What I learned this week:
1. How long two little boys can play with a pack of garage sale stickers that cost me less than two dollars. How many sheets of them they could go through in an hour… and that it was totally worth cleaning up later.
2. How glad a mama can be that her new carpet is on back order (when the week before it arrives, there’s a chocolate milk spill, three tubes of acrylic paint smeared on the dining room floor, a cat ‘accident’, and the baby gagged on something he ate off the floor and puked in the living room).
3. How heavy a box might get when it wasn’t designed to pack books in. And the proper way to tape the bottom of a box, might I add…
4. How many books a homeschooler can accumulate if she lives five straight years in the same house. And why it might be beneficial to go ahead and pay Lowe’s the extra money to help move stuff (heavy on the book cases) when they put the carpet in. Oh – and how to stage your closets and rooms to make your house look bigger and better for home buyers.
5. That your nose can feel broken when your braces are tightened hard enough. {poor big kids!} And finger burns don’t feel all that great, either… hot soup + mama’s pinky = 2 hours of ice water and 2 Tylenol.
6. Puzzle pieces don’t appear until you have boxed the puzzle itself and stacked at least three other heavy boxes on top of it.
7. Hand-me-down, wrap-around baby gates from the church pre-school that extend around my entire living room REALLY come in handy.
8. That it costs nearly a quarter per mile for me to go anywhere in my SUV, and how much a bus or train pass for a work commute really saves you per month in gas, wear-and-tear on your vehicle, toll charges, and traffic headaches.
9. My friends are really great. I knew this, of course, all along… but I love them for being there for me. My kids’ friends are really great, too. For the record, a few of them even gave up time this past weekend to help us pack closets and books.
10. That Lowe’s honors competitor coupons and deals… which will save me up to 200$ on my carpet. And no, they aren’t paying me to say that… although, I would work with them in a New-York Minute if they offered.
And that’s a wrap for this busy week… as I always say, “Learned something new today. Now I can go to sleep.”
{What have you been up to so far this summer?}
This week I learned that ice packs on my child’s back works better then cough medicine for bronchitis.