Long but fruitful day

Well, today Sweet Pea got to spend five hours with her auntie! Auntie came down shortly before naptime, and of course Sweet Pea turned into a little wild thing upon seeing company. But she got to sleep at naptime in record short time anyway, which ROCKED. I then went grocery shopping ALONE, which was fantastic not only because I'm gunshy from our last grocery trip, but also because I had a HUGE long list today, and even by myself it took me forever to find all the items on the list. When I write my own shopping lists I write them to follow the way the store is laid out (I start from the first thing you see when you come in the door and go around the store to the other end). The list I had today didn't work that way so it took me longer to find everything.

Then I rushed home, hugged Sweet Pea and listened to her stories of what she and Auntie had been doing, my SIL helped me unload the groceries from the car, I gave her the sandwich I had gotten her at the deli, and then she unpacked my groceries for me while I got back in the car and rushed to the salon. Yeesh! So I FINALLY got that haircut - will post picture soon, my hair looks so much better than in the last post - and Sweet Pea did just fine with me walking in, hugging her, dropping a bunch of groceries and leaving again.

Sweet Pea is really getting much more independent these days. There are so many times every day when she says, "No Mama, I want to do it myself!" I am thrilled to hear those words from her and to watch her do things for herself, although sometimes I have to sit on my hands to keep from helping in order to make things happen in a less messy or quicker fashion. I know it's extremely important for her to learn to do things for herself and just as important for me not to take any part of that accomplishment away from her or make her feel like she can't do it herself - but I also have a slightly OCD clean/orderly freak (which you'd never know from seeing the state of my house... heh...) inside of me that wants to "help" so that things get done the way I would like to see them done. At least I realize that, right? And can stop myself. Hee.

Now, about the tremendous grocery list that I did not write myself: After reading about other flybabies' successes with and enjoyment of the sample menu mailers on savingdinner.com (the $*&@# link thing never works for me anymore so I can't seem to make actual links in my posts, which is very annoying), I decided to try the free sample vegetarian week's worth of meals and see how it went for me. Thus the insanely long shopping list (we're talking 6 meals, each of which serves 6 people - I want to make lots these days anyway to freeze food to make things easier on us after the baby's born). I'll post about how this goes... I'm a little concerned about how much food I just bought. I'm going to have to cook like a maniac for the next week to use it all before the veggies rot! But I've got company tomorrow night for dinner, so what better day to start? Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I don't think I could ever get through a shopping trip that involved with Sweet Pea along. BUT, Auntie is going to be coming over every week, so I could use that time for my grocery shopping... but I want to be able to do fun things during that time, too.

Well, now I'm just babbling. Should have been in bed hours ago anyway. Stayed up way too late washing dishes, but I'm stoked to have a clean kitchen again to wake up to tomorrow. Yay!