I wanna be a deeenntist!

We took the boys to the dentist today. It's been a long time coming, and it was... well, dentally speaking, it was far worse than I'd anticipated. However, the experience itself was wonderful from beginning to end. The boys were so excited to meet their dentist, and they bounded ahead of us into the office to announce their arrival. (I did put in a lot of overtime working them up to that, too, but it was well worth the effort.) The staff was phenomenal. Well, James' dental hygienist was phenomenal. John's was above average for your normal dental cleaning experience, but paled in comparison to the one James had. No complaints all around, though, as it was far, far, far and away better than any experience I ever had as a child in a dentist's office! (We did request the really nice lady for the next visit, though. *grin*) Yay. One more wonderful resource secured, and one less thing to worry about. That feels really good.

I didn't blog about our Normal Day because it was... well, pretty Normal. We wandered around a bit. We read a stack of books in bed, then headed off to the table to have snacks and make sock puppets and cards. We ate. A lot. We caught up on laundry, read and talked some more.

Part of the deal was that there were to be no overalls that day. The older two and I wore sweats and loved it. Smidge kept hauling his overalls from the closet and trying to get into them. Then he'd stand at the door and cry, "House!" Hmmm. We snuggled in informal shifts and spent a lot of time feeling like we ought to be doing something over at the house. The boys commented on it. I agreed. When Zorak came home from work, however, he wanted to run to the house for "a couple of hours" (alone), but I think the choking noise emanating from my throat hinted to him that it would probably be better if he'd take bath duty and let me find a dark corner to hide in for a bit. It was a good day, but boy, oh boy, it was draining. I think I need a few hours of q-u-i-e-t. That might help.

After the dentist appointments this morning, Zorak headed back to work (bless him for helping me herd the kittens at the doctor's!) and the boys and I headed to Costco. We needed food, in a bad way. One simply cannot go two weeks straight in a household of five without ever setting foot in a market, and expect there to be food in the house at the end of those two weeks. That is the official result of our experiment, anyway. So, we splurged. We had a great time. We got smoothies on the way out and laughed and giggled. We do very well when we're on-the-go, I've noticed. Anyone else do that? It'll be nice when we do just as well on-the-couch, though.

And this evening, we loaded everyone up and worked on the house for a few hours. Zorak finished removing the bathroom wall (we are moving it over 12"), and I hung out in the living room with Spartacus doing subfloor duty. The house no longer smells!! A great deal of the persistent odor that's refused thus far to subside seems to have been the cat urine/bong water soak the previous owners had put into the carpets. It's like Carpet Fresh for the socially deranged! The house is also harboring a lower relative humidity than it's probably had in at least a decade: the balcony door is splitting! We're keeping it to use as our humidity gauge. Now we just need some enigmatic liquidy substance we could use as a barometer and we're set.

The Dumpster Guy is bringing us a construction dumpster tomorrow. We can get the toilet out of the front yard now! WooHoo! (The neighbors were starting to get a little worried, I'm sure.) Tomorrow Zorak will head down to do his rough plumbing calculations greek greek greek mostly greek to me. The boys and I will head to church for Pioneer Club. The decision to keep the boys in PC while all this is going on has been a Very Good Decision, and while it's not-so-great to lose an evening of work, it's worth far more for the boys to have that positive consistency each week. Good stuff.

Pickles and Ice Cream, anyone? Poor (wonderful) Zorak is at Wal-Mart as I type, trying desperately to find a body pillow for me (and it sounds like tonight's excursion will not end with a pillow, either - who knew body pillows were considered "seasonal"???). I'm going to hit the hay, anyway, and get some shut-eye. If I go now, I might get an extra pillow from his side of the bed without much of a struggle! :-)

Kiss those babies!
~Dy