Today…

Outside my window: it’s just beautiful out. We seem to be having a warm streak which means the windows are open again as we try to keep the apartment cool.

This weekend we: got pretty sweaty! I was getting so used to “sweater weather” that it  didn’t even occur to me when dragging Dan and the kids to the local arboretum yesterday that it might be hot, sweaty and not very much fun. Luckily I got some good pictures, so it wasn’t a total waste and we will go again when the weather cools down a bit.

We also: had something to celebrate on Saturday! A couple weeks ago I drew up this little “potty chart” on our whiteboard. Every hour that MM kept his pull up dry, he got a happy face. 10 happy faces earned him an extra tv show before bed (I’d have preferred something else but this bribe seemed to work for him) and a week of “10 happy face days” meant going out for ice cream. A month? Big kid underpants of course.

The first week was a total failure. He seemed excited about the idea but wasn’t doing anything about it. I think the comfort of wearing a pull up was officially spoiling him because one day I threw a bit of a temper tantrum and demanded that he start wearing underwear and guess what? He kept it dry. Like basically all day. Like no underwear accidents. And then he did it again the next day. I think we had two wet underwear incidents last week but still maintained our “10 happy faces” each day. Which meant Saturday we went out for ice cream.

And if he keeps this up all month I’ll let him buy some new big kid underpants in the style of his choice. The ones he’s wearing now are really “training pants” – a little padded. I’ll let him pick out some fun “big kid” styles next month if this continues to go well.

Big cause for celebration, no?

I am reading: two books right now. The first is Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her by Melanie Rehak who you may remember wrote Eating For Beginners, which I adored. I’m almost 100 pages in and I’m a bit torn. I think my biggest complaint is simply that the book is about a lot more than I realized it would be and it’s not really the book I sat down to read, you know? Expect a lot of history about the early 1900′s and women’s suffrage – an interesting topic for sure, but just not what I had expected to be reading about I guess. It’s also much more “typical nonfiction” than EFB was – not enough of Melanie’s wit for my taste!

I’m also reading That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo which is the book club pick for October. I requested it from the library and it came in a lot sooner than I was expecting. I’d planning to finish reading Girl Sleuth first, but then I noticed that the due date was next week last night! Apparently it’s only a 2 week rental and I’m worried they won’t let me renew it so I thought I should get busy reading. This book has a lot of nostalgia cred – lots of passages about Cape Cod, obviously, and it had me googling lake house vacations in the middle of the night (since we live in the mid-west).

I also really enjoyed his description of the main character sitting in the backseat of his parents car as a kid, on their way to the Cape, unbuckled and leaning forward on his mother’s seat trying to get in on the conversation in the front seat. I used to hate sitting in the backseat as a kid – that attention divide really can be huge, no matter how old you are, but as a kid I remember it most intensely. I’ll confess that the same thing happens in our car today. What is it about the front seat / back seat? Out of sight out of mind? Reading about it really put me in MM’s shoes, wondering what he thinks about while his daddy and I talk in the front seat.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where my enjoyment of this one ends so far. Because apart from the nostalgia and the great descriptions of Cape Cod, the book is otherwise filled to the brim with… well bitterness. There is a lot of divorce talk in this book, which you might think I’d relate to as the kid of a single father, but really? Not so much. It’s kind of like sitting in a room with a couple on the rocks (or post divorce) and being forced to listen to the bickering. You kind of just can’t wait to leave the room and be amongst happy people. And you know, maybe that’s what Russo’s going for and I’m not saying the book isn’t well written or interesting, because it is. But the negative energy just isn’t my cup of tea right now and I’d much rather be reading something else. I’m not sure if I’ll finish either book but I’ll give both a bit longer before walking away. I really hate to leave a book unfinished but I also really believe that life is too short to be spent reading the wrong books, you know?

We also: bought a toaster oven this weekend. Our old toaster stopped working a couple weeks ago and after Dan confirmed that he wouldn’t be able to fix it, we decided to save up for a toaster oven instead and we are really happy with it so far. We got a fairly inexpensive black and decker from Wal-mart (because they will return anything) and have been making much toast and even some baked french toast yesterday and so far, all good things. Any great toaster oven / convection oven tips or recipes?

Some links I think you should click:

• I loved this post at Simple Mom about bringing peace to the witching hour. Last week was all about the witching hour for me as the baby gets older and a bit more vocal about her likes and dislikes. How do you deal with that awful time of day when tempers run short all around?
• The Bloggess (love her) wrote this fantastic post “Because some things are worth more than a box of cereal” – if you are a review blogger or have considered becoming one, definitely give this one a read!
• I may have mentioned once or twice that I’m currently infatuated with Starbucks’ salted caramel hot cocoa – which I can luckily recreate myself at home. Now I can even make homemade caramel sauce with this recipe from Caroline @ Armelle.
• I loved this custom sized mug cozy tutorial at Hazelnuts. Hers is for handle-less mugs, but it can be easily altered for any mug.
• Ree just wrote this amazing post about 10 important things she’s learned about blogging. If you haven’t read this one, you just have to – such a simple post but so inspiring and so classically Ree!
• If you’re like me and frequently have a pile of old IKEA catalogs lying around, you will love this idea for turning old magazines into paper dollhouses at Ohdeedoh (of course). Such a great idea and one that I’ll definitely be trying out soon!

One last picture to share before I go: I had to share one more picture from our ice cream excursion. We happened to park next to this older couple. The guy driving was on his phone and seriously parked kind of like a maniac (although we met them inside and they were super sweet) which made Dan and I laugh a bit and make a couple of “darned kids and their cell phones” jokes but then Dan couldn’t help but laugh harder when we got out of the car and he saw our cars parked next to each other. Guess which car belonged to the couple in their 20′s and which belonged to the couple in their 70′s?