Injury, or Fun with Words

Every night, at bedtime, Carter has the same thing to say to us: "I can't go to sleep. I have too much INJURY!" (meaning "energy")

Then he holds out his arms wide:
I have THIS MUCH injury!

An hour or so later
I have THIS MUCH injury!

A half an hour later
I have THIS MUCH injury.

A little bit later
I have this... much.. injury.

And finally
I.... have.... this.... much.... in.....

Project 3

I'm blessed to have a husband with a similarly high tolerance for mess, and a similar love of organization.

We both hit our limits with the basement mess recently, which inspired Project 3: the great basement reorg.

I'm also blessed to have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law that are equal parts helpful, hard-working, good-natured, easy-going and practical. They are a lot if other stuff, too, but those characteristics best describe what they brought to our basement project yesterday. They also brought a few more things to store in said basement.

I'm not sure the photos really read, but trust that our basement looks 1000 times better absent the 8 bags of trash and donation haul we got out of there. Not to mention the stellar furniture and box origami that we all did.
 

Oh, and it's with mentioning that there was one other really critical factor in our success: a good babysitter!

2 Projects Down

Several of you asked what kind of projects we have underway as a result of our recent home improvement prioritization. We've knocked out 2: fixing our kitchen cart (which I had nearly rendered unusable due to the force exerted by my hand-crank pasta maker) and converting our WBFP to gas (for those of you who haven't spent hours scouring classified ads for apartments with a WBFP, that means "or wood-burning-fireplace"). We love wood, but, due to some poor design, the smoke from our WBFP went straight into the intake for the heat upstairs, where it blew into our closet, right on my hanging clothes. So, gas will mean more frequent fires and a less stinky me.

This weekend, we undertake project #3 (cleaning out the basement). Project 4 may involve a Christmas gift for Carter, so I won't speak of it here until then, lest he learn to read or one of you let it slip! AND we're getting estimates for our largest (and most highly desired) project, which may or may not happen, depending on the size of the estimates... We'll keep you posted!

Home Consulting

With most of our urgent home projects taken care of (big knock on wood), stable jobs (finally! and also knocking on wood) and no major life changes on the horizon, we've been feeling ready to tackle a new project on our house. But what to do? We've been tossing around ideas for a while, but were having trouble getting anything started.

So, last week, I ran us through a little home version of a prioritization workshop I like to do (usually at work). We brainstormed on post-its, consolidated our ideas, voted on our highest priorities, and then organized our ideas on a matrix by number of votes (on the X axis) and cost/effort (on the y axis). Our french doors came in handy for this part of the exercise!

We decided to ignore all high cost, low desire items. Then, we made a plan to do the highest desire, low cost items and to research the high desire, high cost items. At the end of one hour, we had a clear action plan with tasks for each of us. More on our progress soon!

Whiteside Mountain

In Highlands, NC for the weekend. It's a perfect day!











- Posted by T using BlogPress from my iPhone

Carter on the upcoming holidays

I really love it when someone else does my blogging work for me. Here's a couple of stories shared by Cart Cart about his evening with Carter earlier this week, with a few comments from me [in brackets]:

While reading the fire engine book Wednesday night at bedtime, about halfway through Carter interrupts and raises a finger in the air, and says, "Let's pause for a moment, while I call my parents." And reaches over for the broken cell phone, opens it, and has an imaginary conversation with both of you. Then he puts the phone down and says, "We can go ahead now."

In the car on the way home, he was talking about a lot of things, and especially that Santa had come that day [for pictures]. He remarked the best part of Thanksgiving is that after that, Santa comes. The following ensued:

Cart Cart: "Speaking of Thanksgiving, do you know what kind of meat people eat for Thanksgiving Dinner?
Carter: Yes.
Cart Cart: What?
Carter: Chicken.

Cart Cart: No, actually it's turkey, like the thing you made in art class today and showed me.

Carter: Do people go out and hunt the turkeys and bring them home?

[Its news to me that Carter knows what hunting is. Last time I indicated that something on his plate was an animal he adamantly disagreed, citing (as if I was crazy) that "It doesn't have eyes!"]

Cart Cart: They can, but they usually just hunt them at Publix at the store, and bring them home and cook them in the oven.

Carter: And after they eat that, Santa Claus comes !!

Clearly Carter has misunderstood my attempts to give him a way to think about when the Christmas season starts. If waiting for Christmas is any more difficult than waiting for Halloween was, we're going to have a long weekend after Thanksgiving - not to mention the month after that!

Thanks again to Cart Cart for sharing!