A Beautiful Day

Going into this whole 11 days, I was most worried about being lonely over the weekend. Ironically, today was the best day we've had here since Cliff left. It started out pretty sour with Nathan waking me up at 6:20, 1-2 hours earlier than his norm. For those of you who don't know, I consider any time before 7:00 am an evil time to be up in the morning. So you can imagine that I started the day thinking I was going to be tired and grumpy all day. Pleasantly, I was surprised. I managed to get the whole house cleaned up for tomorrow's open house--mopping, vacuuming, dusting, bathrooms, the works. I also gave the dogs a bath and enjoyed some time outside with the kids afterward on what turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon. Of course, a big factor in my attitude today probably came from the fact that I was able to get away alone thanks to my awesome babysitter who stayed with the kids during my last week of belly dance class. It was a lot of fun-our instructor is great at mixing focused practice of specific moves with lots of open, free, fun dance time. I'm going to miss her class!

The kids and I ended the day with a lot of wrestling and playing on the living room floor. Nathan enjoyed doing some peekaboo play with me and Laura. We really got him laughing hard tonight, which is so fun because he tends to be more reserved with laughter most of the time. Also this evening, Nathan finally started walking around the room behind his walker toy. He did a good job of keeping up with the walker and its wheels; now he just needs to learn how to turn the thing around when he gets to the wall! Laura and I started into her new box of basic addition flashcards, which was fun. And of course, she and I ended the night with our new tradition of watching Bugs Bunny cartoons on You Tube.

I had a nice surprise this afternoon when Cliff started instant messaging me on Facebook. He arrived in Granada today (in the south of Spain). After dinner, he found an internet cafe that only charged 1 euro for an hour of time on their computers, so we were able to "chat" for nearly an hour for less than 2 American dollars. They are having fun. Cliff is loving the European attitude toward life and thinks we would fit in better there than we do here. He said he's only coming back because of me and the kids. :-) Tomorrow is more sightseeing in Granada, and then they are off to Sevilla on Monday. He said he has more stories to share, but since he was typing on a Spanish keyboard, he decided to wait until we could talk via iChat in a couple of days. I'll post more then.

Tomorrow is yet another open house. A car drove by this evening while the kids and I were playing in the driveway; they were driving very slowly with the window down and looked sheepish when I said hi to them. This is the telltale sign of someone "checking out" our house-Cliff and I used to do this ourselves. I wanted to run after them and say "Buy it, please!", but thought that might come across a tad desperate. Here's hoping........!
Gina