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| The cat finds creative places to get warm and simultaneously gives me an excuse not to fold clothes. |
Update (3:40pm): I published this post a few minutes before I heard about the blasts at the Boston Marathon. From what we can see on the news, they still are not sure what the explosions were, but since I can’t get my phone to work right now to reply to the text messages I’m getting, I’ll say it here that we are at home safe, watching the news to find out more.
I love three-day weekends. We are having one right now because of a Massachusetts holiday known as Patriots’ Day, which commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War. My favorite part about the holiday is that they also run the Boston Marathon today, so there is an air of festivity about the day. This is also the start of “April Vacation” (aka “spring break” everywhere else in the country), so I’m enjoying the relaxed atmosphere in our household.
On Saturday we did pretty much nothing at all. The morning was spent sipping coffee at the dining room table and planning our summer trips while the girls played in a homemade sofa fort in the living room. We’re looking forward to a kidless beach vacation in August. More on that later. Charlie had a fever all day, so much of the day was spent snuggling with her and reading my book. I didn’t mind the excuse to slow down, and she’s a trooper when sick. She just wants to cuddle but makes very few other demands of me. Every now and then she’d say in her cute toddler voice “Mommy, I gots a temper-sure. I need some mee-sin.”
After the kids were tucked in, we watched the latest film in the Mission Impossible series, and I have to say I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. It was fast-paced and somewhat cheeky, served with very little cheese, just the way I like it. I have become a big Jeremy Renner fan, so I enjoyed seeing him in two movies in a row (the last being The Avengers, which I also unexpectedly liked). When did Simon Pegg get so skinny?
I began yesterday morning with a cleaning bug, to the point that I sprang out of bed and started scrubbing the toilet before 8am. Nate staggered into the bathroom and looked at me as if I had three heads. With only a quick glance in his direction, I shouted “Clean all the things!” and continued on my merry scrubbing way. I barreled through the rest of my morning with a caffeinated zeal for purging our home of the unwanted things that linger in corners and drawers.
It must have been an infectious bug because before I knew it, Nate was at work doing some spring cleaning of his own. In another of our home organization vignettes, I sometimes I find Nate standing in a room for several minutes, and I know he is silently plotting something. This happened yesterday in the guest room–I interrupt him and asked him what he was thinking, because I am nosy. Then because I am the conceptual thinker, I loved his ideas and want to commence the project immediately. Being the analyst he is, he prefers to consider details from every angle first. Sigh. I left him alone for a while to ponder, attacking a closet in my quest to declutter, and then offered my services of lugging and hauling when he was ready to begin. We got rid of an ugly old dresser and consolidated the girls’ furniture, then swapped out the guest bed for a roomier futon sofa. It looks great!
Later that day I went to afternoon tea with a girlfriend. Tea is one of my favorite and most-missed British traditions that I have gladly continued on occasion since returning to the states. Boston has maintained its tea connection, so you can find many a tea shop that offers afternoon tea in our area. We pigged out for two hours and still had enough to bring home for the kids to sample.
Today we had hopes of seeing the marathon on a pretty spring day, but alas our lengthy winter is plodding forward with high winds and low 40’s. The girls spent their morning sitting in the sunlit upstairs landing, the only warm spot in the house. I hope we’ll get in a bike ride this afternoon while we still have a Daddy day-off. Right now I am sitting on a cozy chair while the kids have their quiet time, eating Haagen Dazs while I pretend not to notice the pile of laundry a few feet away. Now you know everything.
xoxo
~J