Sneak Peek

Our weekend ate our brains and replaced us with sleep-walking zombies. But we had fun while it was happening!

Amy Fowler Brandt took the bus up from NYC on Friday night to hang out with her midget fan club for a few days. Maggie was a bit jittery all weekend from the joy of having Auntie Amy to play with and boss around. She even let Amy do her hair! Mike and I stayed up way past our bedtime both nights, but there's always so much to talk about.

On Saturday, Mike took Maggie and Amy over to Medfid to see the house, and lo and behold they stumbled on an estate sale there! Our house was open to the public! Amy went in and browsed around while Mike took Maggie on a tour of the neighborhood - he was a bit worried that if Maxine (the seller) was there she might recognize him and think it odd that he was snooping around. Later, Amy and I went back so I could rummage around in the house too. It was so exciting to be back in the house because I haven't seen it since the open house we went to on the first day! I missed the inspection to take care of the girls, so it's been over a month now. We went in the basement and the attic. We opened all the closet doors and inspected the bathrooms. The place looks like crap! Ha! We talked later about how, at the open house, we were totally focused on the bones of the house - the floor plan, the state of the heating and electricity and so forth, the levelness of the floors, the size of the yard. Well on Saturday, I got a chance to really LOOK at the surfaces and I gotta say...EVERYTHING MUST GO! I'm just itching and twitching with impatience to paint that sucker and scour it with bleach from top to bottom! I won't be able to fully rest until the basement carpet is out on its ear and the toilets are scrubbed to within an inch of their lives. In my mania, I may even find the superhuman strength required to scrape all the exterior paint myself. Call me neurotic.

We proceeded to Target and Home Depot the very next day to purchase our 5 gallon drum of Polar Bear white paint and a cartload of new cleaning supplies. We felt much better as soon as we had our nuclear grade weapons arsenal firmly in hand. Now all I need is one of those thingies that steams wallpaper off and about 6 pots of coffee and you won't even recognize me anymore!

It's gonna be great! It's gonna be horrible! It's gonna be great.

Anyway, later Sunday night, Mike decided to take the crib apart to move it into our room. Kate is growing out of the pack 'n play completely, but she's still not sleeping through the night often enough to move her into Maggie's room, especially now with the teething fiasco. They are both such light sleepers I only hope they will ever be able to share a room without making each other miserable. Plus Maggie hasn't responded too charitably to the idea of Kate taking naps in "her" room. So Maggie was helping Mike with the tape measure and the wrench and the bolts when it suddenly dawned on her what he was actually going to do. Then the sobbing started. She said, "What did I ever do?" and "All of my stuff is missing!" over and over while the tears rolled down. I sat and talked to her about the reasons we were moving the crib and then suggested we fix up her room all pretty. She was OK with that, so we mostly just cleaned up and moved some of the furniture around. Then we made a reading nook next to her book shelf out of her heavy winter comforter and our extra pillows. She loves it!! That turned the whole evening around, and she is in fact having her nap time/quiet time there right now. She may not actually be asleep there, but I haven't heard a peep out of her - that's better than most days. Yay for creative problem solving! Another crisis averted.

Pictures will follow, I promise.