Yada yada

I don't really have a lot to say but Claire is asleep, the house is relatively clean, no deadlines are looming and it's time for a change of scenery at the top of the blog. I hate when you check a blog over and over and see the same title forever -- you know who you are! -- and right now I'm that negligent blogger.

We had a fun weekend without doing too much. Saturday morning Amanda and I had a yard sale, our second. For whatever reason I thought it felt more laidback than the one we had last fall. I didn't price any of my stuff, I just let people make me offers, but if they balked at that (many of them did, as Dad predicted) I'd throw out a number, and if they balked at the number I'd add "Or whatever you want to pay. Half that?"

I made $60, not much if you think of it on a per-hour basis, but I had fun doing it and hanging out with Amanda, and everything that sold was stuff I just wanted to get rid of. The money was bonus. A woman from a charity that's having a yard sale in a few weeks came by after the yard sale and picked up everything we didn't sell, so none of it came back into the house/garage/attic and I didn't even have to pack it up and drop it off at the Coalition.

Saturday night Ron kept Claire so Matt and I could go on a date. It was wonderful. Our conundrum is that the free babysitters (grandparents) actually enjoy playing with Claire -- they want her to be awake, not asleep, when they keep her -- so we feel guilty asking them to keep her at night when she usually goes to sleep by 7 or 7:30. On the other hand, we're cheap, and it hurts to pay a high schooler even $7 or $8 per hour to hang out and watch TV while Claire sleeps.

However, after a few nights out without Claire recently (thanks to Ron) we have decided it's totally worth paying someone if we need to, at least a couple of times a month. I certainly had my share of easy babysitting nights during college, where the kids would be asleep by 8 and I'd spend the next three or four hours getting paid to do homework or catch up on reading. I guess it's payback time.