Somehow the last three days have slipped by so quickly that it’s time for an eclectic catch-up post covering the interesting tidbits I’m sure you’re eager to read.

Wednesday, July 9

Much to our surprise, we received a delivery from “Cookies By Design” for Judah. There was a huge turtle cookie accompanied by four balloons. Judah instantly had an entourage of friends and well-wishers, hovering closely and begging for tastes of his cookie. I served as crowd control, telling siblings to stop asking for Judah’s treat, and instructing Judah to just enjoy his whole cookie. Judah did as I advised, and told everyone that they could not have any of his cookie and he was going to eat it all. After some time, I checked on Judah at the kitchen island, and it was then that I realized he had licked all of the beautiful icing off of the cookie. It was now a greenish, smeared cookie-on-a-stick. When Judah saw me he said, “I’m done. I’m going to share now.” Do you think that we are all just shameless enough to accept chunks of a cookie that has been licked? Well, we are. And it was delicious!

Thursday, July 10

This momentous day was none other than Michael’s and my fifteenth wedding anniversary. Michael surprised me by taking the day off work and arranging for child care so we could go out to lunch. What a treat! We spent the morning cleaning and sorting and working on projects around the house, and then Grammy showed up at lunch time so we could disappear for a while.

Before we left, I asked Laura to take our photo. I had the bright idea that we could hold up our fingers to indicate the numbers “one” and “five”. Isaac insisted that we were showing the number “six”, even though I argued that no, it was the number “fifteen”.

For lunch we went to Destihl and had so much fun trying several interesting things on the menu. The cheese curds caught my attention, because the menu indicated that they use locally-made cheese, which means the fried curds themselves are not mass produced. They were indeed fantastic! We also ordered the beer sampler, since Destihl brews their own. The beautiful small glasses were so interesting to taste and compare. The main dishes were just as unusual and delicious. Michael got a burger and I got soup and salad. We weren’t planning to get dessert, but then the waitress explained that Destihl makes an ice cream with their espresso beer in it, and I couldn’t resist, so we got a scoop of that. Amazing! All in all, it was a perfectly enjoyable lunch, and I’m already looking forward to our next visit.

Friday, July 11

Today was the day of our long-awaited garage sale. I felt so unprepared, even though I’ve been sorting and boxing things up for what seems like weeks. But I was determined to go ahead and work with what I had, so I started barking orders at the children.

“Carry these tables!”

“Post these signs!”

“Take care of the baby!”

“Haul these boxes!”

Finally we had some semblance of a sale, and customers were coming, so we smiled and tried to keep things as attractive as possible.

I was pleased that we actually had a fairly regular stream of folks stopping by, and little by little our coin dish sprouted dollars it didn’t have before. Most of our items only cost 25 cents or 50 cents, and at the end of the day we had fifty dollars in the “profit” line. Cool! Not exactly a new get-rich-quick scheme, but definitely worth doing.

The prize for today goes to our customer, “Aunt Carol”. She came all the way from Rockford to see our sale, and she spent the most money (over $15!). We’ll be sure to keep her on our mailing list!

We’ll probably have our sale again, since we have boxes of things that didn’t sell today, and we have much more to sort through. At some point we’ll call it quits and haul the leftovers either to the curb or to the local thrift store.

So, there you have it. Our last three days in review.