Whew!

Wow! What a busy weekend!
Spent all day Friday making about 200 trips up and down the stairs from our stifling hot inferno of an attic with trips of yard sale fodder. NOT much fun.
Was up at 5:15 a.m. on Saturday to drag stuff into the front yard for a yard sale. Again, NOT fun. Roused Steve-o from bed around 6:15 to help. Priced stuff, pulled out the lawn chair & the coffee, and sat and waited for the money to roll in as all the suckas came and bought all our old stuff we didn't want anymore. Goodbye computer armoire! Goodbye random books! Goodbye basket that the cat has used for a scratching post! Goodbye giant stuffed panda bear that I'm STILL unsure how we ended up with in the first place! Goodbye boys' beds! Goodbye old stroller!

I was hoping to get enough money from the yard sale to buy the boys new beds and I did that, so I'm a happy camper. Only thing I didn't get rid of?? The Evenflo stroller travel system. Ugh. It's totally a "first-time mom-I-must-have-everything" buy. Who REALLY needs a stroller THAT big? With 3 cupholders, a basket in the back large enough to hold a 3 year old child (literally - I stuck Owen in there once when he fell asleep) and wheels big enough to off-road through the Grand Canyon?? I'm totally downsizing for baby #3. So if anyone out there needs a stroller/carseat/travel system -- lemme know. I got one for ya...you can have it for CHEAP. Or free.

So....with the old office now completely empty (sold the computer armoire, moved the computer to another room) and with the boys room devoid of beds, it's time to do some major cleaning. By 1:30 Saturday the yard sale is finished and I begin the haul - to the curb for the stuff we're trashing, back upstairs for the couple things that we'll hang on to, or hope to give away in the case of the stroller/carseat deal. We vacuum, we organize, we throw-away. My friend Ginny let me borrow her Bissel carpet cleaner so I drove over to her house to pick it up and brought it back to get to work cleaning up our nasty cream colored carpet. And lemme just say..... OH. MY. GOSH. I am in love. Steve commented several times about how I needed to chill out about the carpet cleaner. Here's the thing - and may I sound like the atypical 1950's American housewife for saying, but I'm a total FREAK about having my floors be clean. My mom ingrained this horrid obsessive-compulsive behavior in me - specks of lint, dirt, marks on the carpet leave me with a tic in my face and twitching to break out the vacuum. I CAN'T STAND a dirty floor. Dishes piled in the sink? Whatever. Laundry stacked sky-high in the mudroom? Big deal. An inch of dust over all the furniture. I don't give a crap. But carpet? Floors? Must be clean and clutter-free. For the most part, I've resigned myself to about 1 day of perfectly clean flooring a week, thanks to two boys who are constantly trashing the house. But over the last year that we've lived in the house, the floors have gotten steadily ickier, more and more stained. Enter in the Bissell carpet cleaner. I L-O-V-E this thing.....it successfully removed a 2 foot long stain of pancake syrup (compliments Owen, 3 months ago), several blobs of green paint (again, thank you Owen, last spring), ground-in-dirt, crayon, marker, juice stains, and other unidentifiable marks on the carpet and left the house smelling oh-so fresh and clean. It was absolutely amazing.
I love you Bissell heat pro carpet cleaner. I want to marry you and have little bissell heat-pro babies with you that will flit around my house scrubbing carpet and making my house look and smell fresh.

Does that make me weird??

I don't care. Someone buy me this glorious machine as soon as possible. I will love you forever.

Hope you had a great weekend. It's almost 2 am here so I'm going to bed.

where I will dream about that carpet cleaner. Ginny, when you guys move next month, if you could move into a place that has hardwood floors, that'd be great. Because then I could keep it.
The carpet cleaner that is.

I miss it already.