- Stay on the balls of your feet – You gotta be ready to move. The second you’re caught off balance and flat footed, disaster is going to strike.
- Control the hips – It’s all about the core; you can’t trust the extremities. If you’re holding an arm or a leg or something, you might as well not be holding on at all. I learned this one during diaper changes. If you want a struggling kid / slippery eel not to move, you gotta hold on to the hips.
- It is important to center yourself before conflict – If you’re not zen going into a situation, then things are going to go bad fast. This isn’t just for physical conflict either, it’s doubly true for head-to-head power struggles with your toddler. Your mental health is a tenuous balance at best when you have small kids, but it’s important to hold it together as much as you can, or everything else is going to suffer.
- The best defense is a good offense – Get out of the house! Don’t put yourself in a position to fail. Occupy your kids before they get a chance to even think of mischief. Sometimes it might seem easier to just sit back and handle things as they come, but you always end up regretting it.
- The bigger you think you are, the harder you’re going to fall.Enough said.
Month: March 2011
Quick Hits
- These days, Evie insists on have tights sticking out of her drawer with her drawer closed, so it looks like legs sticking out. Those legs represent the Wicked Witch of the West.*
- Nothing makes me feel less manly than having the alarm go off in the night. I guess I should feel the opposite, like big strong protector of the household, but really I’m just reluctantly jabbing a stick into dark rooms to startle anybody in there, ready to run at the first sign of trouble.
- Although Oliver can’t walk yet, we discovered he can open the front and back doors. We have lever handles, and it turns out those handles are just a little lower than the rest of the doors in the house, so he can reach and pull if he really tries.
- Babies are generally very good at getting you what you want, but a baby with sunglasses on is irresistible. I forgot about this since Evie was a baby, but it never fails. It’s like the atomic bomb of cuteness.
* EDIT: It has been pointed out that the legs would more correctly represent the Wicked Witch of the East, which is true. But come on guys, she’s three!
My eBay Experience
Recently we have been trying to de-clutter our house as much as possible. Most things we’re saving in a pile to take to the enormous annual family rummage sale. However, there were a few things that seemed a little more valuable than what we were likely to get at the rummage sale.
The first of these things was our Keurig B-30 single cup coffee maker. We liked it (you can read all about it here), but we actually liked it a little too much. The problem is that we turned into degenerate coffee addicts, and we needed something that could make more coffee at a time. We progressed past needing a single cup at a time.
This particular coffee maker retails for $100, and we were also including another adapter that retails for an additional $13.50, so this was a decently expensive setup and we thought we could get some money out of it. We looked around on eBay and saw that most of the similar things were going for about $50, with at least $10 for shipping, so we were assuming we could get at least that, especially if we were including the extra adapter. However, we decided if we got at least $30 for it, we would be happy, so we set the bid at $20 and did the listing.
Sara's Beautiful Photography
Now the first thing I noticed was that everybody and their mother immediately contacted me saying, “Oh hey, you’re getting rid of that? I’ll take it!” Well, if I wanted to give away this expensive device for free, I would have just said, “Who wants this?” instead of paying to list it in eBay! Or at least tried to sell it for $0.50 at the rummage sale. I wanted money folks, I wasn’t in it for the charity!
So we put our listing up on eBay and watched it closely for a few days. Absolutely nothing. A few views and that was it, no bids.
I think part of it was just that nobody likes to bid on an auction that has a lot of time left to go on it. So conceivably the bids would pick up as time went on. The other problem is that we created a totally new account for this, with no eBay history. I think people are distrustful of this, because they think I’m a scammer or something. Now everybody had to start with no history at some point, but I have a feeling that auctions by people with little or no history probably go for less money, due to this suspicion.
So we weren’t getting much action, but I felt like we would eventually. However, our first bid finally came in…from our friend Dabu!
She was the lone bidder at $20 for a few days, until we just decided to sell it to her if she wanted it. She was, after all, the only person who actually put their money where their mouth was.
Me: “If you still want it, we’ll give it to you for $30.”
Dabu: “I’ll give you $40!”
In other words, Dabu is about the worst haggler in the history of the world.
We found a way to take down the listing, so we’re only out the minimal cost of listing it in the first place. So we didn’t exactly have the full eBay experience (we don’t have to ship it or deal with the feedback system, two of the main components), but overall I would say it was fairly positive. It was easy to set up, and seemed to be working okay. I don’t know for sure if we would have gotten any bids if Dabu hadn’t bid on it, but I think we probably would have. However, I think it might not have gone for as much as some of the other ones did.
So overall, generally positive, and we might try selling some more stuff in the future!
Quote Monday is Aquatic
Evie: “Why does Grandma Kathy go shopping? Why doesn’t she just order it?” – This was before we blew her mind with the information that there weren’t computers when Grandma Kathy was her age.
Me: “How did your pants get wet?”
Evie: “…water maybe?”
Evie: “Sometimes your leg gets bubbles in it. Then you can’t move it. It goes away eventually, but sometimes you forget and try to move it, and then you have to wait.” – I eventually figured out this meant her leg fell asleep because she was sitting on it. I thought “my leg gets bubbles” was a awfully poetic description though!
Evie: “Mama, what color is a whale’s bellybutton?”
Evie: “Do people live on Saturn?”
Sara: “No. Earth is the only planet people live on.”
Evie: “What about France?
Shane Halbach 