It's A Beautiful Day

I wonder how many of you will read the title and instantly start humming a Mr. Rogers' tune, and how many of you will read it and start nodding in time to the U2 song that is now stuck in your head. I'm a stay at home mom to a two year old, so my inner rock star was squelched by a smiling, kindly, cardigan-wearing, puppet-wielding gentleman.

It is a beautiful day here, in potential if not in weather. Outside is gray and dreary and cold and wet, but it's pleasant here in the house. Elise got me out of bed earlier than I usually get up, but for once I didn't mind. The house is still a wreck as we're gearing up for the garage sale tomorrow. We're hopeful that shoppers will live up to their Seattlite reputations and not let the rain keep them away. Really, though, we don't care if stuff sells. Whatever doesn't sell will be donated. We're just so happy to be getting rid of some stuff! It has been fun to go through the house and say, "Hey, we don't need this anymore! Hey, let's get rid of that!" Very freeing. We even found a bag of stuff that we had never seen before. I'm not kidding. There was a big garbage bag in the garage that Andy thought was full of items going to our church nursery (I frequently have bags or boxes of stuff headed that way, so I can see why he thought that), and that I didn't even know was there, as I don't venture into the storage area of the garage very often. Well, I opened it last night and found that it was from a friend of ours who gave us some things when they moved. Apparently they dropped this bag off during Elise's birthday party, which was 3 hours of loosely organized chaos, so neither Andy nor I ever realized that the bag was there. It feels odd to open something in your own storage area and find that you have never seen it before. Kind of like getting a roll of film developed only to find that they are somebody else's pictures. Weird.

As per the suggestions given by Write, Mama. Write, and prompted by the desire to find superfluous toys for the garage sale, I moved Elise's toys around yesterday. Just some subtle changes - I moved her toy bins to a different wall in the playroom, moved the rocking horse from the living room into the playroom, and brought a couple of toys from the playroom into the living room. I just wanted to encourage her to play with a variety and to stimulate her imagination. It worked. She pulled toys and books from the toy bins that she hadn't played with in months. When she got up this morning, she immediately went to play with the doll house in the living room, occupying herself for quite a while. It was a joy to watch her play.

In another attempt to exercise Elise's imagination, I turned the kitchen table into a playhouse yesterday. I put a blanket on the floor under the table, added some pillows, some baby dolls, Legos, and books, and threw a sheet over the table to make "walls". Elise loved it, but she said it was too dark, so I put a lamp under there. She played for over an hour. At one point she read The Little Red Hen to her Lego penguins and orca. I heard her say, "Come on, ping-pwings [penguins], come on, whale, let's read! Okay. [gibberish, gibberish, gibberish, all in a high-pitched voice] The end!" She had great fun, and I got a few things done while she was so happily playing. My thanks to Write, Mama. Write. for inspiration.

Have a great weekend, everybody!