So Much for Mowing the Lawn...

It decided to rain today. So no lawn mowing allowed. This is the trouble with waiting for the weekend; now it means I'll have to mow the stupid thing when Doug's at work. Glory.

I had to get out of bed rather quickly yesterday morning...I woke up to two kids strapping on helmets and informing me that they were going bicycle riding. Wait! Wait! Not without me!

Of course once we pulled the bikes off the porch I realized we never fixed the problems we encountered last time we went riding. One of David's training wheels was further off the ground than the other, which not only scares him, but makes him ride as if he's got hip dysplasia. So David ran inside and got a pair of pliers and a wrench for me, and we realigned the wheels. I thought his tires were a little low, so we got out the tire pump and fixed THAT, and then discovered that Lauren is busy growing and she needed her bike seat raised.

Last time we focused on the fine art of identifying the beginning and end of the sidewalk, and how to find and make it to connecting sidewalks. This time we had to practice crossing streets (note to self: Be aware of small people making sudden stops), and then Lauren spotted something wonderful on the other side of the street and she stopped cold right in the middle of the sidewalk and caused a train wreck. "Lauren, you can't just STOP like that. If you find something interesting and you want to look at it, that's fine. But you need to pull over first!" She looked confused, then tried to ride her bike into the street, and then up onto the neighbor's grass, then tried to turn around. Oh. We have no idea what pulling over actually is, or what it means. So we went back to identifying the right and left sides of the sidewalk; I maneuvered Lauren's handlebars to show her how to move to the edge. I had her sit and stay and had David ride around Lauren, then pull his own bike over. Then I had Lauren start again, go around David, and pull over. We alternated with this five or six times, to make sure they got the feel for riding around someone stopped on the walk, and got the practice of pulling over themselves.

They got to ride through two lawn sprinklers (the water coverage was overlapping the sidewalk), and felt that they were quite Big.

After we got back the remembered that it was Saturday and that Saturday morning cartoons were on, so that took up a big chunk of time. We went to the mall and ate Chinese food, and we took the kids to the play area while we talked about the potential job offer.

We then went to Williams-Sonoma, and went searching for the here-all, be-all replacement for our two saucepans, which have become very sad. They're anodized aluminum, covered with a thin layer of Teflon. At this point, the Teflon has begun to flake off into the food, and I'm becoming rather alarmed at actually using said pans. (Yeah, technically the FDA classifies Teflon as an "inert substance" if you ingest it...but honestly, who wants to eat Teflon?) So we went with our Cooks Illustrated nearly-always winner: All-Clad. All-Clad is quite serious cookware, and quite seriously expensive. So this is our one, big, four-quart pan meant to do most of the heavy stuff (which related more to frequency rather than quantity). Cooks also has a "Best Buy" recommendation which is oodles cheaper: the Pinzon 3.5-Quart Stainless Steel Sauce Pan, which can be had for about $20 at Amazon.com. (We're going to get one of those, too.) We'll get to test it out later this week; I'm cooking a big turkey breast, the leftovers of which will go into a turkey soup/salad/fresh bread dinner.

David's supposed to start learning to tell time; if anyone knows of any good websites for teaching kids time, let me know....