Retail Therapy Day

I am working on a series of posts about breastfeeding, and still have many more posts related to cloth diapering to edit and publish, but for today I thought I'd actually post about what I'm doing -- today. Before I started reading blogs much, I thought that that's what most of them were, because a "web log" sounds like a daily journal to me. Obviously, blogs are sometimes daily journals, and can be very popular as that, but most of the ones I read are more like articles or editorials than personal journals. I'm still in the early stages with this blog, so I'm experimenting with different styles of writing, and different topics, and thinking that I'll naturally start to focus in on what is best for me over time. This flies in the face of all of the advice that I've gotten from friends, and from professional sites such as Pro Blogger and his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Oh well. Without further ado, my day today:

Average has the day off today, so we both got to sleep in. Sweet Pea slept until about 10:00 AM. I got a load of wash going, put away some clean clothes, ate breakfast, and played around on the internet. I cleaned the food dehydrator that Average's mom loaned us, then washed and pitted the plums that I picked two days ago at a friend's house (thanks C, N, and A!) and Average helped me load up the dehydrator. This is our first time drying food. I'll post again with the results. Some photos of the process:



Cutting the plums, I was reminded of how dull our knives have become. When I mentioned this to my husband, he suggested we take them to get sharpened, something we have been meaning to do for about two years now. So, we actually went and did it! We wandered around the mall and wasted some money on chocolates and giant pretzels, then I suggested we head across the street to visit a baby store that I recently realized sells cloth diapers. I had gone in there the day before our trip to see if they had wet bags, and discovered that not only do they have cute wet bags in a variety of sizes, they also sell Fuzzibuns and Bum Genius diapers, which are two of my favorite brands of pocket diapers. At the time, I didn't have any spare minutes to browse around, but filed it away as something to do later. Now, after my second visit, I love this store. They have high-quality items, which means they also have high prices, but it is so much fun to look! I regretted not visiting earlier, and not registering there before Sweet Pea's birth (we didn't do the registry thing at all). I ended up buying three items: the perfect baby book I'd been looking for for months (it says sweet pea on the cover!!), a pink Bum Genius Organic one-size all-in-one diaper (most expensive diaper I've bought, but I've heard fantastic reviews), and another large wet bag (we are going out of town again at the end of the month, and I somehow lost one of our wet bags).

It was some pleasant retail therapy, but I think I came away with more wants than I went in with. I hate it when that happens. In general, Average and I have been trying to avoid falling into the trap of buying everything under the sun, and all new, for our baby. We haven't actually spent much on her because we have such generous friends and family who have bought or passed on to us nearly all of the big items we wanted and needed. But gosh, baby stuff is so cute! How does one stay strong in the face of all of the adorableness? Perhaps balancing my checkbook later today will help to kill the drive to buy... which brings us back to the rest of the day.

I checked the plums when we got home and they still have a long way to go. I was hoping to put in peppers tonight when the plums are done, but that might have to wait until tomorrow. Average took a nap when we got home while I nursed Sweet Pea. Now I'm typing away while he plays with her. Plans for later include picking apples from our backyard trees, trying to get Sweet Pea to take a really long nap, more laundry and a small sewing project, checkbook work, and going on a date tonight to the movies.