up to date

Hello Friends! I thought some of you may like a quick update to keep you up on our latest happenings. We are enjoying the summer. Lawrence is at such a fun age. It really makes our days and evenings tons of fun. The heat is a bit of a bummer, just because we have to watch when and how long we are outside. Lawrence inherited my sweat glands! We spend 10 minutes outside and he is dripping sweat and his hair looks like he got out of the bathtub! He will hate me for that someday when he is sitting in his high school algebra class, pitting out his shirt, and hoping that the cute girl sitting behind him doesn’t notice (or at least point it out for all to notice). Been there.

There isn’t much noteworthy news around here. But a few footnotes:

- Have you ever heard the story about how important it is to lock your car doors in Kansas? Otherwise, you might come back and find a carload of squash! I get it! We were so excited that our first garden produced… squash. Lots and lots of yellow squash. At least something likes this heat. We also got a basket of cucumbers, a few tomatoes (most were rotten), three zucchini, one nasty carrot, some bitter lettuce, a bunch of cilantro that is in our freezer, four mini red onions, and three butternut squash (even though we didn’t plant any)! Not bad for a garden rookie (me) and a retired farmer (Corey).

- On that note, I am working on my first cookbook. “29 fresh, fabulous and fun ways to fix squash”! I hope you’ll support my endeavor ;)

- I have been working hard at getting our basement in order. Let’s just say that the first time I went down there, part of me was embarrassed and the other part thought about calling ‘Hoarders’. However, in our defense, we never actually wanted to keep all the crap (yes, there is no other word for it) that had accumulated. When Corey drug me back to Kansas, he was kind enough to drive a Uhaul back with my entire townhome packed into it. The Uhaul was efficiently unloaded into the basement. Then Corey’s mom sold her house, so everything Corey could have wanted from their was packed up and unloaded into the basement. My parents were so excited that I was back within visiting range, that they visited and brought all of my crap from their attic and unloaded it into the basement. Then we had this grand idea of remodeling our entire main level. Yep, you guessed it, at one point or another, everything was moved into the basement. And then the little man was born which gave me lots of reasons to block out the basement! So that brings us to our present situation.

I have hired a babysitter to come over a few days and I have focused on tackling our basement. And it feels soooo good! I have made a ton of progress at organizing, pitching, donating, and repacking. Things were going fabulously. Until…

I was bit by a brown recluse spider. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but by the next day the dime sized black mark made it pretty obvious. And then the red swelling began. So now I am scared of our basement and don’t intend to move anything for a good ten years. Or I am just waiting for a bug man to come out and kill those icky things. Besides reading about all the horror stories of those bites, there is very little that they do for them. Of course you have to see a doctor repeatedly, so they can glance at it and say ‘well, we just need to keep watching it’. And then they put you on medication so that the next doctor you see can tell you to not take it. And then they tell you to go to the hospital over the weekend so it can be “watched” (cha ching cha ching) so that the doctor can tell you to - keep watching it. It is quite entertaining.

- Other sick news – my thumb nail fell off last week. I wanted to see how good my car door sealed so I shut my thumb in it to verify that it sealed just fine. I thought it was ugly before so I would keep my nails painted to cover it up. Now that it fell off it is even uglier. And I can’t even paint it because it is all uneven and dry and raw. Yuck. But the sort of funny thing is I am in the process of losing a toe nail too! How ironic is that!

- Our little man is SUCH a daddy’s boy! It is so cute. He pretty much laughs, smiles and talks from the minute that Corey walks in the door at night until he goes to bed. He is happy during the day, but he is delighted in the evening! He loves playing with balls. He is also in the ‘sitting’ stage, so he loves to back up to anything that looks like it would make a good seat. He sits for half a second and then moves on to the next thing.

Until we meet again,
Abs