We finally broke down and hired someone to cut our grass.  He’s pretty cheap, too.  We just have to keep his mower filled up with bubble solution and he’s good to go!

Quinn has taken an interest in fahfahs (that’s flowers for those of you who don’t speak Quinn).  He likes to point them out, try to figure out what color they are  (99% of the time he ends up saying they’re yellow) and smell them (but instead of sniffing the flower he ends up blowing on it- because he can’t figure out how to smell on demand yet).  He has found a favorite flower and loves to pick them and give them to me.  I love getting flowers from a man and these flower bouquets that Quinn picks for me are the loveliest, most beautiful bouquets I have ever received (sorry, Ryan).  Here is Quinn in action, working on a three flower bouquet for his adoring mama!

And for those critics out there who consider dandelions to be in the weed family, you’ve obviously never been given a freshly-picked dandelion bouquet from a child.  Because if you have, you would see that they are clearly not weeds but rather sunny little flowers.

Is it ridiculous that I’m this excited about a refrigerator?  Maybe, yes.  But let me tell you the story of her, and you’ll be excited to.  We went to Lowe’s a few weeks ago to get some new appliances as part of our plans for a budget kitchen makeover.  Our goal was stainless steal and cheap.  So we got an oven, dishwasher, microwave and fridge.  But not this fridge.  We got your typical standard model- freezer on top, fridge on bottom, no frills.  The guy told us all four would be delivered yesterday.  So we prepared by selling our old appliances via craigslist and had some pick-ups for them scheduled.  Well yesterday morning rolls around and we get a call from Lowe’s delivery guys- they are delivering our stove and dishwasher but don’t know anything about a fridge or microwave.  Um, what?  So, very calmly in my most professional tone, I called the manager at Lowe’s and let him know my GREAT unhappiness about not getting the appliances they promised when we already sold our other appliances and what were we going to do with food that needs to be cold or frozen and no appliance to do that?!?  Now this is where I must give Lowe’s credit- they consistently mess up our big orders with them but they also consistently rectify their mess by giving us a sweet deal.  Enter my lovely, beautiful, water and ice dispensing, automatic temperature sensing, digital display fridge.  This one happened to be in stock and met our requirements- stainless and energy star- so they agreed to deliver it to us that afternoon.  Here’s the bonus- they did so without charging us the additional cost of the fridge.  So bam- all of a sudden I have a fridge which is almost double the cost of the original fridge that we bought, without us having to pay an extra penny.

I love her.  She’s everything I always wanted in a fridge.  Ryan is even excited- mainly because the freezer has a shelf that is specifically labeled “pizza shelf”- I guess only frozen pizzas can go there- and also because a whole case of beer can fit on one shelf with plenty of room to spare.  Now I can actually see what food I have.  The bad thing- because of all of the extra room, our fridge looks bare.  And because of that, I’m off to Costco…

We’re in the middle of sprucing up our kitchen, which involves getting new appliances.  We’re big craigslist fans, so Ryan listed our old appliances on craigslist.  He had a good time writing the ads and all were pretty funny, but I think this one is my favorite.

Microwave: Great way to save time! – $75

This is a GE over the range microwave. It is in great condition. We are getting stainless steel appliances so that is the ONLY reason we are getting rid of it. It makes a mockery of popcorn, thaws chicken like it’s going out of style, and has more functions than an 11th grade math class. Yeah – if you like to microwave – this one’s for you!

The color is bisque. That’s like an off-white.

“But my other appliances are white. This will never work.”

WRONG! Bisque is the answer to your dreams. Just don’t wash the other appliances for like a month and suddenly everything will match! It’s a win-win! Less cleaning leads to matching appliances.

This is not one of those wimpy small microwaves that makes you wonder if your ramen is going to be hot after 10 minutes of cooking. This is a big boy.

I once threw the neighbors hairless Maltese in there on defrost for like 30 seconds and it came out all tan. KIDDING! KIDDING! But I could have – it’s that big and powerful!

And his writing apparently is effective, because we already had someone pick up the stove this morning and the other three appliances are on their way out soon as well.  Gotta love this guy!

Quinn was all amped to wear his Earth Day appropriate shirt today that said “be cute, don’t pollute”.  I’d like to take credit for purposely putting him in a shirt with an eco-friendly message, but I can’t- it was strictly a “what do you have clean that still fits you” coincidence.  Oh well, good message anyway.

Our family has two Earth Day goals for this year: start a compost and be better recyclers.  For the compost, we’re going to do a suburban compost pile and actually put it in a container with a top- which makes it neighbor and trash-eating-dog friendly.  I plan on doing something like this.  And as far as the recycling goal, we are extremely lucky in that our township accepts a majority of recyclable material curbside.  Cans, plastic, paper, magazines, glass, cardboard.  We even have a special day this year to recycle our electronics.  We don’t recycle enough of our paper and I think it’s because we don’t have a set place to put the paper when we discard it.  So I plan on setting up a little recycling center in our garage.  If you build it, they will come.  In this case the “you” is me and the “they” is me and Ryan!

Quinn has a favorite CD right now that he insists on making me play on our ride to daycare and on our ride home…and during breakfast…and dinner.  I’m sick of it but he always asks so nicely for me to play it- he says “choo-choo” and then does the sign for sing/music.  That means he wants me to play the train song and thus begins the dreaded CD.  After that, he begs me to skip the next song and play the moon song by saying “mooooon, mooon, moon, mooooon, please”.  So I put that on and if I’m lucky he sings the word moon at the end of each verse, which is hilarious to hear.  His new favorite song on the CD is called “New Morning” and he actually sings to that as well, although the words “new morning” sound like “mooooo moooormaaahhh”.  I tried to get it on video but he wouldn’t sing, although he did dance a little.  It was crazy Earth Day dancing!

*After watching it a few times, I feel the need to explain and interpret a few things about the video:

• The camera is shaking so much because I was dancing with Quinn.  I just couldn’t stop myself- that kid puts me in the mood to dance!
• I’m pretty sure that a few seconds into it Quinn grabs his diaper and says “pee pee”- guess the dancing shook the pee right out of him!  And when you’re dancing that hard, there is no time for a potty break!
• When I ask him what his name is and he say “feefee”- that’s what he calls Fenway.  Then when I ask him again and he says “Doo”- that’s what he calls himself.  Sounds nothing like Quinn but we go with it!  It’s better than calling himself “Pee” like he calls his Gram or “Doo-Doo” like he calls his daycare friend!

This evening while we were playing downstairs, Quinn grabbed his diaper and said “pee pee”.  We darted upstairs to the potty and he sat down on it, but no pee.  I think I missed the window during the 45 seconds it took to run to the potty and take his pants and diaper off.  But since he was already happily sitting on the potty, I gave him a book to see if anything would happen if he sat for awhile.  Nothing happened but it’s a start!  Not that I’m counting on him being potty-trained anytime soon, but I figure he can at least get used to the idea.  And Ryan claims it’s never too early to start reading on the toilet!

I took a big whopping zero pictures this weekend so, sorry, no new pictures of the world’s most adorable boy.  We were all too busy playing in the dirt.  Ryan and I were doing some major landscape work while Quinn was “helping” us.  He would pick up a handful of the mulch we just laid down and dump it in our weed bucket.  We didn’t have the heart to make him stop because he would so earnestly say “help” before picking up the dirt and then after he put it in the bucket he would turn to us with the biggest smile on his face- so proud of himself.

We started at 8 in the morning and worked until 6 in the evening.  We knew we should call it a day when a neighbor walked by and asked if we had been working for awhile.  When we told him yes, he said “I can tell.  You guys look pretty wiped out.  Time to go in and kick back some beers.”  Wise advice, Mr. Neighbor!  Our front yard was in bad shape and now looks pretty good- beds are in shape and mulched, new plants are in, we even created a stone walkway that I’m pretty proud of.  I’ll have to take a picture to show off our hard work.  And aside from a nice looking front yard, I also have a pretty sweet sunburn on the back of my neck.  It looks pretty ridiculous- just one stripe of red across the middle of my neck.  I lathered Quinn up with sunscreen about 10 times throughout the day but apparently forgot about my pasty skin.  Oh well, it’s just the beginning of my farmer’s tan- we have a lot more flower beds to work on this spring!

Finally a nice day here.  We celebrated by spending 2 hours outside after work and literally took Quinn inside kicking and screaming.  He pulled out his gardening tools the minute we got out of the car after daycare and was digging and throwing dirt everywhere.  He must have inherited his grandparents’ green thumbs, because this fondness for digging in the dirt and pretending to garden did not come from me!

Notice the flying dirt to the right of Quinn.  It was all in his hair and he probably ingested a few morsels of dirt with his dinner.  There’s protein in dirt, right?!?

Quinn got another incident report yesterday at daycare for biting one of his classmates.

Later that night I stayed up to make our dog Fenway a mix of ground turkey and brown rice to add to his food.

Does anyone see something wrong with this?  My kid bites and my dog gets home-cooked meals.  I think I have things backwards!

just because we haven’t had a good messy eating picture in a while…

I was particularly excited about this dinner because little did Quinn know that his beloved spaghetti sauce was actually 90% pureed carrots and only 10% spaghetti sauce.  I was so proud of my trick…and it made me realize that it doesn’t take much to get me excited!