Pet Peeve

A pet peeve is a minor annoyance that an individual identifies as particularly annoying to him or her, to a greater degree than others may find it.  [Wikipedia]

I never thought that I really had a pet peeve.  Sure, there have  been little things that bother me, but none that I could classify as a pet peeve.  Well, now I have one. I think I've had it for a while, but I just recently realized it.

My pet peeve is when people leave the windshield wipers going too fast for the amount of precipitation that is falling.

Strange, I know.  I guess that's the thing about pet peeves - I find it annoying to a greater degree than other people do.  I know all of the settings for the windshield wipers in our car.  The fast ones, the slowest ones, and all the ones in between.  If it's just barely raining I'll even go through the extra effort to simply hit the wipers once as needed to keep it clear in order to avoid over wiping. 

I think what made me notice it is that whenever I'm riding in the car with Kevin (who could care less how fast the wipers are moving as long as the window is clear)  I find myself at times asking him to turn the wipers down, or even just reaching over and turning them down myself.  The only way I can not be annoyed by excess windshield wiping is to try to not pay attention to them.  It's hard, and takes self control, but I can sometimes do it.

Cheese in the Living Room

I think Evelyn likes to do all of her naughty things right away in the morning - she must dream about it all night and then try to do as much as she can right away. 

This morning while I was washing dishes I started to wonder why Evelyn was being so quiet in the living room.  I walked into the room to find a bag of shredded cheese dumped all over the coffee table, couch, and floor.  Evelyn was holding the salt grinder - which had signs of being licked and also had cheese on it.  There was also cheese stuck to her face all around her mouth.  Oh how I wish I could find the charger for our camera battery so I could have taken a picture of it all. 

After a little thought, I realized what had happened.  Last night I had to feed Elsie right after supper and so I didn't put the food away right away.  Evelyn must have grabbed the cheese and brought it into the living room while I was busy with Elsie.  We left right away after dinner to visit a friend in the hospital and didn't get back until late.  The cheese sat in the living room all night.  Then in the morning, Evelyn found the cheese again after breakfast when Mommy wasn't around.  Since cheese is one of her favorite foods, what else was she to do but eat it?

Needless to say, it gave me an immediate reason to vacuum our living room which was in dire need of being vacuumed anyway. 

Random Thoughts

Sharp Photo sells life-sized cardboard cutouts.  I'm thinking I should have one made of myself so that I can stand it up in the hallway outside the door to the girls' room during nap time.  That way Evelyn will think I'm standing there and won't get out of her bed.

I ran the dishwasher at our new house today, and it. was. AWESOME.  There was an entire counter full of dishes that disappeared in a matter of minutes.  And I didn't have to wash any silverware. 

Have I mentioned that I hate washing silverware?  I think it's because you wash and wash and wash and your pile of dishes doesn't get any smaller.  You have to wash every nook and cranny of each piece and it just takes a long time. 

We made home made apple cider two days ago.  Man is that stuff good.  Warm it up on a cool fall day and sip away.  I also have 5 more gallons of it in our freezer for the winter. 

I washed 5 loads of laundry today.  What did people do before they had washing machines?  I guess they had a lot less clothes.  I am thankful for my washing machine.  I put in a bunch of dirty clothes, turn a couple of nobs, walk away and a little while later they're all clean.

I've been really emotional lately for no apparent reason.  Yesterday Evelyn pinched her fingers in a closet door and I started crying because she was crying.  Last night my brothers ate some of the pizza I had gotten for our dinner so I didn't get to eat as much as I had wanted to and when I got home that night I cried about that too.  Really?  I cried over pizza?  What's wrong with me?

I ate a salad for lunch today. 

I emptied 3 containers of moldy food out of the refrigerator. 

I like baskets.

Evelyn did a dance while she was eating her lunch meat today.  Kevin and I both laughed at her, but she just kept on boogieing. 

I had to use my spell checker to figure out how to spell that last word.  I don't think I've ever written it before: boogieing.

It's a rainy day here in Eau Claire.  I think I'm going to take a nap while the girls are sleeping and then drink some cider and fold clothes. 

New House

So yes, we are now living in our new home.  We really like it a lot, and are excited to start working on it.  Here are some pros and cons about our new home:

PROS:
*More bedrooms and bathrooms
*Much bigger yard for Evelyn to play and run around in
*Babysitting-aged neighbors just next-door
*A DISHWASHER!!!!!
*Lots of puppies for Evelyn to see and pet
*You can actually put a crying child in one part of the house and not hear them in another part
*2 fireplaces
*A built in hutch
*At least double the cupboard space I had before
*A 3-car attached garage
*We're 1 1/2 blocks from a park
*There is more storage here than we'll ever be able to fill up
*Close to the mall and grocery store
*Only 2 miles from our storage shed for work
*Lots of big windows facing east and south

CONS:
*Evelyn can't tell where the driveway ends and the road starts as they are both blacktop.  This means I have to watch her closely when she plays in the driveway.
*I don't want to even see the first heating bill.
*Bigger house means a lot more to clean and keep picked up.
*We're on the opposite end of town from family.

As you can see, there are a lot more pros than cons about our new place.  We love just about everything about it. It'll be a great home for us to grow into - one neighbor even offered to sell us their cedar play set for the girls.  We've moved into a higher class neighborhood than we were in before.  It's been fun to meet some of the neighbors and get settled in.

Moving to the South Side

It all happened so fast.  We now own two houses.

My grandmother passed away three months ago.  My uncle was living in her house, but a few weeks ago he moved to another place.  We wrote an offer to purchase my grandmother's house from the estate a couple of weeks ago.  We had the closing yesterday, so now it's ours!

When will we move?  Well, There's quite a bit of cleaning that needs to get done at the new house, so as soon as that gets done, I will start to gradually move the 'non-essentials' over the course of probably a week.  Then we'll take a day probably the weekend after labor day and move all the big stuff.

We still have a few things left to do on our current house, but it makes more sense to finish them after we are moved out. [refinishing floors, refinishing kitchen cupboards, and a few little things.] 

Where will we be moving?  We'll be on the south side of Eau Claire, but still in town.  Between Golf Rd. and Hamilton Ave. not far from State St.  For the first time in my life I will live on the 'south side' of Eau Claire.  Our new house will be just 2 miles from our storage shed where Kevin goes every day.  We'll be much closer to where I do most of my grocery shopping, and we'll still be close to a Menards.

The house needs quite a bit of work.  Another fixer-upper you might say.  We have so many ideas of things we want to do, and sometimes stay up late drawing maps of the house, and talking about all of our ideas.

At first I was sad to be leaving our current home just when we've gotten it mostly fixed up and nice.  Now I am just so excited to have a bigger place (going from a 2bed 1bath to a 3bed 4bath) with a bigger yard, and the closest neighbors are across the street instead of 10' from our bedroom window. 

What will happen to our current home?  We're hoping to have everything finished and put it on the market by the end of September.  We can't actually sell it until Feb. 1st 2012 because we took the first time home buyer tax credit.  We just want to get it up sooner so that people can see it before winter.  If someone were interested in renting it, we may consider that option until we are able to sell it.

So, needless to say, we have a crazy couple of weeks coming up.  I've started boxing a few things up and sorting things to get rid of.  I forgot how much work it is to move.  When we moved before it was just Kevin and I and we were going from a small apartment that couldn't hold much and we were newly married so we didn't have much either.  Now we have 2 kids and a house + garage full of stuff.  Let the fun begin!

Cutest Kid or Facebook Junkie?

So, Evelyn didn't win the cutest kid contest.  Another girl (who was cute too) won by almost 30 votes.  Kevin and I were talking about the results the other day, and decided that this other girl only won because her parents must be the kind of facebookers that are friends with everyone they ever met or knew in their entire lives.  Kevin and I on the other hand, have both purged our friends (a couple of times) and limit them to people we are actually currently friends with.  Kevin has 222 friends and I have 158.  103 of those are friends we share.  In order for us to have won the contest, we would have had to have gotten every one of our mutual friends to like Evelyn's photo.  Most of the people we are friends with are not facebook junkies either, and don't like other pages just because one of their friends tell them to.

I pretty much knew going into it that we wouldn't win, but thought I would give it a shot anyway.  It was a good ploy for the photographer to get lots of people to like her page.  Before the contest when I looked at her page, 175 people liked it.  Now there are over 500 people connected to her page.  At any rate, Evelyn's still the cutest in our book (besides her sister of course).  And we wonder how she would do in a contest judged by people completely unrelated to the children.  Guess we'll never know.

Those Eyes

Yesterday I stopped and found myself staring into Evelyn's eyes.  She was goofing around and being silly, and I noticed the joy and excitement that shone through her eyes.  I had to just stop and stare into her eyes for about 5 minutes while she played.  I guess I've never really taken the time to just sit and look into her eyes - those beautiful eyes that every stranger comments about.

Since really noticing her eyes yesterday, I have been watching them more closely.  They are such a means of expression.  The way they well up with tears when she is hurt or upset, the way they light up when Daddy comes home or treats are mentioned, the way joy and excitement shine through them, the way she discerningly stares at a stranger or something unfamiliar, they way they look at you when she gives a hug or kiss.

Her eyes show a lot.  If she got enough sleep, if she's trying to tease, if she likes something, if she doesn't like something, if she's not sure about something, if she's ready for bed.  I could go on and on.  I guess I just haven't taken the time to enjoy some of the little things about Evelyn, like her eyes, and now that I have I really enjoy it.