Lots to Say

Dude. I have a lot to catch up on. I'll try not to bore you to tears, but there are things I must say.

First up, I got a new cell phone. It's been about a week now, and I'm having such fun with it. I can actually TEXT now. Dan says I'm too old to text. But I do find it much easier than getting into a 10 minute conversation when I just need to know one little thing. The phone is new (and pretty rockin' cool), and we also changed to AT&T. We are bundling everything under U-verse, which is being installed this coming week. So that has caused Dan and I to be complete couch potatoes this week and sit every evening on the couch while we try to clean all the shows off our Tivo. Because once U-verse is installed, we lose all our saved shows.

The evenings have been full of TV time and the mornings have been full of some serious purging. I have been RUTHLESS in throwing out junk from our house. It started with the craft room, and then spread to almost every other room in the house. (It even spread a bit to the blog! You may have noticed a little change with my blog banner.) I have cleaned out junk drawers, barbecue tools, candles, dived into hidden cabinets, vacuumed in hard-to-reach places, purged the mantel, and finally bagged up all the baby bibs that are no longer a part of our lives. I feel so incredibly happy about all of this purging. It is awesome! And now my friend and I are planning a garage sale for September.

Katie and I are getting used to having a space to do crafts. On Wednesday, I pulled out a new treat to share with her. I've been saving it for at least three years, when I saw it at Goodwill and snatched it up. It is a set of Fashion Plates, just like I used to play with back in the '80s. And I also pulled out a set of Barbie fashion plates that I found in a resale shop a while back too. Katie LOVED playing with them and has already had her friend Sammi over to use them. My heart was so happy, showing her something from my childhood and seeing her have the same kind of joy in it that I used to.

And something else pretty awesome happened this week. I wrote this post back in November, and was asked permission so it can be used on a Daily Guideposts sister website. I was beyond thrilled about this. The link won't be ready until September 3, but I will make sure to post it that day so you can check it out.

We enrolled Katie in a gymnastics class and it started last Monday. The smile on her face was brilliant as she climbed up on the balance beam and got started in her lessons. Now I have to figure out how to entertain Jackson during the 75 minute class. He wanted to bleacher dive while we waited. Uh... no.

Yesterday, most of my half marathon team got together and did our dress rehearsal for race day. We wore all our gear, drank water only at designated intervals (where the water stations will be on the race route), and did the entire 13.1 miles in three hours and 45 minutes. I am sore today, but proud of myself and my team. I'm glad that we proved to ourselves that we actually CAN do this.

So, there's a recap of our life the last week or so. I know it isn't very glamorous, but it's kept us pretty busy.