New table and sick again…

well, little Finn is sick – poor sicky.  This picture doesn’t quite show how miserable he looks but he was running a temp of 103 and had big red circles under his eyes.  Of course, it barely slowed him down.  Today he has been doing better, although he still has a nasty cough – a symptom he always seems to get with any cold.  boo.

Better news, we got our new table!  Love it!  I will definitely have to keep on top of it because it is black so it shows every smudge and fingerprint (when will I learn this?) but I love it anyway!

I wanted to make some black & white toile placemats which would look awesome (see my previous post about Walmart), but couldn’t find the toile I wanted, so I may do something else like find some cool scrapbooking paper and laminate it or something fun like that. 

My only issue right now is with the bench.  I really, really like the bench.  It is basically what sold me on the whole thing when I first saw it, but I’m not sure if we’ll keep it or not.  Don’t know if you can tell from the pictures, but in our opinion, they made the bench an inch too tall and an inch too wide.  It does not fit under or in between.  Kinda dumb.  So, you can’t push it in all the way, and it’s hard to get into – especially for the kids.  I was thinking we could use it as a decorative piece somewhere else in the house and then bring it to the table when grandparents are here (another original idea why I loved the table), but I don’t really have anywhere to put it.  So we are debating.  I like it a lot, but we may end up returning it and just getting 2 more chairs.  Sad, but it may be what needs to happen.  We will try it for another day or two and see what happens. 

I Hate Wal*Mart

Exhibit A:

I tried to sneak in with my return. I HATE returning things to Walmart because they make it such a pain in the ass. I am sure they do this to make people avoid returns. I am also sure it works. So anyway, I am like shoplifting in reverse – trying to sneak an item back IN to the store, but the old man catches me and says loudly “RETURN??”. “Yep,” I say and sadly bring him my item. Of course I am in a hurry and of course he is in anything BUT. So, he gets his scanner gun and tried to scan it, once, looks at it, twice, looks at it, thrice, looks at it, puts it down, studies his scanner, hits a few keys, picks it back up, scans it, looks at it… this goes on for about 4 more minutes. Then he finally takes some pre-printed return tags out of his smock, slaps one on there and hands it back to me and says “Here you go, this thing hasn’t been working all day.” Well, THANK YOU ancient Walmart employee then, for taking the time to prove that - both to me and to yourself, oh and wasting 8 minutes of my life in the process.

Exhibit B:

I found the best black & white toile fabric at Walmart. And now they no longer carry it. (This is also a curse I have, where I find something I love and then it ceases to exist – and I’m not talking about a few things here, I’m talking dozens and dozens, to the point where now if I find something I like, it makes Cody nervous because we both know that pretty soon it will go poof! and disappear.) So I go to the fabric dept. and there are three employees and no customers and they stand there talking to each other ignoring me until I finally say, “excuse me does one of you work here?” So, I tell them my plight and they look at me dumbly and then say well have you tried joanns? yes. have you tried hancocks? yes. have you tried the internet? yes. another time-wasting round of questions and suggestions, like “well I would try Hancock Fabrics because I know they have a lot of toile. That’s what this is called, ‘toile’ ” Thank you. Thank you so very much. Because I didn’t just say I already tried there and I didn’t know it was called ‘toile’. So they can’t give me any information whatsoever about who made it, etc. Another 10 minutes wasted.

Exhibit C:

Go to the return counter to return item from Exhibit A. The girl with zero personality acts like I am ruining her day by bringing her a return (apparently because I was so determined to actually cross the geriatric defense line and actually MAKE a return) and grumpily asks me “well, what was wrong with it?” I should have said “I bought it at Walmart.”

couple things…

So, first off, I got a new cookbook today.  I have a hard time with cookbooks for some reason.  They may look great, or have great ideas, but for some reason when I flip through the recipes, I am just not interested to try any of them.  I got a couple from the library the other day and same story.  One was about cooking and freezing your meals for a month and it’s a superb idea, but none of the recipes interested me.  Well… this book is different.  Its basic premise is to make a bunch of vegetable purees and discreetly add them into most of your foods you make for your kids.  Genius.  Although, I can’t give Mrs. Seinfeld all the credit, my mom has told me about this for years, I guess I just needed it spelled out and sitting in front of me in book form.  When I told her about this book, she said something like, “I’ve been doing that for 35 years!!  I should have written a book and made millions!”  To which my dad replied, “yeah, but you’re not married to Jerry Seinfeld so you probably wouldn’t have made millions.”  Ha, my parents crack me up.

Not to deflate Jessica Seinfeld of her fantastic ideas or well deserved kudos, but I do wonder if she would have sold so many books if she was Jessica Smith?  No matter.  The point is, I have gone through this book and have marked about 75% of the recipes to try and went to target and bought about $100 worth of produce.  So I am excited about it.  I guess somehow it hits close to home, so thanks mom for the brilliant idea, and thanks Mrs. Seinfeld for putting it all down on paper.

 

In other news, Burgundy is a big girl, officially.  First she is potty-trained and now she has the guard rail off her crib.  WE tried it for the first night last night and she did great.  Her bed is her respite and so I have been wanting to do something like this for a while.  Whenever she is sad she says “go to bed” with a pout, and wants to be put in her bed to calm down.  I have been looking for a way to let her go there without needing help in and out every time.  Voila!

 

Had to put this on here, Finn took this picture and it is possibly the greatest picture I’ve ever seen.  One day he may be a famous photographer, because he really does have an eye for it.  Luckily, I have all of his great photos saved so when he IS famous, he can make a coffee table books about his first experiences with a camera.

 

And lastly, here' is a modified idea I got from one of the little girl hair blogs I frequent.  Heart Hair!  For Valentine’s Day! 

(I can hear Cody making a joke something about having a “heart on” but I won’t)