Today

Today was a fruitful day. In McStew-speak, that means we all got dressed and got out of the house. It's the little things that thrill us here.

This morning, Annalivia, Daniel and I ate breakfast at the table together. That was fun and sort of new for us. We usually eat breakfast in shifts. But I think we're going to try this more often. Daniel and Annalivia do lots of laughing at each other when we are all at the table. And once we firmly establish that Annalivia is not allowed to have Daniel's baby bananas until he is done with them, we're good to go.

We went grocery shopping at several different stores today and Annalivia had great behavior. She had chosen to wear a pale green Sunday dress today and I let her. She also decided to carry around with her a pink stuffed bunny rabbit that was mine when I was little. So lots of people smiled upon her and she responded graciously. Daniel was also in a pretty good mood in his baby pouch which always enthralls strangers. We had lots of people smiling upon all of us today in the stores, actually. That was sort of nice.

In the process of all that, I think I ditched a plumber who was giving the church a quote. I got stuck in traffic on my way back to church and, I think, made an erroneous assumption in my eagerness to get home and not drag children out into the rain. This wouldn't be a big deal, except that I didn't really divulge my part of the mistake to parishioner coordinating the whole effort and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it could have seemed like I tried to swindle the parishioner. The guy is a good guy and very understanding, so I'll explain tomorrow, but it was one of those times when a long and drawn out dawning-realization reveals something negative about one's own actions. Not so much fun.

Anyway, it was good to get home from shopping and upon arriving home, I attempted to unpack groceries. A little while later, it occurred to me that I had not put the package of bacon I had purchased in the refrigerator. Annalivia had been, ahem, standing on it, so I asked her where it was and she said, "maybe in van." No, I assured her, it was not in the van. I asked her if she had taken it somewhere and she ran into her bedroom to show me the bacon chillaxin' with her stuffed animals in her toybox. Odd child.

So, bacon recovered, I proceeded to cook it up for BLT's with the anonymous tomatoes that were waiting on our porch the other day when we returned from some miscellaneous errand or other. We also had German potato salad, since we had bacon fat sitting around. It was all delicious, if I do say so myself. But we did not have enough bacon for lunch tomorrow so we have been forced to cook up another pound this evening. Our lives are hard.

And in other news -- we met with and hired a lawyer this evening to handle our personal injury cases from the accident. We both realized we couldn't possibly figure out our way around the settlement process, so it should feel like a relief, but we're both feeling a little flattened by it all. Not sure why, but we are grateful for the fact that someone else will deal with it from now on. And since we are paying them a lot, we're assuming they'll do a fine job. We hope.

And on that note -- to bed! Hope all is well out there in your worlds, blog friends. Good night.