Our newest obsession

I think this was the best $3 garage sale purchase of all time. My mother was going to go out and buy a new one on Monday in preparation for Christmas, but this was a little bit of a better deal. And the kid loves watching the marbles go through ... she can only make tiny little towers on her own, but heck, I love the building part, so it's kind of a good collaboration for me to build and her to run the marbles through. Liza doesn't even mind waiting while I build - she takes off the little paddles that spin around when a marble goes through, pretends they're flowers, and makes up stories that involve me being a bad witch who comes and takes away the mommy flower and all the little flowers are sad, so I end up not being able to use any of the spinners and half of the marbles fly out of the turns that are supposed to have spinners, but it's all good.

Now, if I can just resist the urge to see how many sets it would take to run marbles from Liza's bedroom to the basement, we'll be fine.

It's possible we read to her too much

It's pretty much a daily occurrence that Liza will narrate what she's doing as if she is reading it out of a book. I'm not talking about a normal 3-year-old talking to herself, like "Now I need to find a piece to make a door." She's talking as if she were reading dialogue, complete with descriptions and speaker identifications. For example, I'll ask her if she wants milk or water with her snack, and she'll reply," 'Water, please,' Liza said, smiling at her mother."

Most of the time she just does this with her own conversations. It's a little bit disconcerting, but it hasn't crossed the line from "cute" to "disturbing and/or annoying" ... yet.

Then today she started doing the same with the toys she was playing with. When the princess fell into the dungeon of the Little People castle we found at a yard sale this morning, Liza had the other princess** say, "'Oh, are you okay?' Flower Girl asked." This went on for 5 or 10 minutes, each character providing the entire written dialogue from some script in Liza's head. It was a little freaky.




**Also freaky? After the princesses rescued each other from the dungeon half a dozen times (while the prince sat outside in the carriage), 'Her Highness' told 'Flower Girl' that it was time to go because they needed to get married because they were in love. So they booted the prince out of the carriage and rode off into the sunset, holding hands. It took every bit of my liberal Democratic willpower to not suggest that it might be better to have the prince and the princess fall in love and get married. I draw the line if the kid starts involving livestock, though ... although I did think it was pretty funny when she had the Little People baby Jesus repeatedly falling down into the dungeon and being rescued by the Wise Men and the camel from the toy nativity scene we found at the same sale.

I don't know what it is about baby Jesus figures ... Liza kept making off with the one that goes with our "official" nativity set last Christmas, and we'd find Him in the bathroom or on her chair in the dining room. The manger scene looks pretty strange without a baby ... sort of like a really bad party where everyone is just sort of standing around awkwardly. I seem to remember that my cousins used to do the same thing with their (much more expensive) baby Jesus figurine when we were kids. And some of Liza's friends have a Playmobil nativity set mixed in with all of their other Playmobil stuff ... and apparently the baby Jesus is a regular purchase at the Playmobil grocery store. Not a customer - a purchase. That totally cracks me up.

Craigslist.org

Oh, my. I think I'm in love.

So far I've sold the boat, three side tables, an ottoman, a box spring, a mattress, three framed black and white photos, and probably some other things I've forgotten. I can see more of the cracked garage floor, I'm going to have fewer big things to drag out for the impending yardsale, and I'm up by $475. Must ... not ... sell ... furniture ... we're ... actually ... using ...

Anyone need a boat? Too bad, this one's sold!

We're selling our 16' Old Town Loon 160T tandem kayak. It's been a good boat, but we hardly ever used it, even before we had 30 pounds of deadweight to haul with us and keep from jumping overboard.

For $400 you get a gently used boat with only minor cosmetic scratches on the underside of the hull, two paddles, a dolly to get the thing to the water, a roller to get the thing into the water, a cover to keep spiders out of the cockpit in the winter, and a set of tiedown straps for use with most standard roof racks. This boat retails for about $700, not including all the extras, so this is an excellent deal.

If anyone is willing to come pick it up in Northeast Ohio, I'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE 6/22/07 - Sold! Gotta love craigslist.com ... this sucker was out the door less than two days after I listed it. Hooray! Now you can see more of our crappy cracked garage floor!