Blogging on the Fly*

(* No flies were hurt in the making of this blog post.)

I’m in the parking lot outside of Lucy’s ballet class with my laptop on my lap – hence the “on the fly” title.  Last night, while Lucy was at gymnastics, Mel and I had a “date night”.  We ate a quick dinner at Flippin’ Pizza, grabbed a frozen custard cake for the weekend celebrations, and came home to continue “The Great Purge”.  And despite the name, we’re doing more organizing than anything really.  BSP’s nursery is largely an established beachhead at this point.  Her furniture is in place, books are in the bookcase, clothes are in the drawers and closet, diaper changing accoutrements are staged appropriately…

Most of the mess that was our basement has been reorganized and put back in a better “stack”.  Hopefully we’ll be able to locate and access clothing, decorations, toys, etc. as the appropriate time approaches now.  We’ve also culled a lot of toys, clothing, and general swag from Lucy’s stashes to identify and stage things that will be BSP-future items, China orphanage donation items, and general charity donation items.  I don’t pretend to understand the algorithms used to differentiate these classifications; I just smile, nod, and tote the bails.

When Lucy came home from gymnastics last night, we had a brief chat in which Mel and I explained to her that we have family friends coming over today to watch the playoff games. These friends include Lucy’s official BFF and her older sister (also an F.O.L., “Friend of Lucy”).  As a condition for having these fine folk visit our home, it was a stated imperative that we get the basement clean and organized.  This message was obviously understood and taken to heart, because at 7:15AM today, Lucy came into our room to tell us that we needed to get cleaning the basement!  How many times do parents hear that from their seven year old daughters?

We spent most of the morning moving, sorting, and organizing.  Now Lucy’s at her ballet lesson.  Afterwards, we’ll have a little lunch, Lucy and I will get back to the salt mine, and Mel will prep food for our afternoon guests.  With any luck, we’ll actually make some progress around the house this weekend and get another step closer to being BSP-ready.

Also established last night, we’ve set up (and successfully tested) a Skype account for video chats from our trip to China.  Hopefully we’ll be able to keep in touch with our friends through that as well as the blog postings, email, and facebook.  Ultimately, we won’t know what connectivity we’ll have until we’re in China, but we’re going to give it our best shot.