The Kett-Files: Keeping Up Appearances, Day 5

To see what the Keeping Up Appearances Project is, click here. Or, click Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, or Day 4 to see how the week has gone so far. 

Day 5:

• 8:26am: I feel quite a bit better today than I did yesterday. Man, yesterday kicked me on my tushy! And now I’m looking at the completely thrashed house and I don’t want to do this! I need to clean the house in order to get my chosen pins done for the day. I just keep finding work to do online because then I’m being productive.I know I’m going to have to face the house sometime though. Blah.
• I decided to start the day with hot cocoa instead of my lemon water because it sounded yummy, and it was! White hot cocoa with Almond Joy creamer...MMMMMmmm!!
  
• 11:11am: I’ve spent over 2 ½ hours blogging. The house is still trashed and I haven't’ done a single pin, but Emilee and I were able to get 9 blog posts written and scheduled, relaunch decisions made, and work done. Blogging can really take some serious time!! But now I’ve done everything I can think to do for right now, which means it’s time to face my house. At least Darrow went down for a nap easy finally. This is the first day I haven’t had to put him back in bed 20+ times before he fell asleep! Maybe the first thing I should do is go get the jeans off the clothesline that I put out to dry on Saturday. Oops.
• 1:15pm: I put away the clean dishes, rewashed the gas clothes (no more gas smell! The vinegar and sunshine worked!), cleaned up Darrow’s toys (which are back out now that he’s up from his nap, ugh), fed us both lunch, cleaned up the jar Darrow dropped on the tile floor, switched over the laundry, and got the laundry in the room organized.
• I swear teaching is the only job where you steal supplies from home to take to work. I was going to do the bath paints I had pinned for Darrow, but we have no cornstarch. It’s at Cameron’s classroom. Oh well. 
• 3:32 PM Getting dressed for the day makes so much of a difference! I finally got out of my pjs around 2:00 and I’ve been way more productive around the house in this last hour and a half than I’ve been all day. No wonder one of the things in that “5 ways successful people start their days” pin is to get dressed. I even did my hair and makeup! 
• For my hair I tried out the triple french braids ponytail from the hairstyling pin I found. I have a confession. I've never ever french braided my hair, and only have tried it one time on someone else. I get the concept, but I just haven't done it. It took a few tries, and it isn't beautiful, but I got it to work and liked it!
• I even got brave and tried contouring again. I really like how today’s makeup turned out. I think it looks more natural than Saturday’s attempt.
  
• I mimicked my outfit from one I had pinned. I didn't have the right jacket for the look, but the one I had worked (well, for the picture...it was too hot to wear it otherwise). 
• The kitchen is clean (as per the daily cleaningpin), and ready to make dinner here in a few hours. Darrow is bathed (it was easier to let him take a bath while I did my hair and makeup than it was to keep him out of the toilet). 

And that's where I quit journaling for the day. I didn't finish. So let's go off of memory now just a few days later. 

• Since I couldn't do the bath paints pin for Darrow I decided to do a play dough pin I had saved instead. Somehow we've never tried playing with play dough for Darrow, and it's on the list of recommended things to work with him on from the Vision Specialist (fine motor skills and manipulation). I was in the middle of mixing it up when Cameron came home. This time I got a great reaction from him! He wowed and oohed and ahhed over makeup, hair, and outfit. I felt cute before, but then I felt like I'd really killed it. He agreed that this time my makeup was much better and he even liked the braids and little poof they made on top (which is not something he's a big fan of). Sweet! He helped me finish mixing up the playdough (using boring regular food coloring because I didn't get the gel coloring because I'm cheap). His interest in it lasted all of 5 minutes (tops!),  and he only wanted to poke holes in it. But maybe he'll be more interested later as we play with it more often. It is nice dough though, and was pretty simple to make. 

• And by that point we were hungry! So Cameron took Darrow outside to play and work on the yard while I got dinner put together. The yard was in sad shape when we moved in:
  
  No one knows where to park or which door to use. The steps were mostly filled in, and with all the rain we got shortly after the weeds got even worse and covered the entire yard. We've been making plans and working on it trying to make it a nice place to be eventually. You'll see more posts in the future of what we're doing to transform this little house into more. So Darrow and Cameron worked on the yard and I put together a dinner pin I've had saved for months and months. 
  
• For dinner we did Pickle-Brine Chicken. This was supposed to be the meal for Day 4, but because I was sick it didn't happen. This did mean though that instead of 8-24 hours in the brine, the pickles had nearly 40 hours in the brine.I'd bought an 80oz jar of pickles long before we moved and had been working on eating the pickles to be able to have the brine for this. This was one of the fridge items that definitely came with us on the move! I was excited for the chance to try this out.  It was pretty straight-forward to put together. I used our large cast iron pan to cook these in/on, and they went together without a hitch. To go along with the chicken I threw together some mashed potatoes (I LOVE mashed potatoes!!) with the last 4 taters in the cupboard, leftover heavy cream from the cake, leftover mozzarella cheese from...from...what did I use that in this week?! Huh. Anyway...and garlic powder. It was yummy! And then just some frozen corn out of the freezer. It was a yummy meal! I loved the chicken!! Cameron's not a huge dill pickle fan, but he still liked the chicken. 

• The rest of the evening we went and delivered Prickly Pear Jelly for Family Night, and then hit up Dairy Queen on the way home.  
• I didn't quite get in all my water, and I didn't get in my exercises. Dang it.