excuses, excuses

Sorry, friends.  I know it's been a while since I've blogged.  I have a gabillion blog posts on the back burner, and I really need to start getting some of them out there!  Bear with me, it may get worse before I get better.  I'm sure you all remember me whining about having to sell our house and move.  Well, our house is officially on the market.  Which means it needs to look nice.  Like all the time.  Regardless of the fact that I have two littles who delight in the utter destruction of our house.  And it LOOKS like we have children in our house, which is statistically worse than having your house be the site of a homicide.  Just kidding, I have no idea about statistics, just the word of our real estate agent.  Who apparently thinks our house looks crap and blames our children.  Well, he's not alone!  I blame my children, too. 

We've spent the past week doing the following to prepare the house to be on the market:
1. Packed away 10, yes, TEN big totes full of clothes to make the closets look nice and organized.  Yes, I'm saving maternity clothes AND my old work clothes.  My future is foggy.
2. I painted. a lot. of. stuff.  Not walls, mind you, but furniture and whatnots.  The furniture being our bedside tables and a set of bathroom drawers.  The whatnots being 2 mirror frames.  There was a lot of the color turquoise being used.  It all turned out pretty great, I'll post pictures soon.
3. Cleaned windows.  And then cleaned them again when feral children licked them. 
4. Took down all the family/baby/hey-look-at-my-children-dammit pictures that were ALL over the house and replace them with the cool artwork we used to hang up before we felt the intense need to wallpaper our house in baby photos. 
5. Bought and assembled the big-boy-bed for Fletcher.  (*sniff, sniff*)  I will also post pictures soon, cause it's a pretty cool bed.
6. Weeded.  Watered.  Mowed.  Trimmed.  Cleaned up sticks and debris from short-yet-intense storm with hurricane force winds. 
7. Cleaned, cleaned, cleaned, and cleaned.  I mean, I do actually clean on a regular basis.  But this was waaaay beyond my standards.
8.  Blah, blah, blah.  You get the picture.  I've been busy! 

So now the house is all beautiful, and you can barely tell that children live here.  Ah, the perfect house.  And then just when I thought I couldn't take all the excessive sorting and cleaning, we're done!  For the moment. 

One of my best friends, Karen, came into town from Arizona which is the best excuse for kicking back and relaxing after all that hard work.  We drank coffee, relaxed, played with the littles and then left in a hurry once Brian was back from work to go out!

You can see in that picture that I'm really excited to be leaving the children at home with Brian.  I love my friend, Karen.  She's very glamorous, yet down to earth.  She is a great shoulder to cry on, and makes me laugh until my sides hurt.  She is one of the loves of my life.  And I mean that in a very platonic friendly way.

We met our good friend, Katie, out for dinner.  We ate too much Indian food, drank wine and champagne, and laughed hard and loud.  It felt good.  We closed down the restaurant, too!  They were locking the door behind us.  So we sat in the dark at the tables on their patio and talked and laughed more.  We watched all the waiters go home and talked and laughed some more. 

And when I got home I found that not only did Brian feed, bathe, and put the kiddos to bed, but he also cleaned up the dishes and put away all the toys.  Perfect.  It was all the perfect day to help me realize that life is good.