Seven for Friday

1. On Wednesday night, Olivia had a make-up class for gymnastics for one day that was missed because of snow. Many of her class opted not to make-up the class, and it was a make-up for other classes too. So she was one of six girls in this class, and she was the youngest by at least four years. There were ten-year-olds and at least one teenager. They were doing stations and practicing the fundamentals of back handsprings. And Olivia got to participate at her three-year-old level. She learned SO MUCH in just that one class from all the hands-on attention of the four instructors. AND she did her first cartwheel! She just watched the bigger girls doing them in warm-ups, and decided to go for it! She'd advance to the next level SO QUICKLY if this was the way her class went every week.

2. I'm supposed to transition to a new diet for the sake of fending off future endometriosis. I know what kinds of foods to eat, but I guess I'm just being reminded of how difficult it is to eat healthy foods in our society. Healthy foods are more expensive. And you have to buy them fresh, so more trips to the store. It's going to be a challenging lifestyle change...not because of WHAT I should eat, but HOW to get that in our house and on the plate on a regular basis.

3. It's Thursday as I write this and someone (one of the kids) is bleeding all over my new, thankfully not carpet, floor. I keep finding little streaks on the floor. I'm pretty sure it's Olivia, who has an old cut on one toe and a fresh (newly bandaged) cut on another. I finally made her wear socks to protect the Oriental rug in the living room. I worry overly much about that stupid rug and all the unpleasant child-produced filth it must be absorbing right there in the middle of the living room. I'm starting to think it might be time to suck it up and buy a cheap area rug for the living room so I can move the Oriental back to the master bedroom, where it was before we decided we couldn't live with the echo in the newly-floored living room. I'm learning that there are a lot of hidden costs in reflooring your house.

4. We have been plagued by the annual post-holiday cold this week. I'm mostly over it, but Olivia is still snotty and miserable. The evidence: We've emptied two brand-new kleenex boxes and put a dent in the supply of three more. Since Monday. Gah!

5. Sometime in the Spring last year I started getting developmental emails from Enfamil. "Your baby is 3 months old...get the best nutrition available." I'd get these every couple of months, adjusted for the fantom baby's age, with coupons and the like. I had signed up for their family rewards (or whatever it is called) program when Olivia was born specifically for these coupons. But I never returned to the site once we switched her to milk at a year. And the emails disappeared for a long time, until fantom baby apparently showed up on their radar. So I'm wondering if they just have some sort of robo program that estimates when, statistically, your next baby should arrive so they can start shoving ads at you again. I guess it's a sensible marketing concept. Except it kind of has the opposite effect for me, Ms. Infertile, who has been simultaneously waiting for a second adoption and spending time and money annihilating endometriosis in hope of a possible chance at pregnancy, someday in the vague and uncertain future. Dear Enfamil: You are not helping.

6. I miss warm weather. Winter is not even a month old and I'm already over it. I want to get outside and run. Running, by the way, has been abandoned completely. I tried it a couple of months ago. I began right before I got the evil upper-respiratory-infection-from-hell that knocked me down for the better part of two weeks, and then it got cold outside. I want to do it, though. I do. I just want to do it when the weather is not lung-stingingly cold.

7. We're going to see a movie on Sunday, and I'm overly excited about it. The last movie we saw was in January of LAST year. Yeah. I'm also excited about this particular movie. I got chills when I first saw the trailer on TV that announced that Narnia was back in theaters. Love the books. The movies have brought them to life. Much like the LOTR series, the movies have (thus far) been faithful to the spirit of the books. That doesn't happen often for books-turned-movies, in my experience.

Happy weekend!