Seven Quick Takes Friday, Vol. 26

I
Mobility, here we come! In the past 48 hours Little Bear has begun crawling forward AND "cruising" along furniture. Goodbye, days of setting him in one spot and expecting him to stay there... on the up side, he's much happier about being set down while I work, probably because he knows he can go get into trouble.

II
We need to babyproof the house. This weekend. No more procrastinating. Any suggestions for things I might not think of?

III
Our landlords are seriously awesome. I called them on Wednesday to let them know our dishwasher was leaking, and within a half hour he'd come by to check on it. He determined that it wasn't repairable, and I resigned myself to a few days without a dishwasher... I know, I know, end of the world... and then I got a call that evening that he'd picked up a new one and could he install it Thursday morning?

IV
Today is sunny and beautiful, nearly 32 degrees, so I'm going to refrain from complaining about the four inches of snow we got this week and the ridiculous below-zero April we've had so far. Hopefully spring will stay this time!
One perk of living in a northern desert-class biome is that spring is not a rainy season: once winter finally gives up, we can expect weeks straight of nearly uninterrupted sunshine.

V
Wednesday saw my first-ever attempt to cook a whole chicken... The experiment could have gone worse. Dinner was fine, the bird cooked well but was still moist; I could probably have managed to save more meat bits from it than I did, and if I was really a good housewife I would have saved the carcass to make stock, but it didn't happen, because of all the nasty things you encounter in the kitchen chicken is undoubtedly one of the ones I despise most. And I was all done touching that thing.
Sigh. I think part of the problem was that the whole reason I cooked a whole bird--knowing that I was going to passionately detest the entire process--was that thought: if I was really a good housewife, I'd.... Why can't I be happy with myself for being "a good housewife" in other ways, instead of adding on all sorts of criteria?

VI
Matt certainly didn't think that I had to cook a whole chicken to be a good wife! As he (taking pity on his clueless wife) was carving the chicken for dinner, he informed Little Bear that "real chicken comes in pieces."

VII
I can give eyewitness testimony that the sun is truly back to its absurd summer hours here: at what should have been oh-dark-hundred hours this morning, Little Bear woke us by sitting up, patting Matt's face until he opened his eyes, and then bouncing and trying to climb over me to get to the window, where sunshine was pouring in. Time for blackout curtains.


Say a prayer for our usual host, Jen, and her new little one who is in the NICU with breathing trouble! Thanks to Grace of Camp Patton for hosting this week.