Today could have only been made better with bacon. I wish I had thought of that when I made breakfast for everyone.
Joshua took the kids to Home Depot this morning at nine. They have a free(!) program for kids on the first Saturday of the month where kids get to build something. Joshua took Mary Judah once last year and they built a small catamaran. You have to get there early before all the kits are gone, and we kept forgetting each month. This time they built a window birdhouse.
Getting the rest of the fam out of the house enabled me to have a cup of coffee in peace and work on the Palm Sunday service for our house church for tomorrow. I got that squared away before they all got back, so that felt good.
The kids came home just beside themselves with excitement about their birdhouses, and we went in the backyard and pulled out some paints and let them paint their birdhouses. While we left them on a blanket to dry, Joshua and I cleaned out our storage unit in the garage while the kids played and rode their bikes around the yard. Killian’s getting pretty good at the tricycle, now that he can finally reach the pedals.
Joshua found a couple of really creepy-looking spiders in the storage unit. They had the same body shape as a black widow - long, skinny legs, with a very bulbous abdomen - and we scooped them both up into jars and slammed lids on them. Okay, so I scooped them up. One of us is really afraid of spiders. I won’t say who.
My camera battery is dead, so I don’t have any pictures of the spiders for you. We think they’re either brown widows, Western widows (although some sites say this is the same a a black widow) or false widows, which is a different genus than the other widow spiders. I think one is a male and the other female. Mary Judah had fun looking at the spiders with the magnifying glass attached to the emergency whistle she keeps in her backpack. That little loupe really works!
We got the storage unit cleaned out and reorganized (and after finding the spiders, I’m really glad we did!), which feels nice. It had gotten to where we could hardly step in it. We cleaned it out last spring, but as always, stuff got moved around each time we went camping and when we hauled out all the Christmas decorations. Nothing ever gets put back in its place and Joshua and I are both neat freaks, so it had been driving us crazy. We even made room on the shelves for stuff from our Costco runs, which always ended up on top of the washer and dryer.
If only I could be as motivated about my floors.
It was warm enough to eat lunch outside, and then Joshua and the kids stayed out for a bit. The birdhouses got suction-cupped to the ground floor window, so maybe we’ll get some birds. After they came in, we all cuddled on the couch together and watched “The Gnome-Mobile,” an old Disney flick that is set here in San Francisco and in the redwood forests to the north of us.
We made homemade pizza and the kids got a bubble bath. We put Killian to bed and Mary Judah and I curled up on the couch and read a few chapters of “Little House on the Prairie.” She calls it “Mary and Laura.” We are reading from the exact same boxed set I read and reread countless times when I was a kid. Our copy of “Farmer Boy” still has my name on it in blue tape from when I was hospitalized in the seventh grade and had my Dad bring it to me to help pass the time.
Joshua’s watching a movie, and I just finished flipping through Suze Orman’s “The Road to Wealth” while eating a mug of rocky road ice cream. It’s broken up into chapters dealing with different aspects of personal finance, and done in a Q&A format, answering all kinds of questions for each aspect. It’s like the personal finance version of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” I read most of her book “Women & Money” last night while taking a bath.
I’m realizing that I’ve got a pretty good handle on personal finance concepts. I know what “action steps” we need to take right now, and nothing in any of the books I’m reading is telling me anything I don’t already know. Sure there’s lots of information I will need down the road - regarding more in-depth retirement issues, home-ownership, saving for college, and investing - but until we meet our current financial goals, a lot of the stuff I don’t know about yet will just overwhelm me. I know it’s out there on the horizon, but I need to take care of what’s in front me right now, and will get to those things when it’s time.
My Friday and Saturday nights are so exciting I can’t stand it. Actually, I don’t have any complaints - we got needed stuff done and we had a great time with our kids. This is what Saturdays are for.