Currently Reading The Mommy Manual: Planting Roots That Give Your Children Wings By Barbara Curtis see related

Our family spent this Saturday doing very Saturday things:

–Jay finished cleaning and vacuuming the main house (everything but the yellow room. We’ve nearly given up on the yellow room– we wade through to find the girls’ clothes in the morning and occasionally feed the fish (If you’re reading this Derek, we’re still waiting for you to come take them away).
–We bathed, well, everybody. Accept the cat. Of course, he comes running as fast as the girls when the tub’s running, so maybe one day we will…
–One out of three needed haircuts was done (the first out of the tub )
–We did grocery shopping

Both girls did very well remembering to stay close, and so had a ball running to the end of their visual tether and looking at everything. They got to see a cake-decorator doing her job, too, and they enjoyed that.

–I called on a few random houses that caught my eye while looking for Mom and Dad’s house-listing. We went to see one, and it made me so thankful we’re not actually in a position to need to buy again. Both girls ran giddy through the place, while Jay and I mentally planed to make them wash as soon as we were home.

We’ve sort-of talked about it, and figure if God wanted to give us a new (mainly larger) place, what we’re in now would likely sell as soon as we tried (it sounds gorgeous, and really is perfect in so many ways). But we’ve also talked about staying her until it’s paid-off, which would be another 9-years or so.

— We visited both the Ford and Toyota dealers to look at “small SUVs”. This was Jay’s fun (the house-dreaming is mine: I’d love a work-room, or even a laundry room. And getting the computers out of the bedroom would be ideal.). We drove a Ford Escape and a Toyota RAV4. The girls (and us parents) enjoyed crawling all through the showroom vehicles, checking out the weird new “redesigned” knobs and buttons.

Speaking with the salesguy at the Toyota place (who, naturally, wanted to know what time-frame we were thinking about buying in), I articulated my feelings both about the car and the house “dreams” we’ve been chasing today:
We really have what we need (A car that will hold three carseats. A house with the perfect layout), plus some perks (a heated 2-car garage). If there’s something “more-perfect” out there, sure it’d be nice to know, but what we’ve got now is such a close match we have no reason/motivation to *settle* for anything.

It’s a nice place to be. As long as we don’t look too high (houses/cars we can’t afford at this point in our lives) we have no reason to feel discontented, and mostly we feel thankful again for the fitting gifts we’ve been given.

One bonus today was an exhausted Natasha asking this evening to go straight to bed when we got home, and agreeing that skipping nap (even when given the option) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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I wanted to write all this down because it seemed like the perfect Saturday– a fun family-together day, guilt/obligation-free, with the house and groceries taken care of.

Watching my favorite people all enjoying themselves in each other’s company is so great.