Summer is really killing my ability to update my blog, isn’t it? (Right, because I was so much better in the Winter, *cough*.)

Since I’m incapable of paragraphical (is that a word? It is now.) thought, here are some random bits over the past several days.

1. On Friday we got up early because Breanna had a doctor’s appointment. She weighs 28.5 pounds and is 36.5 inches tall. People always think she’s short, but she just has shorter legs than Hayley. Otherwise, she’s not that short in general and she’s going to be pretty tall as well, I think.

2. She really doesn’t like seeing doctors, which is understandable because most times she either feels fine but gets a needle jabbed in her leg or she feels like crap. However, she was relatively courteous to the nurse and the doctor. At one point the doctor said she was pretty good for her age since a lot of kids in that range scream and cry when you look in their ears or whatnot; I told him it was just because when she’s nervous about something she just tunes the world out and pretends no one exists.

3. She did perk up at the end when they gave her a free book. The children’s hospital is promoting literacy and reading to your kids by giving free books to all the children who come in for any reason. Breanna was ecstatic to get a Clifford the Big Red Dog book. As for reading to your kids, they clearly don’t know about her tendency to rip the book from your hands and toss it across the room. She much prefers looking at them by herself.

4. On Saturday, Hayley was invited over to her grandparents’ house for the day. Breanna was napping when Hayley left so it was only an hour later that she found out what had happened. She came out to the living room and asked where George was. I said he had gone to do some work at a friend’s house. Then she asked where Hayley was. When I said she had gone out, Breanna sat on the floor with her head on the couch and pouted. I told her to eat some lunch and we’d find something to do even though it was too hot to go to the park right then. I was actually about to pull out the big Rubbermaid container to make a ghetto wading pool for her, but George came home and said our friends Dean and Jo had invited us over. That settled it! We headed over there and spent the afternoon wetting our legs in the sprinkler, playing with the dog, and eating souvlaki for supper. Breanna decided she had had a suitable amount of fun – though she did still miss Hayley enough to call her to say hi on the phone.

5. They had built a new deck in their yard, and when Dean and George went to the hardware store for a minute, Dean came back with a little bistro set – a round table and two chairs made out of eucalyptus. George said it would be a good size for our balcony too and that it was only thirty bucks. We decided to go get one next week, but it turned out Jo really didn’t want it since they already had a set of furniture on the deck and she didn’t want more. We took it off their hands for them, saving them the nightmare of returning something and we didn’t have to wait to get it.

6. I love it. We moved here in 2000 and for eight years I’ve been wanting to do something with our balcony. I always said I couldn’t live in an apartment without a balcony because I’d feel claustrophobic, but in all honesty, I haven’t sat out there much at all. It gets a lot of hot, afternoon sun and there’s no roof or canopy so it’s blazing out there. I didn’t use it at night because there was no table and it wasn’t inviting. I still haven’t planted any flowers, but at least now I have this set and it makes the whole thing so much more cozy than it was.

LOVE.

7. After we left Dean and Jo, one of George’s friends came over for the remainder of the evening. I set up the table and chairs, despite George rolling his eyes at me in amusement over my lack of patience whenever I have something new – if I get something, I must use it NOW NOW NOW. The last laugh was mine when I came out to the living room after putting the kids to bed, only to discover George and his friend had gone outside and were sitting on the balcony, sipping vodka and enjoying the evening. We have a couple of those white plastic deck chairs everyone owns, so I pulled one of those up too and the three of us sat outside until about midnight, coming in only because it started to rain.

8. Today was rainy so that shot my plans to have my coffee outside on my balcony, but really it wouldn’t have been that relaxing anyway what with two kids who would want to be out there too. Since it poured in the afternoon, I got out the big rocks I brought home from the lake up north and set up some paint. They painted happily at the table, decorating their rocks, and I actually got all my work done (which was hopping because Angelina Jolie had her twins), and was able to relax with my excellent book for a bit.

9. And now that I’ve finished my cup of tea, I’m seriously considering slipping into bed and going to sleep at a relatively decent hour (11 pm is really good for me). I hope your weekend was as enjoyable as mine. Tell me what you did!