Six-day-old Benjamin relaxed at home with Mom,
Joseph was very excited to play with his cousins and eat his
Allyse and Joshua worked on some coloring after dinner.
Angelina stayed home with Benjamin and Mom.
Benjamin enjoyed his first Thanksgiving.
Baby Benjamin is changing on almost a daily basis.
With the new baby coming (or is he), we knew that we would have to find furniture for Angelina's bedroom and use her current furniture for the baby's new room. For months, we have been scouring Craigslist, ebay and sales advertisements in hopes that we could find something girly for Angelina that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.
I took apart the crib and took the baby furniture down to the new baby's room. Then I took Allyse's bed apart and moved her furniture into Angelina's room.
It was really hard to gauge how Angelina was going to react, as she tends to be quite possessive and she has invested heavily in being the baby. Since the crib is a primary symbol of her infancy, we thought that she might reject the new bed. However, when it came to bedtime, she seemed pleased to be in a new big bed, and she slept all night without any incident.
With Allyse's new bedroom set, I brought most of it upstairs by myself, but I had to call on a neighbor to help with the desk and the dresser. However, the toughest part was the shopping. I needed to find bedrails for Angelina and a boxspring and mattress for Allyse.
After I bought the bedrails, I went to look for a mattress set for Allyse. I went to four stores trying to find somebody who actually had something in stock. At the fourth store, they were determined to sell me something. When I found what I wanted, of course, they didn't have it in stock. They went through several mattresses, each progressively more expensive, offering it to me at the same price as the one that I first wanted. By the time they found a mattress in stock, they were offering it to me at less than one-half of its retail price (which gives me a little insight into the markup).
On Wednesday, my kind wife made me a lunch to take to work. I ran off, forgetting she had done so. That same morning, she had a doctor appointment across the street from my office, so she brought the lunch to me after the appointment.
Joseph and Joshua decided that their ships
Joseph's ship: The "Dauntless" is a work in progress.
Is there any question about how
Joshua's ship: The Black Pearl.
Joshua's color scheme was simple: basic black.
The Dauntless and the Black Pearl finished and
I am not the best at identifying spider species, so I took pictures of it before I separated its spirit from its earthly tabernacle. Living in the desert, I am only concerned about two species of spiders: the ubiquitous black widow and the brown recluse. This was obviously not a black widow, so I Googled the brown recluse. Fortunately, our spider did not fit the profile.RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A UC Riverside study shows that where brown recluse spiders are common, people can co-habitate with them and bites are infrequent. The study by Rick Vetter, staff research associate in the department of entomology at UC Riverside and an internationally known expert on spiders, focused on 2,055 brown recluse spiders collected in a Kansas home of a family of four. Despite the abundance of spiders, no one in the family received bites from the potentially dangerous arachnids.I know the point of the story is that the brown recluse might not be such a big threat, but I kind of lost any possibility of not being completely creeped out when it said the researchers found 2,055 brown recluse spiders in one house. Now I'm a tolerant guy, but I cannot imagine sharing my home with 2,055 brown recluse spiders. I'm pretty sure that I could not sleep another night in that house.
All I can say is 2,055! I mean, sheeesh, what finally motivated them to take care of the problem.
"Uh, honey, we now have over 2,000 brown recluse spiders in our home. Do you think we should we call an exterminator?"
"Yeah. 1,900 was okay, but over 2,000, well, that's just a few too many."
Last Thursday I started feeling that familiar, uncomfortable tickle in my throat. By the afternoon, my throat was getting raw and I knew what was coming. By the evening I was sneezing and had a full blown cold, and I have had the blahs ever since.
Avoid stress, get a good night's sleep, avoid cigarette smoke, include in your diet plenty of whole foods, fruit, vegetables and avoid dairy products, eggs, excessive meat, excessive sugar, saturated fats and alcohol.Oh well, at least I don't smoke and drink.
Saturday was Joseph's day with Dad. We started at Home Depot Kid's Workshop where, by miraculous coincidence, the project for the day was a pirate ship. Joseph was as about as happy as a boy can be.
