Random stuff

Here are a few recent tidbits:

Stay-cation: With money being tight for everybody, I think a lot of people are taking days off and just staying home. That's what Jeff and I did. We usually take our anniversary week off to go on a trip. This year, we took the week off and stayed put. We spent one afternoon going out for a nice lunch and catching a movie. But mostly, we just did stuff around the house.

We felt a little bit guilty about this, but we still sent Biscuit to day care every day. We thought about keeping him home with us, but there's no way we could've done the stuff around the house if he had been here. We needed to paint the kitchen, clean out a couple of closets, do some yard work and other such chores. Could you imagine if Biscuit was home when we were attempting to do any of those things?!?

Nice painting: It took me almost 8 years, but I finally got my kitchen painted. It was white above the chair rail with a stenciled border. Below the chair rail was BRIGHT golden yellow. Now, it's Haze on top and Cup of Cocoa on the bottom. In layman's terms, that would be tan on top and darker tan on the bottom!

When Biscuit walked into the kitchen after my first day of painting, he looked around trying to figure out what was going on. First of all, the kitchen was a disaster area. The table was shoved against the counter. My cookbook bookcase was in the dining room, and all my cookbooks were stacked on the table. Oh yeah, and the walls were a different color than when he'd left that morning.

"What you doing, Mom?" he asked.

"I'm painting the kitchen. The walls were yellow and white, but I made them tan," I explained to him.

"No, Mom. Walls not tan. Walls brown. Walls cafe," he said. Cafe is brown in Spanish. I thanked Biscuit for the compliment and decided that I wasn't up to argue about colors with a 2-year-old.

And do you know that at least every couple of days, Biscuit will walk into the kitchen, look around and say, "Nice painting, Mom. You did nice painting."

No costumes: Biscuit is completely enamored with emergency vehicles and personnel. He loves police cars and police mans, fire trucks and fire mans and amublances and, you guessed it, ambulance mans. So I thought it might be fun to get him some emergency worker hats or costumes to play with.

I went to the store, and there was a whole aisle of princess costumes, nurse outfits, ballerina tutus and more. How many costumes do you think they had for little boys? None! I found some online, but that's no fun. I wanted to let him pick out what he wanted in person, not on a computer screen. We do have a really good toy store here in town that has non-battery-operated toys. It's a little pricey, though, so I'll have to do a recon mission to check it out before I take the boy in there and let him get all excited.