I did it... yes, I did.

Soooo.... we got a very lovely couch and chair combo. Wanna see 'em?

Second hand. Beautiful. Amazing condition. Priced right...

...and we cannot get the sofa down the stairs to the family room, cannot even fit it through the door at the very top. On the flip-side... we are gonna be needing a couch to replace the one we currently have upstairs, it's a loaner from my folks who will be coming home some time in Aug or Sept. But that's a pretty looong time to live with that many big couches in the front room. But it looks like that's exactly what we are going to do. Yay.

Will I sell the couch and chair? Are you CRAZY!? I love those things!

All of which does nothing to solve the problem of seating in the basement. Sigh. Looks like it's time for us to get comfy on the carpet.

I am considering the cheap leather-ish (bonded leather?) sectional that comes in a couple of pieces so that we could slide them downstairs and put them together and then never move them again. Ever.

Unfortunately "cheap" is still $700. On top of the $450 we just dropped on our early replacement couch (and chair) for upstairs. NO T MADE OF MONEY here, people!

I did the following too, and that's all the segue ya get:

The other night I walked around the corner to the hallway to discover Lilac trying to teach Birdie how to climb the hallway walls by propping her hands and feet spread eagle on each opposing wall. Seriously, the girl can apparently wedge herself all the way up to touch the ceiling.

OBVIOUSLY the thing to do is stop such dangerous and potentially destructive behavior. But I could hear the note in Birdie's voice, and easily see the way she was "trying" to learn to do this climby/wedgie thing. I could see that she didn't trust her own body or ability to learn this. Like she "couldn't" do it, so she was sort of flailing about and getting frantic, and feeling like a failure. This bugged me more than the footprints that Lilac was leaving on my walls, so I ... ahem... well I coached Birdie a little.

Yeah. I encouraged my kid to learn to climb the walls. Whaddah schmuck I am! In any case she DID learn and now I have all kinds of sizes of footie-prints all down the hallway walls.

Whatevs. Better than boogers, and I have wiped more than my fair share off the hallway walls, so I know of whence I speak.

Witty and Newsy (newsy anyhows)

Well, fiddle-dee-dee! Turns out I was dreaming, and the blog fairy did NOT, in fact, visit my blog with witty and newsy posts!

I could have SWORN that she wrote one about how the very next day after that last post, everything got warmish and huge amounts of that snow melted off, filling up one of our window wells. Was only by dint of some hard and ickky labor by Birdie and myself, combined with much hopping about and yapping like lap-dogs by the rest of the crew that we did not flood out again.

Around about the time that Birdie announced that she couldn't fill, tote or dump one single more bucket of gravel, or help with one more shop-vac full of murky water that one of our Home Teachers knocked on our door with a plate of holiday cookies in his hand. I was pretty bushed too, and I really didn't want to call Dadguy home early because he was struggling at work to finish up some things that HAD to be done before he could take off for Christmas, so I asked poor Brother C to help. I swear though... fifteen to twenty minutes later the well stopped filling, whether the supply had started to freeze up again for the night or whatevs.... just glad it did.

******************************************

Christmas was wonderful, and while I am glad it's over, I am a little perturbed at Santa Clause for not giving me MY wish of the loan of a few dozen of his elves for the clean-up of the holiday decorations and the tree.

Which is still up.

And decorated.

Yeah.

*******************************************

Looking forward to this spring when my little sis moves back to Utah from Baltimore. Yesterday as I was driving I overheard Lilac telling her sisters that she "...can't wait till my Aunt T'Amy comes back 'cause she will twuhhl me all I WANT!"

********************************************

Yesterday all the kids had off of school for MLK day, and I decided to take them and one of Birdie's friends to go to the dollar theater showing of the Owls of Ga'Hoole. On the way to the theater that is a few towns north of us, we got caught in traffic from an accident on the freeway and were already five minutes late when we pulled in to the parking lot and saw the most epic line I have ever seen for tickets. We gave up and decided to hit a Redbox and get the movie to show at home, which was great except the kids wanted to put the couch, which is one of those metal framed futon couch thingees, into the bed position. I told them to wait a sec till I got Henry down for his nap, but by the time I got back downstairs the girls were looking at an almost flattened out futon, baffled as to why it wouldn't lay all the way flat. Yes indeedy, four little girls who couldn't have more than 200 lb combined, had managed to strip the bolts and warp the metal holding the thing together, by trying to shove the back part down in a way it wasn't supposed to go. Can't really get to mad. Piece a crap can't hold up to a couple of scrawny prepubescent girls? Phaugh! Can't really get mad... thing wasn't comfortable or much to look at, but we were hoping to make it last a few more years. Sigh...

Would just go on Craiglist (or rather, KSL.com 'round here) but Dadguy is so VERY allergic to cats and some dog that it limits many of our choices.

Still.

Broke.

Probly will try to get a 2nd hand couch anyways.

And HOLY CRAP is Henry hard on our belongings. Just the other day he salted Pearl's Sea Monkeys that Santa gave her. We tried hard to save 'em by switching out their water, but they were all cooked by the second day anyways.

I swear, he's either breaking it, pooping on it, bleeding on it or flushing it.

Wait... what was I talking about?