Time Flies

The kids spent Sunday with their Nana; they went to see the ballet in Seattle. They reported that it was very short and I can't tell if they were disappointed about that or not, but since they were all really hoping to see Swan Lake (about 3 hours long) again someday, I'm leaning to "mild disappointment." All three kids have a surprising love of the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

In the meantime, B and I went into Gig Harbor and walked around all the shops full of highly breakable items that I never take the kids into. We came home in the afternoon and it was QUIET. Very nice.

On Monday, we loaded ourselves into the van and did a whirlwind tour of IKEA and other area shopping destinations, including stopping by our favorite garden center and letting the kids pick out plants. I stipulated they had to be partial sun and cool-weather hearty. The kids complied and each picked out three flowers and one herb that met the criteria.

I am apparently running at 30/10 (hct/hgb) = anemic, so we stopped on the way home for more iron supplements, steak, and (not at all productive for iron building) ice cream. I ran the grill, only the second time I've done it. The girls were SURE I was gonna fuck things up...I assigned them to watching the steaks, which apparently in their world included moving them around a lot. They informed me the steaks were ready to come off the grill more than a little early, so it's probably a good thing it took me another few minutes to get out there and harvest them. The steaks came out satisfyingly rare.

Side note: yes I'm pregnant and eating rare meat. If you go online (or in most pregnancy books), you'll receive pretty heavy-handed advice along the lines of "rare is not an option during pregnancy." This alarmist POV is based on the idea that all meat is hiding horrible salmonella, listeriosis, and toxoplasmosis infestations. There are times when you need to be cautious and times when it makes sense not to worry so much. My steak, cut and packed on-site, is unlikely to have much of anything horrible on it in the first place, and if it did it would all be on the surface (cows don't walk around with salmonella or listeriosis infesting their muscle tissue=meat, it's spread around during butchering). Giving the surface of a steak a nice sear is going to take care of that quite well. On the other hand, if my meat is ground, I'm generally going to want to make sure it's well cooked all the way. Particularly if I buy it in factory-packed tubes or somesuch. And I do avoid lunch meat, but that's more an issue of the fact that I always avoid it because I don't much care for it.

I've found it interesting that the more I know about the warnings pregnant women are given, the more likely I am to ignore most of them. Particularly idiocy like not eating spinach (and I've seen lists that basically encompass everything you can get fresh from the ground) because it "might contain salmonella." But you can eat all the twinkies you want, right? Nothing scary in those (I've never seen a pregnancy do-not-eat list that includes them)? No BPA in the cans of beans I'm supposed to be eating? Let's not forget all the tuna WIC wanted to give me last time around.

Anyway, back to the recap. On Tuesday, we went to Nana's for piano and guitar, and saw Aunty B off. Then we went home, and the kids carefully potted their plants:



We had our first backyard fire of the season (no pictures). And a very late night when Fran let the kids stay up and watch Blues Brothers again.

Wednesday was GLORIOUS. While BittyPrincess took FOREVER (all morning and then some) to fold and put away her laundry:



The rest of us enjoyed the lovely 70-degrees-and-sunshine weather outside:



And someone came over to fix our shower, which had been leaking into our den. This apparently had been a problem forever, and a plumber that came by last week was absolutely certain that the plumbing wasn't the problem, the shower door was. So yesterday the handyman (who lives nearby and apparently has a daughter that Girliness plays with sometimes) came by, advised that we could probably get by with caulking things up properly, and then our landlady decided we should go ahead and get a new shower door anyway. It turned out to be a good thing she did, because when the handyman took off the old door, we found out that the installation had been seriously fucked up. Instead of cutting down the rails, some idiot had cut the tile AROUND the rail, so water was literally flowing into the wall straight from the shower door rail through that hole...that yes, OMG the stupidity, runs straight into the wallspace. The wall/subfloor/ceiling would absorb only so much before leaking, which was why the problem was intermittent. Our shower isn't put back together because we hit the end of the day without the necessary supplies to replace the tiles. Handyman dude said it would be possible to patch but the patch wouldn't be visible and would be much weaker than the surrounding tile, so we wouldn't know there was a problem until the walls and floors were saturated again (and then those would need to be replaced AGAIN). So the plan is to replace the tiles and then install a shower door the right way. Hopefully today. I want the shower back.

He seemed enthusiastic about our plan to use the shower as the source of our water for our birth. BittyPrincess showed him the pool and everything. We're sure the whole setup will work. At some point I'm going to catalogue the bits and pieces of what is involved in setting up your own birth pool, including expense. Because I think it's interesting.

Anyway, we also did the Y yesterday. And Fran took the kids to Kids Gig in the late afternoon while I made dinner (and admittedly spent some time sitting outside reading and not doing anything productive).

I'm not sure what today holds, except that it is cold and rainy (yay spring?) and BittyPrincess woke up with a seal cough.