for almost two hours talking. It was so pleasant to be out in the sunshine with adults to talk to while the kids played. I talked a lot! I didn't feel entirely socially fried afterwards but I definitely do not have any verbal energy to work off now. I like writing so much that when I have an unusually social day, I miss that feeling of built-up words clamoring to get out, along with the process and release of sitting and writing them down. And now, 24 hours later, I still feel blank when I sit down to write. But I wanted to get these last 50 miscellaneous pictures from April out before May progresses too far.
And how about a little daily anecdote for your amusement. In spite of my depleted word bank, I was able to dig dig deep and dredge up some words to tell The Tale of the Dropped Soap.
The Tale of the Dropped Soap
Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen who had never possessed a spacious shower in their bathroom. Hint: this king and queen is Jeff and myself. Now, moving back to my usual less-sotrybookish vernacular: I have become accustomed to showering in narrow confined spaces, so it is usually not to much of a trial. The shower in our basement bathroom is a 30'' x 31'' almost-square, with a waist-high interior railing on three sides that reduces the standing room by 3 inches on all sides. When the hot shower water is running, the shower curtain gets sucked into the tiny shower area, further reducing the interior space to 28'' x 22'' (I actually measured this because it's easy to exaggerate discomforts). For reference, the front of my body from shoulder to shoulder straight across measures 19 inches. The shower is a tiny little plastic tube--no tile or fiberglass, just plastic. But we screwed on a good shower head and an extender to make it tall enough for our six-foot frames, so it is completely functional and bearable...
...UNTIL THE SOAP GETS DROPPED.
Pesky slippery soap. Since we moved to this house, I have gotten extra-vigilant at holding onto the soap in the shower, but sometimes it still slides out of my grasp. This morning, the soap practically shot out of my hand, ricocheted off of the plastic shower wall, and landed right over the drain in the middle of the shower, aka the hardest place to bend over and pick it up. From my waist to the top of my head measures roughly 33 inches. Bending that 33'' half of myself forward far enough to reach the soap off of the ground right beneath me in a 28'' x 22'' space is uncomfortable! I kind of have to tip my head up, tuck my bum in, and do an awkward vertical squat, with the water jetting my wet hair into my face. Balancing in that position in the wet is precarious at best. I haven't ever actually fallen down yet, thankfully, but it always feels very possible.
This morning, I did my practiced awkward soap-retrieval squat and finished my shower.
And the King and Queen realized that even though their shower was too skinny, it still cleaned them as well as a bigger shower would. The End.
That is rather a lame Tale and also a lengthy explanation of this minuscule moment of my extremely first-world routine, and of course I am thankful to have access to a daily shower, but "a single grain of rice can tip the scale," and this morning it was extra tricky/amusing/frustrating to handle the dropped soap situation.
{Of course, I could take my stuff upstairs and shower in the kids' bathroom, which has a traditional bathtub/shower combo, but my bedroom is in the basement and the basement stairs are super narrow and steep (aka not so comfy to walk down while wrapped in a towel), so it's closer and more convenient to get all the way ready in the bathroom closest to my basement bedroom.}
One Sunday in early April, all three of us girls wore navy and white dresses to church. Our unplanned coordination and the puffy clouds begged for a post-church picture.
Getting those Sunday wiggles out
Reading stacks of Chatbooks is always a favorite activity. I love how well those simple little photo books with captions preserve my kids' memories.
Rose pained a rainbow at school, and Amber copied her idea. I love how much Amber loves Rose.
I discovered a 50% off online coupon and ordered the first Schwann's ice cream of my adult life during April. I have been wanting good ice cream for a while, but I detest the door-to-door Schwann's style. It's been a month since our first order and I already dread the Schwann guy's unexpected knocking on my door and then having to tell him NO again. I mean, there's only so much ice cream we can eat, and their other foods are way out of my price range.
Amber decided to eat some cereal out of the Barbie dishes one morning.
She carefully balanced one oatmeal square on the top of each Barbie sized mug and then neatly plucked one piece at a time and ate it.
JAY STARTED CLIPPING HIS OWN FINGERNAILS! Fingernail clipping has always been among my top three least favorite kid-care-jobs, so this moment was totally photo worthy. I still have to tell Jay when to clip his nails, but he can actually do it himself!!
Talk, talk, talk, talk. If Jay is reading, he roars at interruptions. If I am reading, he sees that as an opportunity to sit down and hold long confusing interrogative discussions.
More Chatbooks
Pouty Amby
Inside Fiesta Foods. I love all of the Spanish labels.
Fiesta Foods sells these adorable mini-tortilla presses and although I know I'd never use something so labor intensive and impractical, I want one.
Seriously. So cute.
Amber being Amber: stealing my smoothie one second, bringing me flowers the next.
Apparently we snuggled a lot in April.
One run the sun turned my pathway gold.
Two heads (Jay and Rose) in front of two computer screens, playing Minecraft.
I bought an out-of-print D. E. Stevenson book and it was falling apart, so I decided to try my hand at book binding.
I scraped off all of the crusty old old glue, removed the cover, stacked the pages back together, and smeared the spine in hot glue, quickly smooshing the cover back on top. My methods were not exactly sophisticated, but they held the book together long enough for me to finish reading it! (as long as I didn't open it too far)
Not too bad!
It fell open easily with my patchy binding.
Come on, Amazon--convert more of D. E. Stevenson's Scottish gems into Kindle books! (and stop charging $10 for the ones you have added to Kindle!)
One word: Reese's! I texted this picture to my friend in response to her comment that she was hiding in the laundry room eating whipped cream on strawberries or some such decadent snack, so her kids wouldn't find her and beg for the treat. I have developed a very refined neat-fingered method of unwrapping the foil on a Reese's so it is as inaudible as possible. Mom hacks.
More FOOD: during April I actually managed to gain a few pounds back after my winter of emaciating sicknesses, and it was all probably due to treats rather than healthy stuff. I don't think I am capable of gaining weight while ONLY eating healthy foods. It is so nice to be back up to my regular weight because I have more energy and I feel better all around. One night at dinner, I sighed to myself and said "I wish I was eating a hot cookie with ice cream on top." I was mostly saying what I'd rather be eating, not trying to persuade anyone to make me cookies, but Jeff promptly got up and mixed a bowl of cookie dough. We had hot cookies and ice cream within half an hour of those words escaping my lips. Jeff is truly a winner, both for making the cookies (he makes cookies better than me), and for enduring my commemorative selfie.
I MOPPED ALL OF THE HARD FLOORS. One morning I woke up with the urge to mop. Since this urge usually only comes once a year, I acted on it and mopped my heart out, dumping out two disgustingly black silty buckets of water along the way. Even a dark basement and its weird vintage linoleum deserves to be clean!
I even mopped the cement section of the basement floor for good measure. Don't those storage shelves look so zen-organized?
A beautiful sky on my run one afternoon.
Role reversal after a run one day.
Cute Amby, slowly trying to eat an ibuprofen-spiked smoothie back during her tonsillectomy recovery. I'm so glad that's over! Could we please get through potty training in seven days or less and then be all done too?? Amber says: yeah right!
More tonsillectomy recovery pictures: Wub, Mommy, and water bottle--the necessities. Amber was so pathetic and clingy! She cracked a half-smile when I let her push the selfie button.
Jumping forward two weeks: at piano lessons, Amber was living the life, sitting in the front seat with her pink boots, homemade necklace, kids' French app, "cheesy-wheezies" for snack, and don't forget that sparkly golden crown! Before I handed over the snack, Amber held her stomach and said "my tummy hurts. I need cheesy-wheezies make it feel better." (she calls Cheezits cheesy-wheezies--I don't know where she got the idea for that, but I love it!) Later she coughed and said "es-cuse me" in her cute little inflected voice.
In the past two weeks, Jay has finally gotten comfortable enough to invite the neighbor kids over. We have two neighbors with boys close to his age on one side of our house, and one Saturday afternoon they decided to play army men on the vintage basement linoleum. What decade is this again? After Amber stormed the scene and trampled all of the army men, the boys trooped upstairs and convinced Jeff to let them play on his virtual reality headset. Generational whiplash, anyone?
Sunday, April 29th we went for a family walk in the mellow sunny evening right before the kids' bedtime. Everyone ran everywhere while Jeff and I ambled along hand in hand. It was a lovely end to a glorious weekend. I wrote this in my journal:
No track meet for the first Saturday in forever! Jeff was HOME all day today and it was bliss. We sat together on the couch and talked a lot. We talked so much that I didn't feel like sitting down to write anything this afternoon. It was so nice to have time to just BE with my husband. He's my best friend and partner and true love! It is the best to feel this lucky that I got to spend all day at home with him. We didn't sit around together all day; I finished reading a book and also ran 10 miles this morning. He ran too, and helped Jay and his friends play on the VR headset. But back and forth during it all, we kept finding each other and hugging and enjoying the luxury of leisurely at-home nearness.
This morning I left on my run from Sunnyside to Grandview around 7:15am, and within half a mile I was too hot in my long sleeves. It was chilly but the sun was shining much more warmly than I expected. So I voice to texted Jeff and asked him to bring me a tank top on his way to Grandview (he was taking the kids to the traditional Saturday morning Grampa Dan pancakes). He pulled up and parked ahead of me 15 minutes later, got out of the van, and held my tank top out like he was helping a little kid get dressed. While jogging, I peeled off my long sleeve shirt and dove into the tank top that Jeff was holding. It was awesome! I got my visor a tad tangled in the tank top, but we sorted it quickly and after handing off my long sleeves to Jeff, I was on my way again within 20 seconds. Jeff is the best! When I arrived in Grandview, I realized that my tank top was on inside out. Haha!
Sunday, April 29, 2018
I don't want this weekend to end! This weekend was a beautiful calm oasis between two storms: last week Jeff was away late at two track meets in a row, and this coming week he has two nights of parent teacher conferences. But we charged up on so much quality peaceful together time this weekend, we may just survive. We spent so much time sitting on the couch together talking and discussions possibilities. I love dreaming with my husband!
Amber running between the dirt and the sky.
Throwing one last rock into the canal before bedtime.
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