—1—
Have you been Easter candy shopping yet? If not, buckle up. Candy has been getting more and more expensive for a while now (and the candies themselves have been shrinking and shrinking,) but this is officially ridiculous:
This chocolate bunny is $22. Yes, I realize that it's a big bunny with special chocolate. But I just can't imagine the cost-benefit analysis that would lead anyone to put it in their shopping cart.
Maybe my sticker shock here is disproportionate because I have 6 kids and I'm mentally multiplying everything by 6 in my head. I don't know. Maybe if you're just raising Veruca Salt as an only child it's not as bad as I'm imagining.
—2—
I went to the mall with a friend and while I wasn't really planning on getting anything for myself, I saw this necklace on clearance for $5 (that's 4.4 chocolate bunnies, for your reference) and I had to buy it.
I also saw a lot of other fun stuff that I did not buy, but I stood in front of this painting for a long time, just appreciating it.
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| This was not a small work of art, it was a large piece intended to be a focal point above the sofa and I love that. |
—3—
Our recycling bins are a bunch of 18-gallon plastic totes that sit in our garage, and I don't love them. They certainly do the job, but they take up a lot of floor space, there are too many of them, and they don't have lids so any food remnants on the jars and cans is like an all-you-can-eat buffet for mice.
I did a ton of research and found that most covered stackable bins were too small, but I found the perfect bins at Ikea. They didn't deliver to me, but they deliver through FedEx which has some weird partnership with Walgreen's so I could get pick them up at the drugstore.
It looks so much better! The trash cans and the ball bin that I can now put against the wall used to be squeezed into the narrow aisle between our cars, taking up so much space that we regularly called getting out of the car "The Fat Man Challenge" because there was just no room.
Are there still stains on the floor from oil and grease and whatever else? Yes. Do I plan to do anything about it? No. It's an unfinished garage, and I'm looking for function over form.
—4—
I was videocalling my 19-year-old daughter, who is a religious missionary right now. And she mentioned that her missionary companion says that she (my daughter) talks weird.
"Weird, how?" I asked my daughter.
"Like, casually using big words while talking. Not words so big that no one knows what they mean, just unusual words that people don't regularly use. Like... 'ocular' or 'uncanny.' "
"Hmm," I said, thinking about how this came up because I'd used the word 'scatalogical' in conversation a minute earlier. "I guess you can tell her it's because your mom is an English major. Sorry you're weird now."
—5—
Phillip and I have fallen out of a habit of date night. It takes time and energy to think of something new to do all the time, so we thought: what if we just pick four activities and rotate between them?
For some reason we chose pool as one of our activities, even though neither of us play more than once a year and have no skill whatsoever.
We're bad, like comically bad. But there's hope, I think! After playing a few games of pool, I was able to hit the ball I was aiming for 95% of the time. (Now I need to work on my geometry, because once I hit that ball it only goes where I intended about 50% of the time.)
What should our other four things be? One of them can be watching a TV series (we just started La Cocinera de Castamar, which is like Spanish Downtown Abbey). We're looking for two more things.
—6—
After almost 22 years of having children, Phillip planned and threw his first birthday party.
Was the party months after the actual birthday? Absolutely.
Did his man brain arrange the candles in a perfect grid instead of aesthetically spacing them out? Unfortunately, yes.
But most importantly, did I have to plan or execute anything? No.
And the kids had a great time, even if it looked a lot different than the themed birthday parties I used to throw back in the day:
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| Exhibit A. |
The birthday party reshuffle was part of the work we've been doing on redistributing household responsibilities, loosely based on the Fair Play method. It's been amazing.
For me, it's less about the work it takes to, say, plan a birthday party or help them write a talk for church, and more about the emotional relief it is not being the only one who knows the details of what's going on with the kids at any given time.
In fact, he is sometimes the one texting to remind me of something having to do with the kids now, and I am loving the teamwork.
—7—
I throw shade at Phillip's birthday cakes, but I shouldn't. Because the job he has done taking over meal planning, food shopping, and dinner prep puts me to shame. I always hated meal planning, but since I was the stay-at-home parent I just assumed it made more sense for me to be the one in charge. IT DID NOT.
Let me describe how Phillip is absolutely crushing it in the meal department.
When I used to do it, it was a soul-crushing slog every week. Half our recipes were on Pinterest and half were on physical cards in a recipe box (neither of which were easy to search through), and which one was where simply lived in my head.
But Phillip gathered up all our recipes, fed them into AI, and had AI digitize each one in a standard format and organize it into a searchable database. He doesn't have to look anything up to make a shopping list and it takes five minutes: he just selects meals from the database and AI automatically populates a list of ingredients.
And there's more.
He wanted to have the list in the order he'll find things in the grocery store, so instead of memorizing the location of every single item in Market Basket and painstaking putting the list in order himself like I used to, he took pictures of the signs in the aisles and gave it to AI so it organizes the list for him.
All that to say: I should have been fired from this gig a LONG time ago. I mean, I was playing checkers and this man is playing chess. He's an artist and a genius. I can't believe we didn't make this switch sooner.
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