Week in Review: Dentists and the Usual Drill

Last week was dentist week, part 1 for our family -- appointments for me and for the four-year-old. Husband's dentist appointment is coming up in a couple of days. For some reason, I found myself spitting for at least an hour after my appointment ended -- rather curtailed my planned trip to the grocery store after that errand (the howling wind and sub-zero temperatures were not encouraging, either, but I also don't think it's particularly appreciated to be expectorating in the produce aisle). The four-year-old picked out a purple plastic race car as her prize at the pediatric dentist, and spent a lot of time last week constructing ramps for her toy cars and driving them around.

My playtime last week consisted of a game night with women's group friends, playing Apples to Apples, Word on the Street and the card game 99 -- none of which I'd ever played before. It was a fun time, even if I did end up having to play on someone else's honor after I lost too many rounds of 99 -- at least adding up those numbers stretched my brain into some math skills directions after I spend most of my days thinking about words. :)  I made some Buckeye Bars from this Gooseberry Patch recipe as my contribution to the snacks.

Our family watched the Puppy Bowl together this weekend, but not much of the Super Bowl -- we let that be mostly DH's province, while the four-year-old and I (finally) finished up thank-you notes for late Christmas gifts, and got some practice in on doing dishes.

It was actually rather an aquatic weekend for her, as we also did a "what will sink and what will float" experiment at bath time (it's amazing how fast that kid will pick up toys if she's been promised an experiment in the bathtub) and then her Sunday school class made "aquariums" (plastic water bottles full of what I assume is water with blue food coloring in it, with plastic "sea creatures" they picked out to float in it) when they studied the story of Jonah.

We've also continued the ongoing obsession with horses -- this past week, I had to read descriptions of several horse breeds while she worked on putting the stickers on the correctly matching shape in the horse sticker book,  she got for Christmas.

Unintentionally, except for church, we ended up not going out of the house all weekend -- which was probably a mistake, since the weather was in the 20s on Saturday and is supposed to be back to its frigidly cold temperatures this week. Instead, I finally got over the unproductive blahs I seem to have been suffering from all week and got our family paperwork, which I had been "filing" in a plastic accordion file -- a process which was not making stuff any easier to find -- moved into a different filing system. Still need to sort through some things, but now at least things are not all mixed up with each other because it was too hard to file them. Plus, I've been tracking cash spending throughout January, and started a new Quicken file for 2011, moved all of our bank transactions into it, and got everything categorized. (This is supposed to help with a snapshot of the family finances, and could/may eventually lead to a formal budget.)