Day 212-218: Princess, Art Gallery, Cookbook Love
I seem to be having trouble keeping up with the blog these days. Between work, homeschooling, recess, P.E. class, and just keeping up with dishes and laundry, I run out of time. For this catch-up post I'm just going to share some random things that I remember from the past week.
I'll start with the best first, an incident that happened yesterday evening (Sunday, Day 217). I'll title this In Which Princess the Mouse Escaped Twice and We Discover Nina is Utterly Useless At Catching Mice. Princess jumped out of Jeremy's hands when he was trying to put her in the hamster ball, and escaped behind the desk. Then my job was to catch her when Jeremy scared her out from the corner. As soon as she appeared I just shrieked and froze and then started laughing. I am not scared of mice, I just don't feel super comfortable trying to reach out and grab one. So, I put on gardening gloves and tried again. And again, I just couldn't make my hands reach out and grab her. Jeremy finally cornered her behind a box and got her. He put her in the hamster ball, where William delighted in getting her to roll around the room (probably scaring the living daylights out of her, but he was well-intentioned). But, the lid hadn't been secured properly, and she jumped out again! And hid behind the same box. And Jeremy caught her again. And we put her in her tank and gave her a treat.
Sometime this past week I switched out the small desk I'd been using for my computer desk for a large dining table. The table is now half-covered in painting supplies, and Taiya and William have taken to coming into my office area to paint multiple times throughout the day. It's lovely. I don't mind being interrupted at all when it's in the name of art. I will have to take pictures of some of their paintings to share here. They're really good!
Another notable event of the week was I had lunch with Queen Pee, who is home from the hospital and recovering. I was delivering some eggs for her and she asked me to pick up some take-out from a seafood place across town for her. I mean, the woman just got out of the hospital, what was I gonna do?! I loaded up on two fried food lunches and got some fresh salmon and two orders of gumbo for later. We hung out and ate in the hot sun on her porch, her potted plants surrounding us with greenery and flowers, her cat Mr. Fox sniffing around for bites of fish. Greasy catfish fried and topped with Louisiana hot sauce... ahhhh, it brought me right back to the first week I spent in Arkansas, eating from food trucks at the King Biscuit Blues Festival. It was great to be able to hang out with a friend for a short piece of time. I'm afraid I will lose my ability to have a normal conversation if I don't do this kind of thing occasionally. My sister-in-law and I were joking early on how we're all going to come out of this pandemic super weird and socially awkward.
One homeschooling lesson we've been working on is about money and debt. We started giving the kids an allowance every Friday. They each had about $6 saved up and wanted to pick out toys at Walmart when we went to do our grocery pick-up order. However, most toys are at least $10 these days. They each fell in love with toys that were almost $20, so, I bought them for them, and now they have learned what it means to owe money. Each Friday for about five weeks, they'll not be getting allowance, as they are "paying me back" for the big toys they got. William kept saying he's "going into death" rather than "going into debt" and I thought that was a pretty appropriate description of what debt can feel like. We've also instituted a new rule that we will not go into the Walmart toy section from now on unless they each have $20 saved up. Debt avoidance.
I finished a fun novel that I would recommend: The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman. It took place in 1999 to early 2000s and followed several characters through the dot com boom and bust, which as a high schooler/college student at the time I was totally unaware of. It was a fun book that relished in antique books, a character who was trying to save the redwoods, computer programming (which I know nothing about, but it was well-written enough to sound almost beautiful), family dynamics, philosophy, and one character was a old scraggly poet who taught at Middlebury College! That was a fun detail.
Well okay, that's all I can think of for this week. I'm sure we ate lots of delicious things and read good books at bedtime and I did go on a walk every day this week, which was nice. But I'm just going to stop here so I don't get any more behind.
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