Tomorrow I'm Looking Forward To:

-Sleeping in, and not feeling bad about it.

-Getting the laundry caught up, because I slept in, and now have a lot of energy!

-Celebrating Christian's birthday. 

-Taking more pictures with our camera.

If those things happen, then I will consider it a good day.  If I can also clean Eliana's room, straighten Michaela's room, swipe the bathrooms, get the kitchen in order, get our tree out of the house, vacuum the carpets/rugs, and exercise then I will consider it a day like no other (i.e. when the Lord stopped the sun for Joshua) (read:  a miracle of a day).  

I think I ought to add  -shower to the above list.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

By the Book

Michaela's true love is reading a book.  She can always be found with a book (or three) in her hands.  She may be reading one, and holding a couple in her lap.  She often has several going at once.  I love this about her...I was much the same way.  She has read millions of words, hundreds of stories (many more than once). 

She surrounds herself with entire worlds kept secret until pages are held back and doors are slowly pushed open.  Even when she is asleep.

I am submitting this photo to the I Heart Faces "By the Book" challenge this week...how could I not, when I have a girl who has such a love affair with books?

Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

Christian likes to pretend that he doesn't like for me to take his picture.

The more accurate thing to say is that he likes for me to take his picture on his own terms.

So, if I can get a shot of him smiling, or laughing his contagious, inexplainable, awesome laugh?

Even if it's after antics galore

Well, I'm not looking that gift horse in the mouth.

Or bottom.  However the saying goes.

Seriously.  You have to hear him laugh. 

"I've Got to Learn How to Be Strong Again..."

I have felt gross all night.  The irony lies in the fact that I made grilled cheese sandwiches with honey wheat bread and havarti, and served it with chicken noodle soup.  (You may be wondering why this is an ironic juxtaposition of facts, but if you knew what I've been serving for dinner it would make a great deal of sense.) Now, the soup was from a can, but it was the elite chicken noodle soup.  Not the wimpy chicken noodle soup.  It was all very tasty, and I thought,"At least there are carrots and celery in the soup!  Vegetables!"  I don't know why I feel so yucky, except for the days upon days (read:  months) (okay, read:  years) of horrible eating of which I am profoundly guilty.  

Now.  I know that I am not overweight in any dramatic sense of the word, however I have gained a significant amount in the last two and a half years, so that pants that I could wear a year after my third child was born, I can no longer pull up past my thighs.  While I am not happy about this gain because it is expensive to buy all new pants out of necessity, I am also seriously uncomfortable with how I feel.  And I don't mean how I feel emotionally (That is a whole separate blog post.  Maybe even blog.), but how I physically feel.  I feel bad, like my body hurts.  Especially around my middle.

This kind of frightens me.  

I was lying down with Eliana tonight, as I do in order to get her to sleep (and I won't lie, I enjoy resting for a few minutes before tackling the other things I have to do each night) and my legs kept twitching.  I thought,"I have Restless Legs Syndrome!" which may or may not be true, but I do not doubt that were I to exercise each day, walk around the block, get on our spin bike, go up and down the stairs twenty times in a row (wait, that might make me pass out...walking sounds good), my legs might be more inclined to lie still rather than jump around like so many fish on the deck of a boat, trying to get back into a place where they can live and breathe.

Hey!  That ended up being a pretty good analogy.  I did originally write "dock of a boat"...I'm relieved I caught that because what a ridiculous mistake that would have been to make.  Can a boat have a dock?  Maybe it can.  At any rate, my legs are unruly.  I know I need to exercise.  And eat more salad.

What is the point of this post?  I don't know exactly, because I don't make resolutions.  I mainly want to say I will start exercising, but I'm a little scared to say that because then I have to do it.  I would really like someone to exercise with me, but I have tried finding someone and didn't get anywhere with that.  So, I think I might be on my own.

("once again now.

One more time,

By myself.")

I'm just going to have to do it.  Because I have got to start feeling better.  I don't like this at all.

Does anyone else add song lyrics to their thoughts frequently?  Or song titles?  Like a running musical commentary on my own stream-of consciousness.  Or is that just me?  

According to Plan...Or Not

So, my plan was to clean my house from top to bottom (Or bottom to top...I didn't know where I would start. Maybe in the middle; we have a split level house.) today and I got pretty far along towards that goal.  By pretty far, I mean I cleaned up our entry way.  Which we treat like a mud room, except it is NOT a mud room, which is hidden.  There was a narrow path that one could walk but along the sides of the entry (which is shaped like a six-sided polygon, but not a regular hexagon.  Don't pay much attention to me.  I learned some stuff helping Christian with his math this week.) there was no space to be found.  Not even in front of the closet.  There was a suitcase there.  A suitcase!  What a splendid place to keep a suitcase...in front of the closet!  

I got the suitcase fully unpacked, and put away.  I was able to open the closet and put a lot of shoes away. Can you imagine?  Opening the closet!  I put away more shoes, and some more shoes, and then some more shoes after that. We have a lot of shoes.  You'd think we were big-time walkers, among other things.

Am I not funny?  You know you're laughing, even if you're making fun of me.

I swept the area and mopped it too.  And now I don't feel like dying a million times whenever someone rings our doorbell.

Although, I did get freaked out the other day by a sweet man that works at our church who told me about some burglaries that were occurring because people were knocking on doors in the middle of the day, posing as such-and-such and whoever, so that elderly people would open up and let them in.  I am not likely to open the door for anyone ever again, unless you are FedEx or UPS with a van that I can see in plain sight.  In fact, the doorbell did ring this afternoon, and I could see that it was a hail-repair guy, but I did not answer the door because what if he were really some weirdo in disguise, and besides I was watching MLB and they had all my attention what with the Texas Rangers signing Yu Darvish.  Finally.

What was I talking about?

My plan!  I did not get a single rug vacuumed.  I was sad about that.  I did do a mighty amount of laundry. Now my wash pile is down to two heaping baskets (heaping?  It sounds like I'm baking.) and a smallish mountain next to the baskets in the laundry room.  Oh, and also a pile in our bathroom that I have been avoiding.  I don't like our bathroom anymore.  I know that one day soon I am going to have to overcome this phobia of my own bathroom.  Aargh!  I also just remembered that there is a very large quantity of dirty clothes in the kids' bathroom that I have not dealt with ever since the girls' puke fest this weekend.  Don't worry. There are no pukey clothes in there, but I kind of feel like the whole bathroom needs to be hazmat-treated, and I was hoping to get my regular (read:  what is already in the laundry room) pile down before I bring these other things back to wash.

Now that I'm on a roll what with blogging again I just can't stop typing.  I have all kinds of things to say.  And one of them is that every now and then as I type and the line runs to the end and moves automatically to the next line, there is an extra space at the beginning of the new line.  Why is it doing this?  This is very strange and has never happened.  I am trying to figure out the method to my computer's madness.  Or maybe it is Squarespace madness.  I don't know.  I'll keep you posted.

There I go being funny again.  Bloggers post, you know.  Post haste.

I suppose tomorrow is a new day and today was progress.  That is how I shall look at it.  I am also going to try to take more pictures, because if you read (that is past tense "read") all the way to the end of this post without having a single image to break up all the nonsense, then you deserve an award.  

I know I seem extra chatty, and a little bit like I'm on amphetamines mixed with a Mountain Dew and a box of Swiss Cake Rolls.  There is a reason.  Can you guess why?  If you do, then you should get an award for that too.  But I am not PW and cannot afford giveaways, therefore you will have to be content with the satisfaction that you are super intelligent.  I could let all my friends know how smart you are by posting it on Facebook.   

I never did figure out why there is this extra space at the beginning of some of my lines.  I am curious to see if it appears even when the post is published.  We shall see.  

-Edited to add:  It totally appears when published.  So.  Weird.