stuff

I'd love to take credit for both of these fascinating images! Both are courtesy of Raven (!! I finally figured out how to make the link work!). She made me the adorable calendar you see .. it is my desktop.. and Aunt Sissy's & Aunt Jaime's desktop.. and I think both Grandpa John and Grandpa Jamieson too! I'm hoping for one every month.. and also hoping Raven doesn't start to charge a fee.

There was one heck of a fire in downtown Knoxville yesterday. Three (or four?) warehouses burned.. and at least one of them was over 1oo years old. They were all vacant, but gorgeous, buildings. The fire burned for hours. One of those awe-inspiring events.

You know it's never a good sign when you go to pick up your child from school and she's in a different outfit than what she had on in the morning! That happened to us on Tuesday. Little Missy had quite the bathroom event, requiring a change of clothes. AND, even tho she's only been there a month, the outfit(s) I have at school (left there for just such events) are already too small! Her poor little toes were about to bust out of the footies! So I'll be bringing in some new outfits.. probably some that are currently too big! Anyway.. the good news was that after her little 'event' she was in a GREAT mood and slept like a rock! And hey... we didn't have to be the ones to clean her up.. so that's another positive.

Josh has been working feverishly on a pitch this week.. working day and night.. today is the last day before it's due.. poor guy. It will be nice for him to just sit down and relax tonight (after we bathe Eileen and make dinner and clean up the house and make tomorrow's lunches and coffee and bottles...). We have to watch last night's Lost, and there will be a new Office and we still faithfully watch Smallville. And we have three weeks worth of Gilmore Girls. Oh, and CSI will be a new one tonight too! What did we ever do without Tivo?!

Oh.. and we have our first school holiday event next week - Valentine's Day. It's funny.. when we became parents.. we focused on making sure Eileen was well-fed and clean and warm and happy. Things like school parties are not the first thing on one's brain. So early this week when I picked up her daily activity sheet there was an extra page attached. A list of all the babies names and all the teachers names. It was simply titled "Valentine's Day." now what am I supposed to do with that?!? My mind instantly reverts to when I was in 1st or 2nd grade.. trading Snoopy and Cabbage Patch Valentine cards with everyone. And now I am thinking: this is a room of 3-10 month old children.. the older ones crawl and the younger ones sit in the swings.. none of them talk and they most exciting thing they eat are pureed sweet potatoes and bananas. What do they get for Valentine's day?!

Luckily, a girl I work with has her daughter in Eileen's class. Maddie is about 8 mos old. So Jen, being a mother 3 mos longer than me, is a qualified expert! I talked to her to find out protocol. We decided that baking treats for the teachers and the cheapie store-bought cards for the babies is fine. I don't want to be breaking the budget for little people who have no clue what Valentine's Day is.. but I don't want to be that slacker Mom who does nothing! oh the pressure! This is worse than being in middle school!

There ya go.. there's my stream of consciousness blog entry for the day... Happy Almost Friday!