The (dreaded) sound of silence

I think every mom craves silence and yet, at the same time, knows that silence can be very dangerous. This dichotomy in my home is most apparent with Eliza. Nothing is better than the days when she actually naps, aka silence without fear. On the other hand, when she's awake, I have learned to beware the silence. Because too often I find something like this:

Looks innocent enough, right? But a closer inspection reveals the truth.

On the other hand, if Sage is left alone for a half an hour or so, I often find she has arranged things in interesting ways. Here are just a few such "projects" I snapped pictures of.

Plastic spoons dressed in Polly Pocket clothing

A beanie baby strapped to a ballet slipper

A leopard getting a bite to eat. Of eggs.

Two dogs with puzzle pieces on their tails

A dog clipped into a two-ring binder.

Lily enjoying a neck pillow

The little old carebear that lived in a shoe

A leopard taking a nap

The entire leopard is stuffed in one of Sage's socks (Trust me, this took a while.)

Princess wearing...something

Leopard taking a nap in his ziploc sleeping bag, with a puzzle pillow

A sleepover

Belle's new do

These reptiles are getting a drink from two straws


Sorting, sorting, sorting

How can two kids be so different?

Lap of luxury

We moved into our new house last weekend and now we are living in the lap of luxury. At least that's how I feel every time I use my GARAGE DOOR OPENER!!! Never mind that right now I'm sitting next to a chain smoker at the library computer, borrowing the internet for now so I can post enthusiastically that I LOVE HAVING A GARAGE!!! (Can you believe they don't even include that in the square footage of a house? Hello?!?)

As for Mark, I think he'll agree that we are living the high life just as soon as we locate our towels and get up a shower curtain.

Lily loves the four full-length mirror-closets where she can dance and play and wave to her newfound "twin."

Eliza and Sage go out each day on treasure hunts in the expanse some people call a backyard and found balls (6) and old receipts and a squirrel statue with a broken ear and they pick grape tomatoes and grapes and line them up in their "clubhouse" (our empty shed...no lawnmower yet).

The only treasures I harvested today were 94 spaghetti squashes that the sellers left behind. Perhaps it's the new zucchini here in Utah. Except I've never heard of spaghetti squash bread or cake. But I did unpack all my bread tins, and my heart did a little leap of joy. Maybe it's time to see if zucchini and spaghetti squash really are cousins.

Speaking of spaghetti, Sage came home from kindergarten with a detailed narrative about one of the rules her teacher outlined for the class. No noodle sleeves. It took me a while to realize Sage was talking about "spaghetti straps."

That's all for now. I can't take the thirdhand smoke fumes any longer. Back to the lap of luxury. Where Mark and I play music at 10pm at night just because we can, and we encourage the kids to jump off the couch again and again, and where we head downstairs every couple of hours to make sure the garage door opener is still working. Just because we can.

Packing shmacking

This weekend is our big move. Our ninth move in seven years. How is the packing going, you ask? Well, I'm blogging. So obviously, it's not going very well.

I've lost my best roll of packing tape already. (Either packed into a box on accident or hiding in a Dora backpack with my cell phone and other things Eliza likes to cart away while I'm not looking.)

Sage has been relatively helpful. She is currently on a mission to earn quarters to buy fancy pencils at the pencil machine at her school. She will do anything to earn a quarter, including pack a box. Unfortunately, she feels that two minutes of haphazardly dumping things into a box deserves at least a quarter. Haggling over her wages has proven to be a major liability in my productivity. Plus, how do you pay tithing on a quarter? By having mom up the payout to twenty-eight cents, so three cents can go to tithing, leaving a full quarter for that stupid 5 cent pencil from China? No wonder I have only packed four boxes. (Half of which I have opened to get something out of them later.)

Sage has also been making labels for the boxes. The problem is we have discovered that small post it notes are not conducive to big words written in large, wobbly letters.
Take, our "kitchen" tag, for example.



Lily has been relatively helpful in the packing process. She has spent several hours crawling around and peering in boxes and sucking on their corners and shaking them to test their sturdiness--or just to sharpen her teeth. (Better that than sucking on the spaghetti sauce mix and butter package in the shopping cart earlier this week.) Who needs Baby Einstein when you've got your own personal jungle gym of boxes?!?

The (only?) good thing about this being our 9th move is that we have learned to save our boxes, and most of the boxes still have labels on them. So by reading the labels on the empty box, I know that although it seems improbable, I will be able to squeeze my wok, my crockpot and half of my tupperware collection into the "Eggs" box.

I've decided that my next packing project (other than banning myself from blogging) should be to take down all my decorations. Then maybe it will dawn on me that instead of preparing baked goods for neighbors I should be preparing baking dishes to be trucked to a new neighborhood. Or instead of planning the menu for the "thank you" meal I provide my mover friends, I should pack so they actually have some boxes to move. I had an emotional battle this morning when Sage plopped all my bread tins in a box. I haven't taken them out yet, but I did label them on the outside, just in case. It's an illness, I think.

I need to remember that this is not spring cleaning time, but rather fall cramming. Maybe I can award myself a quarter per box I pack. To be donated to our mortgage fund.

I hate moving.

But I LOVE new houses!!!! The edible and inedible kind.