I really enjoyed the end of my working day. I drove out to a client’s place to business to collect a nice check for a site that went live today and deposited that while driving my very own loaner 2010 GMC Terrain with my iPhone hooked into it. (The thing has a nice sound system.) On the way home Amanda asked what I wanted for dinner and I told her I thought maybe something with some meat, and she said that she’d been thinking of pancakes, which quickly changed my mind. I did stop at the store and pick up some chicken apple sausage though.
Money and pancakes make a nice way to transition to the evening time.
So yes, I still have the Terrain. I was talking to Baker, my salesman, today, and I told him I really didn’t mind all that much. Oh, I’ll like getting my 2005 Escape back, but it’s just not the same as this Terrain. It’s more of a luxury vehicle while the Escape is more of a truck. I really do want to go ahead and update the stereo before long though.
I think I’ve said this recently, but Milly’s been a lot of fun lately. She’s using her imagination more and more and sings all the time. And it’s not just one song. Off the top of my head I’ve heard her sing Old MacDonald had a Farm, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the alphabet song, You’ve got a Friend in Me and at least one or two Yo Gabba Gabba songs… today.
She’s also been all about the Toy Story movies lately. Maybe we should pick up 3 for her. We never got it before because it was on Netflix for so long, but she was asking about it today or yesterday.
Milly also showed me a new thing she knows how to do, which is to walk from our bed to the stand next to it in order to pull the blinds up and move the locking tabs on the window. Amanda noticed the window was half unlocked yesterday and we could only speculate that Milly had climbed up on the table, but while we were playing around upstairs today Milly did it in front of me. While it made me nervous to watch her, I wanted to see what kind of ability she had, and her balance impressed me. I told her she needed to not do that because she could fall, but honestly I was happy that she could get around so well.
She’s definitely not very fearful about climbing on things. For a while now she’s been taking a chair from the table in the kitchen and moving it to the counter to get things like cups, snacks and cereal.
Milly and I started off the morning playing Hide and Seek. She was hiding behind the door when I opened it to let her out first thing, then she counted to ten and I hid in the bathtub. She tried to hide behind the bathroom door, but I told her she had to hide someplace I couldn’t see her. I think she’s just now starting to get that part of the game. I found her with her head and arms tucked under the sheets on my bed with her booty sticking out. I pretended I couldn’t find her until she started giggling while I was naming places I was looking for her.
She also saw some cat litter that got out of Cobb’s litter box, but she called it cat glitter.
I told Milly early this morning that she was going to have to take a nap in her own room today because Mommy had some work to do in our room. When it came time for the nap Milly actually told me she didn’t want to sleep in Mommy and Daddy’s bed, so that worked out. She didn’t sleep at all though. Around 12:30 she was making noise, and when I went up to tell her she needed to sleep some she ran to the door and said, “Let’s be free, Dad!” I did convince her to settle down and rest until the clock said one-zero-zero if she wasn’t going to sleep, and she did do that.
The work Amanda did (all after Milly’s “nap” for what that matters) was to take care of the giant mass of clean clothes that has accumulated over the past little while. Amanda packed for the weekend while she took care of the clothes. I feel like I can start washing clothes regularly again now. Well, I would if we didn’t just run out of detergent. Anyway, our room looks much nicer now.
Total side note: our house will not be empty for Labor Day weekend. The house will be occupied by people and dogs (five, to be exact).
We had small group tonight, but it was a very small small group, with just us, the Johnsons and the Andrewses. We’re starting a study next week on a book called Erasing Hell by Francis Chan. It’s got seven chapters, so we assigned one chapter a week to each couple with me and Amanda taking the first and the last. Basically, the couple of the week will be in charge of the discussion for that week.
That obviously didn’t take too long, so we spent the rest of the night talking about all kinds of things: kids, insurance, alternate energy sources, virtual reality arcades. (The last one was just me and David.)
Kirsten watched Milly tonight and they did some painting. She said Milly was jumping up and down and proclaiming, “I’m so excited!” about going to the beach for Labor Day weekend. She did that a few times today. I think letting her open a toy Amanda bought her on sale at Brilliant Sky might have helped fuel the excitement. It’s really a pack of toys: sand toys in the shape of a turtle, starfish and some others along with a little set for making sand cupcakes.
Amanda asked me to rub her back tonight. She had a terrible knot in her shoulder. It keeps coming back and she’s convinced it’s caused by the chair she sits in at work. It’s been a while since she’s had a massage, so maybe that’s why it was so big.
Zach Dotsey