Send Me Off to Glory in a Glad Bag

Tonight after dinner as I was putting away the leftover lasagna, I realized that our “Saran™ wrap” and our “Ziploc® bags” were both actually made by Glad®. I began to feel bad for the Glad people because all of their products are known by other companies’ brand names.

But then I remembered this cool song that my friend Cat sings, and I realized that Glad doesn’t need to be known for their plastic wrap or their sealable bags. They’ve got their trash bags to carry on the Glad name.

One Last Excuse

I didn’t realize before I married Ben how much free stuff he came with. The hand-me-downs never stop trickling in from his parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.

One of the cool things that came with Ben’s dowry was a sweet dresser. It was the dresser Ben used when he was a little boy, so it had seen better days, but it served us well all the way until our first married trip to Ikea a year or two later.

Now it sits in our guest room, totally abandoned by all living things. I hadn’t thought about the long, lost dresser until I started searching for knobs and pulls for our new cabinets. Then I had a great idea…

I turned this:


Into this:

And that concludes my list of things that kept me away over the past few weeks. I am officially done painting for a long, long time.

My Real Reason for Abandoning the Internet

Once upon a time, Ben and I moved into a house that smelled like cigarette smoke and dead animals, with a kitchen that looked like this:

And that was taken after we got rid of the smell, tore down the wallpaper, painted, patched the giant hole under the microwave, and bought a stove.

Then, three years later, we finally got around to the real kitchen project. We were like, “Brown cupboards? White countertops? I hate those colors.” So instead we went with white cupboards and brown countertops. And we like it much better.

My Apologies

Dear Blogosphere,

I know I’ve been abandoning you lately, but I’ve been doing really important things like science experiments involving the symmetry of Ben’s face...


and making scripture cases out of Capri Sun wrappers.


I mean, can you blame me? Anyway, I’m sorry. I'll try to be better.

Yours truly,
Kim

I Always Have To Steal My Kisses from You

It’s not that easy to get Liam to give kisses. If you’re lucky, he might lean his cheek in the general area of your lips when you ask for a kiss, but you probably won’t get much more than that.

Today we bought some hydrocortisone cream for Liam’s eczema, and as soon as I had finished rubbing it on his red little toes, he kissed the tube of ointment. Twice.

Apparently he saves his kisses for the things he really loves.

Jealousy

I didn’t think it was that hard to say “Mama.” Aren’t there tiny babies that can say Mama? I think it’s one of the easiest words in the English language. So how come Liam can call my sister “Schmath,” but he can’t call me “Mama?”

Guilty Pleasures

Hot chocolate is one of the exceptions to my No Dessert on Weekdays resolution. Other exceptions include birthdays and holidays and that fall on weekdays, including Presidents’ Day. (Well what would you do if you had chocolate fondue leftover from the weekend and it just happened to be Presidents’ Day? Some rules are made to be bent.)

Ben got me one of these hot chocolate machines for Christmas, and I love it so much I want to marry it.



My brother-in-law recently introduced me to the concept of adding flavored creamer to hot chocolate, so I bought some French Vanilla creamer and tried it out in my machine this morning. It was so good that even after drinking hot chocolate on weekdays for my entire resolute life, I actually feel guilty right now.

Realizations

I wonder if it’s more fun to watch the Academy Awards when you’ve seen one or two of the movies being nominated.

Also, Michael Scott is married to Carol Stills in real life? Who knew?

The Scariest Moment of My Life

You know what’s freaky? When you're snowmobiling with your husband and your 1-year-old, and your husband stops the snowmobile to say, “Hey why don’t you stand Liam up so he can look over my shoulder instead of leaning off to the side?” and then you go to stand your baby up and his legs don’t work. So you turn him around to see what’s wrong with him and his eyes are closed. So for one second you think your son is dead, but then his eyes slowly open and he looks at you like, “Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep here.”

Seriously. The kid won’t sleep in the car or the rocking chair or any bed other than his own, but he’ll sleep on a bumpy, noisy snowmobile ride in 20-degree weather with snow falling on his face?

St. Valentine

About a week ago, Ben and I were lying in bed having our annual week before Valentine’s Day conversation. This year it went something like this:

Kim: We can’t really do anything on Valentine’s Day because I have mutual.
Ben: Good, then we won’t have to get a babysitter.
Kim: So what do you want for Valentine’s Day?
Ben: Maybe a new flash drive. What do you want?
Kim: I kind of want a brown hoodie, but I want to pick it out myself.
Ben: Cool, so I’m off the hook?

We’re really romantic like that.

The neat thing about picking out your own Valentine’s Day present is that if you accidentally come home with a pair of pants, two shirts, two sweaters, and a brown hoodie, it’s not your fault. And if you also end up buying a pair of shoes for your 1-year-old, that’s not your fault either. Honestly, who could resist these?