4 Happy Family The personal blog of Kevin R. Hoffmann

I really hope this is true

If this is someone's attempt at humor, I need to meet him or her. If it isn't, pretty scary.

 

As the usual ebb and flow of this blog goes, right now I haven't been showing it much love. Work has been super crazy and we are doing another push on the house. Spent the weekend outside and my raking muscles are sore and I am feeling out of shape.

Next week is vacation to wild and exotic Iowa for Tulip Time and some relation in Des Moines.

Until next time...

School and so forth

Last night, we booked a sitter and enrolled Maya in school for the Fall. She is in the "crickets" class and will be going for a couple of hours a day on MWF. It was pretty surreal seeing all of the little chairs and tables and thinking that she will be here in the Fall. They really do grow up fast.

 After registering we took advantage and had a mini-date night. We gabbed some excellent food from Thai Noodles cafe here in Libertyville and went ot see our favorite bartender at the Island Tap afterwards. We got home at 9 and C took the sitter home. Maya has been really good with her lately. She is a real awesome kid that is great with Maya. When the doorbell rings Maya usually freaks out and want us to pick her up.  No different this time, but when she saw it was the sitter she ran to the door to let her in. It was all pretty sweet. For the second time in a row there were no tears when we left; it was pretty nice.

 After C dropped her off she told me that Maya had an accident. She was wearing big-girl panties; she has been really great about peeing on the potty, but going poop has been another issue. Well, apparently C fed her Taco Bell and Ex-lax brownies all day because the sitter found Maya hiding in a corner. She asked her what she was doing and she told the sitter to go away.

At first she thought the dog had gas and then realized that Maya had evacuated in her Dora panties. The sitter picker her up and took her to the bathroom so that she could finish. When she pulled her underwear off she did not realize how much was in there and it rolled down her leg and onto the floor and so forth. The sitter told C that she called her Mom and did not know what to do, but got her cleaned up, bathed and put to bed. We came home and cleaned up the mess.

We are still working on it, but there is a little trepidation because she is expected to be fully trained by the Fall. Not too worried, yet, but we are hoping for a breakthrough.

The weather has finally come around a bit and we are still finishing up some stuff around the house. Work has been a total time suck and I have trips to California, Toronto and a family vacation to Iowa. Yes, Iowa. We are looking forward to it. First off, we are spening a couple of days in Pella for Tulip Time like last year. It is pretty much C's college girlfriends rehashing memories in a barrage of tequila. After that we are staying in Des Moines for 5 days to just unwind, relax and live at a slower pace. Nothing, terribly exciting, but after all the house and job drama it is finally nice just to take a break.

Weekend Round Up

Last Friday I still had a low-grade fever so I took it easy and worked from home trying to dig through the impending avalanche of work that I owed. By Saturday morning I was feeling much better.  We sold the car the week before and are now reveling in the openness of our garage; we don’t have to try and squeeze Maya into her car seat any more. We just park the station wagon right in the middle of the garage just like an H2 owner across two spaces at the grocery store. 

Instead of placing an as in the paper or hanging a shingle, we decided to take the no-frills, no creepy people in the house approach of selling to Carmax in

Glenview. It really was as easy as advertised (with a self-inflicted twist), you bring them your car they evaluate and give you  a (pretty fair) price that is good for 1 week or X amount of mile. We probably could have gotten a few bucks more if we sold it ourselves, but this was more conducive to our situation. 

I had taken a half day off work to take it back to complete the paperwork. Of course it was snowing and nasty outside. We grabbed the title and registration and headed out. C wanted to drive it one last time. It has a manual transmission and made you feel a little younger driving it compared to the Mom-mobile that we use now. One problem, the self-inflicted twist. We could not find the keys. Though we just had them the day before they were now completely AWOL.

We searched and checked all of the usual chucking places and rechecked them when they turned up empty. Courtney dumped and sorted her purse a few times and I pulled the desperation card of checking to see if they were locked in the car. After about 45 minutes of futility we started to check those places where there is no way in hell it could have ended up here but you are out of ideas so you must check anyway. That is where we found them. Apparently Maya had been playing dressup and decided that the car key was a crucial accessory to that day’s ensemble and had tucked it away with her stuff.  With the snow getting ready to start in earnest and time running out in the day, we loaded up the cars and made the 45 minute caravan through traffic. Once there, everything went well. We got up to the point that we were signing the car over when Courtney had a startling realization that when she dumped out her purse she never put her wallet back in. We could not complete the transaction.   

The manager was nice enough to let us fax over a copy of her license the next day and we received the check a week and a half later. (Sent to our old house. Not sure why they still had that address.) Saturday we went to the mega mall by our house. There is a Bass Pro store there so we let her check out the aquarium and sit on one of the boats (which she did not want to leave). Maya has been asking about the beach a lot lately and whenever we play with her little car driving around the downstairs she always says that is where she is headed.  

In other non-frustrating news. We took Maya to see her first movie last Sunday at the cheap theater by her house. We had been building up Horton Hears a Who all week. (Originally she was going to go see it with her friend Parker from the city, but my illness on Tuesday scared them from coming up. She absolutely loved the entire experience. She sat on my lap most of the time gleefully eating popcorn and asking a million questions. Well, one question: “What’s that?” about a million times.  The movie was just OK, but it was a lot of fun seeing how excited she was for the experience. She is already asking to see another.

 
Maya has also been really digging her Cars pull-ups. Here, she is wearing four of them (3 visible). Still working on trying to get her to go #2.