I’ve noticed that super busy days around here are usually followed by slow days, and today was no exception. Yesterday was very full – we started with an orthodontist appointment for my 12 year old dd, who had her braces taken off. Now she has to wear a retainer for the next six months, and since it’s something that takes adjusting to (it’s not easy to speak normally with it in), she’s not looking forward to it.

Directly from there we went to PA for our big shopping day. We stocked up on bulk grains, fresh milk, canned goods, and lots more, but our big bargain of the day was free range eggs! We stopped in at the bulk foods place for our usual items, and they had a sale of 79 cents a dozen for brown free range eggs! (This was an especially good price, since around here regular eggs are $1.39 dz.) I took all the cartons that were out (just 9) and asked if she had more. Turns out they had lots more – so I got a case of thirty dozen in addition to the 9 I had in my cart. I asked why they were so cheap, and she told me that a local farmer had a bunch of laying hens and made an error in estimating how much he would have to sell. He had lots more than he could sell and asked this store if they could sell some. So I relieved them of some of their overflow. 🙂

I met a lovely lady months ago at one of the stores I visited yesterday, and we’ve stayed in sporadic email contact, so we arranged to meet there again. I also met another mom of seven kids in the store. She was in line right behind me, but I was busy with my zillion things that I was putting on the conveyer belt, so I didn’t notice her. My daughter whispered to me that there was someone with seven kids behind us – we’ve noticed before that though seven seems to us like a small family, when we see others with a similarly sized family, it looks really big! It helps me remember what other people must see when they look at us! I turned around and said hi, and started chatting with her. It turns out we’re both due with number 8 around the same time – she’s due two weeks before me. I left the store, but while I was loading my van, she came out and thanked me for my comments, and we continued chatting a bit longer. Her kids were waiting in the van for her, though, and we all know how hard it is to talk at leisure when we know the kids are feeling impatient! I took her number so maybe we’ll have the chance to connect another time in the future.

I really need to get a separate freezer. I somehow make do with the top of the fridge freezer, but it doesn’t allow me to bake or cook in bulk like I used to, which was a big time saver. (It’s so nice at the end of a busy day to be able to reach in to your freezer and pull out a delicious dish!) And on big shopping days like yesterday, I really push the freezer to it’s absolute max. That’s being careful not to buy all that I would like to buy, knowing how limited space is. I would love to buy more milk so I could put it in the freezer, but I really can’t make room for more than four gallons. The fresh milk is the main reason we go so far for shopping (it’s not available in our state because of ridiculous legal restrictions), but I don’t like to go more often than once a month, which means that for two weeks we have plenty of milk, and for two weeks we have none. Feast or famine. 🙂

I got home just in time to see a friend’s husband getting in to his car. He was delivering some of their overflow food, since people are making food for them following the birth of their baby (this is the friend I wrote about in my last post) and they can’t eat all of it and don’t want it to go to waste. We certainly enjoyed having a nice meal at the end of a busy day that I didn’t have to do anything to prepare! We quickly unpacked all the groceries, and made it in time for my older son’s baseball game, only ten minutes late (he went ahead of us). We took the food with us, because everyone was starving by the time we got home – it was really, really nice to be able to just dish out something filling and tasty for everyone in the short time we were at home.

Ds is a really good baseball player, and this seasonal league is something he looks forward to all year. I was talking to the wife of one of the dads who coaches for my son’s team, who told me her husband said he is ‘awesome’. She went on to tell me that her husband isn’t one to give compliments out lightly, and was really impressed by his character. It’s always nice to hear things like that, isn’t it? To me, character is the most important thing, and if he were a terrific ball player who was selfish and disrespectful, it wouldn’t be worth two cents to me. It’s a constant conscious effort to help our kids work on their character, but it is so rewarding to see them grow up as mature and self aware.

Avivah