Pages Torn from the Franklin Day Planner

Switched Grasshopper (name of the day) to training pants, completley. That was a couple months ago, but I keep forgetting to mention it. She's about 96% trained, has been for the last two months. Some of that 4%: sometimes she pees the bed. Sometimes she's too interested or absorbed in the world to stop and pee. Like in a Tuesday Morning discount chain store, where I've stopped to pick-up a board book for a party we're on the way to...and where totally soaked through pants force me to buy the only outfit in her size, a tank top and pants with a split down the butt and ruffles in it...:



Visited Keith and Theresa's -- two major Gs of Green -- and checked out the amazing, environmentally responsible home they're making out of this neat concrete that is 3/4 air. Even little Grasshopper can pick up big chunks of the block. And they have a pond and tons of frogs. And their house is smack dab in the middle of Houston...It can be done! Neato.

Prepared for Tropical Storm Humberto, who snubbed us. A week or two before the storm, though, we had a river in front of our house after a regularly heavy rain:



Lost keys at the Hari Krishna Temple either while cartwheeling with Marcia, Pearl, and Carrie, or chasing the ecstatically dancing children, during Earth Dance 2007. Luckily Grasshopper seems to be a natural at ecstatic dancing, so even though we spent an hour and a half looking for our keys and still didn't find them, she found a 21 month year old groove and went with it, instead of melting down (like her parents). At nine thirty our friend Charles rescued us in his pickup truck(Marica and family had left when her kids' stomachs started roaring). Later, against all odds, I found a spare car key surrounded by gooey, sticky, humidified cough drops, in the bottom of a black purse in the back of the terrifying tool/tape/shadowy/coat/probably-cockroach closet.

Painted the livingroom Mesmerize purple, using Sherwin Williams no VOC Harmony paint. It is incredible, a lovely color that actually looks like the sky right before it turns night-dark. It doesn't look so good on the computer. We started painting the second part of the room in Aurora Gold but GreenDaddy was unsure if the contrast made the room look more like Mardi Gras in general or the Minnesota Vikings' outfits -- and this is very apparent on the computer:



We had to go back and buy a more sophisticated stone brown, which we haven't painted on yet, and we'll save the yellow, which is actually very pretty in real life, for a bedroom. And: hardly any fumes. I liked that Harmony.

Multiple Choice Confession:

a) Grassroots campaign to bring back the prairies
b) Important experiment on the length of grass and overall compost health
c) Too otherworldsly occupied to tend to the lawn
d) All of the above
e) A little BS, a little of all of the above
f) A lot of BS, a little of some of the above

Bought and/or helped arrange tickets for: GreenDaddy's parents to visit at the first of October, my mother to visit at the end of October, and We Three Greens to have Thanksgiving with my aunt and uncle in Missoula, where they have a lovely new (an unburned :)) cabin in a place called Rock Creek.

Bought a bed for our parents to sleep on when they stay. We got this regularly $500 IKEA mattress from the special sale section of IKEA and bought the cheapest full bed frame to go with it, which we luckily liked better than the frames one or two hundred dollars around that range. (I like IKEA mattresses because they're the cheapest mattresses you can buy PBDE free...) At home, I spent four long hours assembling the frame. Then I put the mattress on to discover it was mislabeled. It was a Queen sized mattress that dwarfs the frame I almost killed myself assembling. We looked for the receipt and of course, though we have every piddling receipt for everything else we did that week, we threw the major purchase receipt away. So now we'll try to sell the frame I wasted important hours of my life assembling.

Developed a taste for Tofutti just this morning.

Phew. GreenDaddy, the ghost of Green Parenting, has a fabulous post he's holding out on. But that'll be up soon...