Preparation Week

Well, me Mum went home on Sunday and so now we begin preparation for many visitors this coming weekend. Julie's Aunts from Nebraska are flying in and her Brother and his family are driving in from Michigan. So we will have a full house this weekend. The reason is for Julie's parents joint 75th birthday party. Her Father turned 75 back in July, but Saturday is her Mom's actual 75th birthday.

So we've planned this whole celebration as an open-house format where people can come and go since the number of invites we've sent out are too many people for the size of our house. Hopefully all of the guests won't show up at the same time as it may prove to be a bit crowded in here.

So the preparation comes with making the house presentable. It's far from it. I have been working on my to-do list this week and crossing a few things off each day, but there are some things that I really need to get done to ensure the house at least "looks" presentable. I got the grass mowed yesterday and our neighbor said "thanks for mowing your grass." I was thinking it must have looked horrible but they were like no, that just means that we'll have to mow ours now. So maybe all that extra care I've given the grass this year is paying off. I think it looks pretty nice, but I'm not a bragging sort of person. I always see room for improvement; like the two weeds in the front yard and the bare spot where the momma bunny rabbit decided to put her nest.

The problems lie in the flower beds that we've still not had the money nor the time to purchase the rest of the plants for to fill it up properly. If we would do this then the flower beds would actually be full of flowers and not the weeds it currently is. The places we have flowers or plants the weeds aren't so bad as you might imagine. We need to spend the time and yes the money obviously because plants aren't as cheap as you might think and buy the rest of the plants we need and fill up those flower beds. But this is just one of the issues I just have to deal with before our guests arrive.

Grace today was for some reason quite tired and a bit cranky. She slept for 12 hours which is fairly normal and we didn't have much time in the morning before school. She did her "homework" in the car on the way to pre-school. While she was in school I went grocery shopping at a couple of different stores. We're buying the food that needs to be prepared before the party Saturday. I bought 8 lbs. of ground beef and 8 lbs. of ground turkey for two different types of chili. Obviously regular and turkey chili; plus all the beans and chopped tomatoes that go with all of that meat. Now the challenge is going to be getting all of that food cooked ahead of time. The biggest problem will be storage space in the refrigerator.

After that it was time to pick Grace up and then we came right home to get the food into the refrigerator. Then it was pretty much just hang out and do nothing for the rest of the day. Neither of us had much motivation to do anything today; so we didn't. We watched Dancing with the Stars from yesterday and just hung out.

Tonight I tried to make frozen lasagna that I bought today. The directions say to cook it for 105 minutes but it actually took almost three hours before it was done. It was good, but that's a really long time. I'm wondering if our oven needs to have the temperature checked to see if it's right or not because that's just crazy! We didn't eat dinner until just after 7:30! That's just entirely too late.

Anyway, we received a book we ordered from amazon.com called Blueberry Eyes in the mail yesterday and it's really for Grace as it's about having eye surgery. Julie started reading it to her tonight. We're trying to get her ready for the surgery she'll have on the 31st. So this is our first step. Surprisingly the doctors office hasn't informed us how to prepare her at all for this. I guess as far as they are concerned, we just show up on the day of the surgery and she'll just have it. But any 5 year old is just too scared of the unknown and too curious to just go into something blindly.

So this is the surgery to fix her crossed eye which is the left eye, but apparently they don't just repair the crossed eye, they actually adjust both eyes and let them fall into place on their own. So that's what we're trying to do and this book is a great first step as the girl in the story has done most of what Grace has had to do for her eyes. Actually she did more as she had to wear bi-focals at 11 months. I can't imagine! We've been pretty lucky to not have her eyes be that bad. I'm not sure how Grace accepted the book when they read it tonight, but I did hear in the beginning where they were talking about getting glasses and using a patch. And Grace kept saying "just like me." So she was seeing the parallel in the beginning of the book, I just hope she isn't going to worry about it and be scared about it right up until the day of the surgery.

I'd better get to sleep as Grace has a full day tomorrow with dance and gymnastics; and I obviously have a lot of work to do too!