wide open spaces

Tabby has been sleeping in a co sleeper in between us in our bed since she was born. It's sort of a mini baby bed that just sits on top of our mattress. The top half has hard sides but the bottom just kind of has netting sides. Well, she decided this week that a fun way to wake me up in the morning (or middle of the night) is to kick her way out of her blanket, scoot down and out the side of the co sleeper a bit, and kick me in the back. Charming. So I decided I was ready to move her to her own bed. Not her own room just yet - she's in a basinette next to our bed - but holy cow, our bed is huge now! Plus the co sleeper seems to have trained Alfred to stay on his own side instead of migrating to the center of the bed at night. Suddenly I have what feels like acres and acres of room at night. It's fabulous. That combined with the fact that I can now sleep through absolutely anything, including Alfred's alarm, means that I've had a couple of really good nights of sleep. I can sleep through anything except for Tabitha, I mean. She makes the tiniest peep and I'm awake. Seriously, she wakes me up by breathing loudly. But she only wakes up once or twice a night, so I'm not complaining at all. I might have to rush to get things done during her 35 minute naps during the day, but girl can sleep at night.

On a completely unrelated note, our house seems to produce massive amounts of dust these days. I used to sweep every couple of days, swiffer once a week or so, and it was fine. Now if I don't swiffer every other day at least there are copious amounts of giant dust bunnies all over the floor. It's disgusting. I don't know if it's because Tabby and I are supremely dirty people or what, but it's kind of disturbing. I just swiffered and am currently enjoying a dust free floor for the next 12 hours or so before it needs it again.

energizer bunnies!

So yeah, another busy weekend and week. Last Saturday was Ellie's first birthday party, as you may have guessed by the picture. They had a keg of beer and a bunch of Easter eggs hidden around the yard with lots of candy inside. So yeah, a good party. Sunday we spent most of the day with Alfred's family. Robyn wasn't feeling well, so we got to learn how to make their traditional Easter ham loaf and tomato pudding. It came out ok. Not quite as good as when she makes it, but ok.

Every night this week has been full, too. Monday night we went over to Lucy and Phil's for leftover beer and barbecue from their party. Tuesday and Wednesday we scrambled to get various chores and cleaning done for this weekend. We did laundry, ironed, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, washed dishes, and cleaned the whole house. We have a big weekend coming up: Mike's on leave, so we're having a big get together! He, Maureene, and Katie are coming for a long weekend, and Tony and Cathy are meeting us in Orlando for the weekend. It's going to be quite a boozy weekend. Expect some drunk posts. We'll be in Epcot for Around the World on Saturday, then a Case Day on Monday, and who knows what else. My liver is trembling in fear!

A clean house is the sign of a boring person

Our house has been kind of disgusting for awhile now. I've been putting off cleaning, since I thought we were moving this weekend and I'd need to clean like a little mofo next week, but our move date has now been pushed back to next weekend and I couldn't take it anymore. So when I got home from work tonight I donned my bleach-marked sweatpants (I'm so bad about getting cleaning stuff on my clothes), fired up my mp3 player, and got to work. I wouldn't call the house clean, exactly, but the bathrooms are at least. And the carpets upstairs are sort of vacuumed. I think our vacuum cleaner is shot. The hose part works fine, but the bottom part that actually vacuums carpets and stuff doesn't appear to work anymore. It doesn't appear to be clogged or anything, it just sucks. Or, more accurately, it does not suck. This is the second vacuum we've gone through in 6 1/2 years. Either we're abnormally rough on our vacuum cleaners, or we need to bite the bullet and splurge for at least the second-least expensive vacuum at Walmart. The point of this story is that I pretended to vacuum the carpets, then went back over them with the hose to at least suck up the noticeable stuff. Which included a cockroach graveyard we unearthed when moving crap out of the office. I'm telling you, we live in filth.

The downstairs is a total disaster area. At least the upstairs is now clean and shows very little evidence of the move, other than the nearly empty office. Downstairs, though, looks like all of our closets and cabinets threw up. And then all the stuff that came out fell in love and made babies. And invited their friends, the cardboard boxes from the garage, over to visit. It's sort of horrific. Oh, and the dishwasher needs to be unloaded, there's a load of laundry in the dryer waiting to be folded, and the kitchen sink needs to be scrubbed. Yet here I sit, listening to "Rock Lobster" and typing. Hell, it's not like that part of the mess is going anywhere.

While cleaning I was musing on one of the little things that I think makes my marriage happier: we thank each other for doing chores around the house. I generally get stuck with most of the inside cleaning, though Alfred vacuums maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the time. He refuses to touch the bathrooms. I do more of the laundry, we split the dishes fairly evenly. He does most of the outside stuff, like mowing the lawn and cleaning branches off the roof. Clearly I think I do more, partially because our lawn gets mowed about twice a year and cleaning the tile in the upstairs shower sucks more than I can say. So when he does stuff around the house, I try to make sure to thank him, and he usually thanks me too. Of course we don't always remember, but I'm definitely very good about reminding him to thank me. Now, I'm only part of one marriage, but I feel like in other relationships chores may just be seen as jobs that need to be done to keep things running smoothly, not anything deserving of thanks every single time they happen. But I could be wrong. So, I pose a question for my cohabiting readers: do you and your significant other thank each other for doing daily chores? I'm quite curious.

I'm so firing my maid

The lazy bitch has seriously been slacking off. I just washed a bunch of dishes that have been sitting in the sink for (let's hope only) 2 days. There's a pile of laundry staring me down from the other end of the couch, waiting to be ironed. There's one item in particular that has been there for at least 2 1/2 weeks. It had company, but they eventually gave up and went back to the closet unironed because I had nothing else clean to wear to work. (Luckily it's been raining for the past 10 days so everything I wore was wet and muddy within minutes of me arriving at work anyway.) The bathrooms haven't been cleaned in weeks on end. The pile of mail is slowly taking over the counter top. BUT - the dishes in the sink are clean! And the laundry we did on Monday is folded, upstairs, and half put away! Someone hasn't gotten around to putting their half away yet. Not naming any names, of course. In case you were wondering, no pictures today. I can admit to this in writing, but photographic evidence is going too far.

Anyway, Alfred just texted me that he's still working and will probably just spend the night up there. I guess that gives me more time to get some crap done. I do still have half of last week's So You Think You Can Dance to watch, so that's some incentive to iron at least. Which reminds me of Katherine (the SYTYCD part, not the ironing part), which reminds me to mention that if anyone else is interested in guest blogging, just let me know. Just email me the post along with any pictures or anything else that needs to be included, and I'll put it up for you. And use it as an excuse to be lazy and not post for a couple of days. I mean, leave your post up longer for more people to see. Yeah, that's it.