Last night as I was putting Sophie to bed I was thinking that it's probably been about a week since I posted anything here.  I have all kinds of things in my mind that I'd like to write, but haven't had the time to actually write it down.  Then I looked at my last entry and realized that it was only Friday, not a week like I'd estimated in my mind.  I seem to have both lost and gained time in my mind.  I'm going in a lot of directions, but feel like I haven't gotten a single thing done.  My mind and body have been busy, and yet I don't feel all that productive.  Here's what we've been doing:

- Our dishwasher has gone on strike and refuses to clean anything properly.  Every load washes some of the dishes and leaves others with some remnants of it's last meal.  This is where I officially declare myself a "big fat baby" because I lived for most of my life without a dishwasher, but now that I'm the chief bottlewasher I'm super sick of having a constant production line of dishes.
- I've been doing massive amounts of laundry including lots of sheets and blankets.  The only good part about washing blankets and sheets is that it doesn't take that long to fold them.
- Martin started pre-school.  This doesn't actually take up that much time, but it's an adjustment for us.  Also an adjustment is my revised working schedule to accommodate taking him to school.  For now, this means the same amount of work but less working hours.
- Since Marty returned from his Microsoft bootcamp, things have been really busy at work and he has had to work a lot of early mornings and late evenings.  They're putting in a new phone system (voice over IP), getting ready to start production on the new plant that was completed in January, and preparing to launch a new website.  It's a lot at once and nothing can be moved out.
- Martin has some sort of cold and an eye that looks a little blood shot, which the doctor assures me is NOT pink eye.  He coughed quite a bit over the weekend, but seems to be doing better this morning.  I'm not sure if we'll take him to pre-school today or not.  I hate to do it if whatever funk he has is still catchy, because sharing is good, but not THIS kind of sharing.  I feel a little bad about passing on today only because he's going to miss one or two sessions in the next week, and that seems like a lot right in a row.  I guess we'll see how the next few hours go before making our final decision.
- We decided to take this downtime to get rid of the old furniture in our basement, move our exercise equipment to the space next to our office, move the entertainment center/bookshelves/cd center to another wall (which of course means taking it all apart first), and shop for a new sectional.
- I'm preparing for Sophie's birthday party which is a week from Saturday.  Today I'm going to make a practice cake which is only necessary because I'm not a very good baker.  Plus, I'm throwing in all kinds of variables.  I'm going to try making a red velvet cake, but the recipe calls for buttermilk which we can't eat since Sophie's allergic to dairy.  I'm going to substitute soy creamer and see how that works.  I'm going to substitute a non-dairy frosting mix for the cream cheese frosting the recipe calls for.  And, the worst admission, I've never made a two-layer cake so I really need to give it a try.
- The biggest thing for which I am the least prepared, Marty and I leave on Wednesday for a trip to London.  Martin is going to my parents house, Sophie is going to go shuttle between people (nanny/godparents/mother-in-law) and several locations, and we'll be at Sevda's.  I have not prepared for a single thing, including planning what we'll do while we're in London.  The main purpose of the trip is to sit around and talk wedding details with Sevda, but Marty and I will have two days where we're on our own.  Certainly we could just sleep in and lounge around, but that seems incredibly wasteful since we'll be in LONDON.

So today, we're going to do a little baking, keep powering through the laundry and sit around waiting for the dishwasher repair man to show up sometime between 8AM and 5PM (thanks Sears for the really specific timeframe).

On the table Saturday night: Moroccan Braised Chicken (this was SO good and pretty easy, I used a cut up whole chicken instead of just legs and it was delicious)