Cleaning, cooking, clapping and kudos

Would you believe that Noah is having a hard time crawling in the kitchen because the floor is… too clean? I guess the dirt and crumbs were helping him gain some traction on the tile. Now that I know that I’ll never mop again.

This weekend we barely left the house. We concentrated on revamping the homestead. I finally used the carpet cleaner my mom gave me for my birthday. I did the carpet in the office and in half the hallway. This took several hours and used up the entire bottle of rug shampoo that came with the cleaner. The carpet definitely looks better, but it’s far from pristine. The guy who sold us the house put in pale beige carpets despite having two kids and a dog. Genius, right? And with our combination of past party spills, cat hair, cat throw up and baby spit-up the carpets are downright nasty. I’d love to replace them all with wooden floors and throw rugs. Carpet is just so gross – it never gets clean enough. The steps are the worst of all and unfortunately our carpet cleaner is too gargantuan to use on the stairs and doesn’t have a stair attachment. If you come over, when you are using the steps don’t look down.

I went to Ikea briefly on Saturday morning to get Noah a bookcase. I bought a different size than I had intended, but once I attempted to put it together once incorrectly, and then assembled it later in the evening while drinking a gin and tonic, it seemed perfect. We also moved some furniture around. I still have nine million things I want to hang on the walls but I can’t seem to pull the trigger on where I want things to go. We tend to move furniture so often around here that I don’t want to put a million holes in the wall. The result is a lot of blank walls and a bunch of wall hangings sitting in the armoire of our guest room.

I did my test run dinner on Saturday night. All the dishes turned out pretty well, but Mark and I decided that it was flavor overload. I’m going to replace the spicy sesame noodle dish with a more mild rice dish of some sort. The biggest problem with my cooking is that I make a frenzied mess - tossing spoons, plates and pans everywhere as I cook. No expert looks that panicked. And my cousin and her husband are going to have a ring side seat. Hope they don’t get knocked upside the head with a dirty wooden spoon. I also decided I would be a much better cook and a more experimental if I had a sous chef. I really hate all the prep work. The cleaning, chopping, mincing takes me eons and almost always has me in fear of losing a finger. Those 30 minute meals might not take me an hour if I could chop as quick as Rachel Ray.

Noah needs all his fingers. He’s clap happy. He claps when he manages to get a Cheerio in his mouth. He claps when he sees the cat. He claps when we listen to his They Might Be Giants “Here Come the ABCs” CD. Actually that is quite cute. It’s like he just discovered the music. We LOVE this CD – it’s funny and catchy, and its children’s music that doesn’t make your ears bleed which is no easy feat. We can’t thank Patrice enough for it. I need to get a few other decent children’s CDs into the mix. I’m already bored or annoyed by all the others we have listened to a billion times, and I’m sure Noah’s getting sick of listening to my music too. I’d like to get a CD of songs from Disney classics. I don’t want the Elton John songs – I want “Zip a dee doo da,” “Chim Chim Cheree” and “The Bare Necessities.” This box set looks good but it’s not cheap.

So last week’s blogger love fest initiated by the Missuz J hiatus has me thinking a lot about blogging friendships and families. It’s so neat to have welcomed so many funny, interesting and sweet people into our lives via this blog. On Saturday morning I had to smile when Mark came into the nursery and said “Shrimpy and Katy have new posts.” He doesn’t always comment, but he’s just as engrossed and involved in all your lives as I am. Anyway – just wanted to tell you all how much we appreciate hearing your “voices” and sharing our lives.