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As usual, I post least when I’m most busy. So what’s been going on since the day after I made Pain l’Ancienne)?\par
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Well, there was Easter: We went to my inlaws for a big dinner after church, actually skipping the Agape feast that we normally eat every Sunday after church. A good time was had by all, I believe. All the food was excellent, my bread was well-received, although not as good on the second day as it was on the first, and the boys got a 3-month supply of candy from their Easter baskets and easter-egg hunt at Grandma’s. We had gone to our local Easter Egg Hunt at the park on Saturday morning, so they added their huge stash of chocolate candy from Grandma’s to their already large stash of mostly sugar candy from the local hunt. They’re still working on eating all that stuff. Oddly enough, Ezra really doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth. He bought himself a candy-bar last week.. and still hasn’t finished it. I keep suggesting he eat it, but he doesn’t seem enthused, although he still takes pride in having bought it!\par
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The big projects for last week were; potty training, researching how to clean the carpet in our minivan (currently residing in our storeroom), finding out about dusting the fake plants at church (a chore signed up for last summer and just now discovered to be more complicated and labor intensive than the word “dusting” usually implies!), and then making the necessary calls and appeals to the appropriate authorities so as to actually borrow the church’s carpet steam cleaner. I picked up the carpet cleaner on Friday, and bought the soap for it, and since they I feel like I’ve been carpet cleaning like mad! On Saturday I cleaned the car carpet (on my hands and knees with the appropriate attachment) and made church food. Sunday we went to church and then to the Wilson’s for a gathering in honor of a friend who married and moved to Canada and was visiting for the first time with her new baby. That was actually a fairly relaxing day, as Sundays go. Monday I did all the laundry (got it through the machines, not folded) and did a water-rinse on the car carpet, to pick up more soap and dirt, and steam cleaned the upstairs hallway carpet and a few other areas. Tuesday I folded all the laundry..\’c3\’82\’c2\~ and steam cleaned the basement hallway and TV room, then did a water-rinse on the upstairs hallway for good measure.\par
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You may ask why a woman, 34 weeks pregnant,\’c3\’82\’c2\~who can no longer see her toes, and finds rolling over in bed a bit of a tricky proposition is cleaning carpets? I was wondering about that over and over again while I was doing it. The truth is, that it was because I borrowed the carpet cleaner. Even though I borrowed it for a job that was more like 4 feet by 10 feet, I felt compelled to do so much more due to the fact that I now have the carpet cleaner, but soon won’t. Naturally, as I used it, I thought how I could do it much more gradually if I had my own carpet cleaner, but I finally realized that it was the necessity of imminent return of the carpet cleaner to it’s owner that is motivating me to do it at all. So apparently, the secret for me to actually clean my carpets is to borrow a carpet cleaner. Maybe I should do that once a year?\par
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Potty training is not going particularly well. I have finally settled down to a routine of constant vigilance: setting the timer for every 30 minutes and sending the child to the potty. I bought a fruit-roll-up, (a treat I reserve only for especially high rewards due to it’s child-appeal: i.e. it’s size and it’s remarkably shiny wrapper) and explained to Ezra that it\’c3\’82\’c2\~shall only be granted to he who poops in the potty without first going in his underwear. Even that apparently is not a strong enough enducement, although he loves to look at his future reward and talk about how he’s going to earn it. Twice today he’s passed up opportunities to gain the prize, and I have found him sitting still with a guilty look on his face… For apparatus, I’m using size 4 underwear and plastic pants newly received from my mother-in-law. Those plastic pants aren’t completely leakproof, but they’re almost completely leak proof and have saved me a lot of misery and allowed me to let Ezra get off the hard floor in between potty trips. That’s good, because with all of the ants on the hard floor, I’d hate to relegate someone to staying in the kitchen/dining room all the time…\par
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Today my plan was to make a meal and go and share it with a friend newly blessed with a baby girl, but little Ezra has a pretty snotty nose, and we were not desirous of sharing that particular blessing with said little girl, so we stayed home and will bring the meal on Sunday. (the family lives on the opposite side of our metropolitan area, at least 45 minutes away, which is why I can’t just drop it off anyway, and return to\’c3\’82\’c2\~our home for dinner)\par
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Michael is slammed at work – as is usual for the last two weeks of tax season. He was going to take advantage of us being gone at my friend’s tonight for him to work late, guilt-free, but of course, now he’s just going to work late. Last night, though,\’c3\’82\’c2\~he came home at the “usual time” (7:00)\’c3\’82\’c2\~but the kids and I had already eaten, so we all went to the park!\’c3\’82\’c2\~A newly procured plastic whiffle ball and bat provided a lot more entertainment than anticipated: surprisingly Ezra was much more into it than Judah. And a two-year-old with a baseball bat prepared to swing is a pretty cute spectacle, I have to say!\par
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I’m going out of town next week to spend one more new-born free week with my folks, and to give Michael opportunity to work as many waking minutes as he possibly can without feeling bad about not seeing his family, since we won’t be there. I’m really, really\’c3\’82\’c2\~looking forward to my trip, and was almost worried that Michael wouldn’t be busy enough to justify it, but it looks like my fears were ungrounded. Sunny, warm, dry Richland, WA, here we come!