Cleaning house

I am pouring all my spare typing time into reconnecting with some old friends via email and have little left to blog. But the pictures! I need to get better about getting them off the camera earlier so there isn't just one big batch. We go to the zoo every Sunday after breakfast, though it's getting harder and harder to beat back the crowds now that the weather is nice. Clementine is obsessed with the frogs there--not the real ones, of course, but the sculpted ones that sit outside Amphibiville and in the playground. In the early spring when it's still pretty cool she can be as up-close and intimate with the bronze sculptures as she wants. Now that the sun is out they're getting a little too warm for fondling and mounting, so she just points and says "Hot frog, hot frog." Or she tries to kiss them:



At some point I will have to explain the impossibility of their love, but why crush her dreams now?

We're outside every second it's nice these days. I resisted the backyard landscape of brightly colored plastic last year, but it was a fool's goal. C loves her slide and picnic table, and she'll hardly let anything touch her lips these days unless it's "Eat table outside." Outside the only way we can get through dinner is bite, slide, bite, slide. It's all a compromise. And she's always messy. I remember once having a notion that kids of a certain age always feel sticky and moist, like they keep their hands in jam jars all day. I wondered how the hell parents couldn't keep them clean, and now I know. Now I know.




We're cleaning like mad this week to get ready for our annual Kentucky Derby party this weekend. The tradition started as an excuse to get dressed up and drunk in the early evening while gambling in our living room with friends (I was thinking old school bridge parties like my grandma had), but things have evolved now that we are proper grown up parents. OK, that's not entirely true. I didn't realize until we started menu planning just what a hell hole my house has steadily become over the last year and a half. I'm just a few weeks away from warranting reality TV show intervention and need to follow my sister's lead and declare a war on stuff. Stay tuned for details, Detroit. I have a basement full of vintage treasures I need to cull. Maybe it's spring fever, but I want to simplify my life, think sleek, clean, pared down. And then of course I remember it's the world's best week to rummage sale at the churches up by work (and I've got a method to hitting them hard), so my lunch hours will likely go to working in direct opposition to my war on stuff. I justify by saying it's always better stuff, cooler projects, but in the end I think I have a problem. Not that I want to solve it or anything--I just recognize there MIGHT be a problem. I can hardly ever show you the cute pictures of my gal hard at work in my office because it's the most embarrassing room in the house these days (and such a shame because I want to show off the collection of vintage typewriters Nate installed on the walls!), but here are a few with the mess in perspective (i.e., hidden):