preparing

It seems like a lot of this week was spent preparing. Preparing for Halloween, preparing for a garage sale, preparing for Steve's birthday, preparing for a writing retreat...

I worked on Halloween costumes for the girls. Mira wants to be a "rockstar bat." So I'm making her a rockstar costume and bat wings and she is wearing them together. That's Mira for you. Emilia wants to be Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon 2.  I got Mira's costume done Friday. It was super simple. Emilia's will be quite a bit harder. But I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Mira mostly figured out this configuration for Cecily's GoGo Smartwheels herself. We wanted to remember how to do it again next time, so I took a picture. :) For those of you with little ones, these are GREAT toys.

We had a garage sale yesterday, so Thursday, I helped a friend go through her storage space to find stuff to put in the garage sale. We had a bunch of stuff, but not enough to make for a big sale, so I asked a bunch of neighbors if they wanted to go in with us. This friend said she'd like to, but she didn't want to risk the spiders in her storage space. That's why I went in and helped. I also baked about 6 dozen giant cookies on Thursday to sell at the garage sale. Ends up, buying muffins from Costco is much less work and much more profitable than selling cookies.

But the sale was successful, though stressful, since no one was helping this year. It was just me and Steve and one of us had to be taking care of the girls.

This neighbor that I helped find stuff for the garage sale is the same neighbor that is babysitting the girls for me once a week. It's a service exchange sort of thing and it's been super helpful for me. And the girls LOVE her.  This is what they did this last week with the neighbor's bubble gun.

Steve's birthday is coming up in two weeks and he's turning 40. I'm trying to put some fun plans together for him. I hope they work out!

A pepper I grew in my garden. My first ever completely red pepper.

This coming week, my writing group is having a writing retreat. We are renting a condo not far from my house and writing and giggling for two days. I had to get the housing squared away and babysitting for the kids. The only thing left to do is figure out food and we are set! I'm excited for the writing time. And it's always a blast to spend time with friends away from the kids. I'm grateful Steve encourages me to do things like this. I've also been keeping up on my writing goals.

This next week will probably be more of the same.  I need to finish Halloween decorations and costumes, read all the submissions for my writing group, and do some more birthday planning. I'm looking forward to it. :)