Our 2-year-old daughter is very much into monsters right now. Wolfman and Frankenstein are her favorites. So when I took her to the Dollar Tree and let her pick whatever card she wanted for Sam’s birthday, obviously she was drawn towards the Halloween cards.
Sam took it in stride.
I think it’s wonderful! We will be keeping this card for a long while.
I let Sam pick her birthday dinner. It was something new. Avgolemono soup, and pitas made from scratch. With Apple Crisp instead of cake. It all turned out great.
I’ve been reading a biography about James Garfield on and off all summer. It’s hard to find time to sit down and actually read more than a few pages at a time.
But at 300 pages in I’ve come across my favorite quote by far:
“It now appears we are defeated by the combined power of rebellion, Catholicism, and whiskey, a trinity very hard to conquer…”
Is that not an amazing quote? Have another measure of respect Mr. Garfield.
We got a letter from our local city government yesterday.
It says they are now going to repave our road this fall.
I’ve been arguing for it since early April when I saw that we were not on the list of roads they considered for repaving this year. I went to a city council meeting to find out why we going to be repaved last year before they decided to cut our road for budget reasons and then opted not to pave it this year.
That did not go well. I wrote about here. Basically, our street is not a “through street” and thus “not a priority.” And because major roads around us have been paved recently, they had no reason to bring paving equipment back to our area just to work on our street.
I’ve been emailing and leaving messages for various public officials since. I had been told that “fingers crossed” our street could be covered by a state paving project and that was the only way we could be paved this year. Maybe that is what happened, but I wrote our services department three weeks ago when details for that project were released and our street was not part of that project.
I never got a response to that email. I specifically asked what it would take for our street to be a priority for the services department, like they said through streets are. That our street is still crumbling, that I have to direct Marceline around potholes on her bike so she can learn to ride, and that my youngest still picks up chunks of the road every time we walk despite them claiming to have cold patched all of the potholes earlier in the year.
Soooo… victory. I fought the man and won. I don’t want to take full credit but I feel vindicated for my effort.
Now if I can get the sound wall study redone I’ll feel really good.
While at my parents in May, Marceline got a bump on her head from running into a door. I used it as an opportunity to tell her about the myth of Athena jumping full grown from Zeus’s head.
She loves it and her nighttime stories since that night are different Greek myths. One that really caught her imagination was ‘Echo and Narcissus.”
In the version of the story we read Echo is always running fast away from you while repeating your last words back to you.
Marceline now will swing back and forth on her swing with head back screening “Echooooo” into the air. It’s been two weeks of her doing this and it’s just as adorable now as it was the first day she did it.
Sam has wanted an outdoor storage shed for our tools and gardening supplies. Just to move it out of it garage and free up some space.
We do have a larger shed in the backyard, way on the edge of our property. We aren’t using that very well, the stuff in it is basically storage, some bikes we haven’t used in a while, gardening supplies that we don’t have a place for (think larger hanging pots and larger gardening supplies), and some fun stuff (frisbee golf basket, outdoor toys).
Basically it’s full of stuff we would like to use more but haven’t figured out the time or storage.
But we needed a place for shovels, rakes, hoes, buckets, and more that just leaned up into a corner in our garage. So why not buy a $300 storage shed to put along our house?
Shockingly, with some help and supervision from Sam we got it together in well under an hour. The only stupid part was securing the roof to the structure. It was 8 screws but it pinched my fingers every time because the screws were recessed under the roof and back wall.
