Nerdy Suburban Mom

Today was loads of fun. We went to an Easter Egg Hunt in Sesquicentennial State Park, which was a lot more games and entertainment than just an egg hunt. The Southern Pride Rabbit and Cavy Club had a table with a lot of rabbits on display — both kids loved petting them.

It was hilarious to compare Reuven, a nine months old baby, to a Flemish Giant.

A Flemish Giant’s weight should be anywhere from 14-22 pounds. Or even more!

The one at the park definitely looked like it was on the high side of that range.

There were also assorted games available, at which everybody won something at (even if it was just a small piece of candy). We even did some hula-hooping (is that a verb?)… and this picture just begged to be turned into an animated gif!

Fleece hats are warm, and easy to make.  Cute fleece hats aren’t much harder.

My next attempt will be a polar bear (same but in white fleece) with a little nose and two eyes…

When you rent a car, you have two choices: buy a tank of gas up-front at current average market prices, or pay a premium (usually almost twice average market price) for the fuel they need to refill the car with once it is returned.  The “game” to play when doing this is buy the full tank of gas up-front, then see just how empty you can get the car before returning it.

I hereby declare us to be the winners of that game.  We managed to run out of gas 0.2 miles from the rental agency, and had to push it in to return it completely empty of fuel.

Mind you, this is a very stupid game; if we had run out just 0.1 miles sooner, we would have been stuck on I-190 in heavy traffic. That’s 0.003 gallons of gas.  0.3% of a gallon.  That’s ridiculous, and it was a not-so-gentle hint that we probably shouldn’t play stupid games with gasoline levels with two small children in the car and a plane to catch. (Even at the intersection where the car died, we shouldn’t have been stopped; there was a PA system that kept saying, “Drivers please return to your vehicle.” I ignored it, because we had to push, and I figured the worst that would happen is the state police would show up and help us push.)

(All the same — we won, we won!)

Snow on Thanksgiving!

It was fairly thick for a while, but it did not last long enough to really chill the ground and stick. It was still very pretty, though, and I while I hope it isn’t the only snow we see this year, there’s not a lot of chance to get it in South Carolina…

This is a picture of Reuven (age 5 months) next to a photograph of Brett (age around 9 months).

Think they might be related? 🙂

Before going to the plant to see my friends, we stopped by Lillian’s old preschool/daycare to see all her friends. This was one of the best stops of the whole trip; Lilly really loved this place, and she loved Miss Marta (the morning teacher/caretaker) so much that she hasn’t been able to talk to her on the phone without crying. Amazingly, she decided to be a little shy when we first came in, despite everybody making a huge fuss over her; the natural craziness of toddlers in an enclosed area soon kicked in, though, and they were all running around like there hadn’t been a four month absence.

Daddy helped out when it came time to dance to some Disney music (aka, Mousercise!)…

After that, Lillian got to eat lunch with everybody before we went to the plant. I seriously miss this school, it’s tons better than her new one… one of those finds that you’ll never be able to duplicate.

When we visited the Bedford plant, Lillian and Reuven came in to meet the engineers.  (At first Lillian was surprisingly reluctant.  I asked if she wanted to meet some engineers, and she thought, then said, “Mmmm… no.”  By the time we had met five people, she was begging to meet more people; she was quite disappointed when she’d met everybody.)

One of the ways they won her over was by giving her all sorts of stuff — earplugs, a Visteon lunchbox, 12″ of vacuum tubing, safety goggles (two pairs!), and plastic caps (industrial, not milk).  She amused herself by putting everything into the lunchbox, and later by creating something fairly advanced for a preschooler: a pressure chamber.

She stuck the vacuum tube and earplus into a cabinet in our hotel room, then placed a cap on the tubing.  Once that was constructed, she came over to ask for ingredients to make pressure, and I quote directly, in order…

• batteries (x4)
• salt
• butter
• eggs
• sausage
• DVD for “this show” (?)
• some pressure (!)
• and a little teeny kiss

Running a little late this year, we carved our jack-o-lantern on October 30. Lillian requested a combination of happy and scary (so it got two pointy fangs), and she also chose the mismatched eye shapes. Very cute overall!

For trick-or-treating, Lillian reused her witch costume from last year, and we added a new accessory: Black Cat familiar!

Total sewing time for the cat costume was maybe 8-12 hours. I think he outgrew it while wearing it, it was definitely not something to grow into! But I designed it from scratch (using existing clothes as a basis), so I’m pretty proud of it overall. There were little black mittens (paws) that went along with it, but he lost one while we were out so he’s not wearing them in the pictures.

I decided to try to track my non-gasoline-fueled transportation, and do a few calculations to see how much money (and gasoline!) I’ve saved.

Basically, I will only count trips that I would have had to make anyway, and typically would have uesd the car for. This includes trips to the grocery store (2.1 miles), picking up Lillian from daycare (5.8 miles), the library, the ice cream store, the good hamburger place, the good pizza place… lucky a lot of these are just over a mile from the house, which means I’m not saving a whole lot of gas, but it is an easy trip and therefore a much bigger incentive to bike instead of drive!

It also includes trips made by Brett borrowing my bike. Maybe he’ll get his own eventually — this would be particularly nice because then I can include trips like the burger place which currently he has to drive to while I bike… and therefore I can’t count it.

Anyway, here’s the page — just over a dollar saved so far. I think I will buy myself something nice once I “save” enough money up!