Marvelous Monday

Regular day. Dropped off Steve, Audrey, and Caleb - in that order. Julie and I ran errands. I lingered in the grocery store because with 33 C heat here (high 80s) it's nice to be somewhere with air conditioning. The aisles between the produce and meat sections are my favorites. Nice and chilled.

We're sitting around sweltering at 8.22 p.m. Still hot. But nice for drying clothes outside on the line. I've done 5 loads today. Actually the 5th is still in the washer, but I'll leave it outside overnight. No promise of rain - just LOTS of sunshine. Apparently this weather is highly unusual.

Audrey had a huge biff today. It was one of those falls that is truly memorable. She had on her pink hiking boots and we were at Caleb's school waiting for his class to dismiss. She was running towards me saying, "Look Mommy! I can run in these-" SPLAT! She caught her toe on the uneven dirt yard and fell forward - onto pavement. She hit forehead first and bounced. It was awful. As soon as she got up there was a mark. I took this picture with my fancy little camera phone about 5 minutes after:

Obviously she was traumatized.

Julie had another first today during our chilly excursion to the store: she sat in the sitting part of the grocery cart all by herself! She kept herself pretty much upright and was happy until she got hungry. Then she would intermittently scream at me. Not constant screams, just little punctuation mark kind of screams as I hurriedly made my way to the baby food aisle to get some baby biscotti (cookies) for her. Then she only screamed at me when I was too slow getting her another bite while trying to push the cart and shop.

Speaking of carts, let me rant a bit about their grocery carts here. At this particular store (Sainsbury's) they have 5 different kinds of baskets:
1 - regular like at home. Place for 1 kid to sit. Deep basket.
2 - regular like at home with the infant seat attached. Except there's a place for 1 kid to sit beside the infant. Deep basket.
3 - 1-seater with shallow basket.
4 - shallow basket with no kid seats.
5 - wheelchair basket - it attaches to the wheelchair.
6 - large child basket with a padded seat facing the driver and a deep basket.
7 - double infant seat basket.
Ok - so I can't count. There are 7 different kinds. But the WORST thing about all of them is that all 4 wheels are free to rotate. At home, the back wheels on carts are fixed, so that you basically can only drive in the direction your front wheels are facing. Not so here. It is impossible to go in a straight line in any direction. The only thing that Steve and I can think of to compare it to are those yellow mop buckets that custodians use. Except harder to push.

Now I'm going to go back downstairs where it's much much cooler. Plus my drink is down there. We finally broke down yesterday and bought 2 beer steins. Did I mention this already? Steve was desperate for something larger than an 8 oz. Glass, so we got these pint ones. Then today at the store, I found pint-sized plastic glasses - disposable party ware. So we'll use those until they break.