Cousins, cousins, cousins

I can't think of another time when Rini has seen quite as many cousins
as she has today! Last night, we travelled down to Calgary and stayed
the night with my sister and her family. It was rather spur of the
moment because I called her right when we were about to head out the
door. We were going to travel straight to Taber, but when I realized
the travel time was 5 or 6 hours, which would put in Taber around
midnight, I figured it would better if we just went to Calgary, then
continued to Taber the next day.

I used up a moment of brilliance with that idea, and I fear I may not
have another bit of inspiration for a year or so.

Still, it worked out remarkably well on a number of accounts. First,
I wasn't as tired driving, and we were able to spend some time with my
sisters as Liz was over for a visit with Isobel.

We spent a couple hours playing Wii, most of the time playing Boom
Blox. We tried Rabbids Go Home, but it seemed banal compared to the
previous versions we'd played. I was initially excited, because
Raving Rabbids and Rabbids TV are a lot of fun. Nevertheless, I had
not played Rabbids Go Home previous to last night, and I wasn't
missing much. Chris had never heard of the Rabbids series, and I was
rather disappointed that his first game was a rather poor experience.
Eh, you can't have sunny days all the time.

But at the end of May, I would expect there to be rain, NOT SNOW.
That was a horrible slap in the face when we went out to leave for
Taber, and there was 10cm of wet snow piled on top of the car! The
weird thing is that this happened last month when we went to the
Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo. It's like we bring bad weather
with us!

Ah, I'm probably blowing that a little out of proportion.

It was great that Rini was able to play with her cousins, second
cousins, and her first cousins once removed. Those were the cousins
that she played with. It was fun figuring out the level of relations
that I had with everyone else, but I confused a few people as well.
Seems a little ironic that I learned how the relation levels work from
my first cousin twice removed.

Time for a change up

I wouldn't say that I'm dependent on my wife, but I do appreciate her input, otherwise how would I have come up with the following: "I have two minds: one's lost and the other is out looking for my wife to tell me where it went.

Something that Caitlin and I have been working on the past few days is organizing our home a bit better. We keep thinking that the ideal thing to do would be to move to a new place, and I can't say nay to that idea, especially with baby #2 on the way and not a lot of place for new baby to sleep, save maybe the bathroom. We were considering putting baby in with Rini, but then realized that would be quite difficult for Rini to sleep. That and it's not recommended for children under the age of six to be sleeping in bunk beds. I'm thinking that the bed manufactures don't want to be sued if young children fall off the beds, because Rini loves climbing up on the bunk beds at Grandma and Grandpa's, plus her cousin has been sleeping in a top bunk for some time now. That six foot bunk at IKEA was a little freaky though. It would be good, but a little freaky.

Though it would be great to have everything done at once, we're trying to tackle one room at a time and the living room is the first on the list. I tried looking on kijiji for some shelving, but we went to Home Depot and IKEA and got much better ideas. True we spent a lot more, but at least with IKEA you don't need to worry about the store throwing away the shelf before you go to pick it up. Then again, they don't have free shelves at IKEA either. Cheap, but not free. Yet I was a little perplexed by their pricing, specifically with the BILLY shelves. I found some online for $80, but when we got to the store, we found some for $50. Quite the drop in price, and yet when we went to the warehouse, we found the $50 shelves we got were in white, while the $80 shelves were in Black/brown. That was the only difference. Same style, same name, EXACT SAME DIMENSIONS, but different colour. I couldn't figure it out. We just went for the cheaper one, paid, packed up and left.

I know I could say something about racial inequality, but I'll leave that for another day.

As it worked out, the shelving that we currently have in the living room complemented the BILLY units better than we hoped. We had an end board for a water bed(?) beside a birch finish BILLY shelf, and things piled precariously everywhere. Now we have the birch shelf in between the two white shelves with the end board on top of the three. And it fits great! The only hiccup was that in order to get the new shelving setup, I had to pull everything off the previous shelves and place them in various spots in the living room. The couch, the floor, the dining table and even the cube shelves we got from Home Depot, which we setup with the hope of using in the living room, but didn't need once we found the BILLY shelves worked so well.

But those wire shelves will not go to waste, because they will fit very well in our bedroom, which is also in sore need of organization. For the past three years, we've had a small bedside table beside our bed, and a large gap to the wall, that we partially filled a couple years ago with a bookshelf from Office Depot. Then I did some measuring and found that not only will the cubes fit there, but the dresser that's been sitting wasting space for the past three years will fit there too. So we're going to move out the bedside table, put in the dresser, and then put the cubes on top.

We did get some under-the-bed storage bins, but made the error of not measuring the clearance under our bed first. Thus, we have to return the bins that are too tall to fit. There is an adage my wife uses with her sewing: Measure twice, cut once. The same could be applied here, only it would be: Measure twice, buy once.

Better make sure I still have that receipt.