Sunday Salon

Today has been a busy day - mostly filled with time sitting down or in the car. My sister's son, who is just two weeks old, was baptized today. Since I am a godparent we traveled to Des Moines for the baptism. This involved leaving our house shortly after 7 AM, arriving just before 10 AM at my sister's. My daughters changed clothes, we chatted for a bit with her husband's side of the family and then headed to church for a 75 minute service. Following that we attended a baptism service in the church chapel. The trip was capped off with a trip through the McDonalds drive-thru, much to my husband's disgust, and a car ride home.

My daughters should be rested up. My middle daughter slept on the car ride down and back, but appears to be out of sorts despite the rest. My oldest daughter announced just a while ago that she has a sore throat. Her eyes don't look quite right, but she is very worried about missing school, so I ran to the store and bought some Tylenol since we had run out and told her to have some Sucrets.

My husband is also worn out. At 1:30 yesterday afternoon he announced that he was making a trip to IKEA. For the past month we have been discussing- sometimes rather heatedly-what to do in our basement TV room. Our bigscreen television- the one that came with the house because the previous owners didn't want to deal with moving it- died. This means we need to come up with a plan. We are not replacing it with a television of equal size. We also need to purchase some type of entertainment center. The television was built into a fake wall that has a hole in it for the home theater system the previous owners had installed. UGH! I am not a big tv watcher, but we have only one other set and need to decide what we are doing in this room. We looked at a few stores yesterday morning but didn't find anything we loved. I love IKEA and had mentioned that as a solution a month ago. My husband was quite vehement in his negative answer at this suggestion. So, imagine my surprise when he arrived home at 2 AM (Did I mention that IKEA is nowhere close to our house - almost 4 hours north) with the exact same thing I had suggested. Now we still need to texture the wall, paint, move some outlets, put the shelving system together, and purchase a new TV. This may take us til next spring.

Anyway, this is why my husband is exhausted. After just 4 hours of sleep he had to get up and drive 3 more hours to a baptism. He was nice enough to drive all the way there and half way back. I didn't even complain when he asked me to drive, seriously cutting into my reading time. Wasn't that nice of me?

I have reviews I need to write on three books this weekend: The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia by Mary Helen Stefaniak, Cate of the Lost Colony by Lisa Klein, and They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Organization by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. I am also trying to finish up Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter, the prequel to Comfort that I read last year around this time. This is one that I can count for the Read From Your Shelves Challenge.

I'm hoping this short week before Thanksgiving will let me get some of these reviews done. I am looking forward to sharing some new holiday books with the kids at school, too.