Odds and Ends

Earlier this week the boy and his father had a very busy morning constructing the ultimate track for Thomas and his many engine friends to travel, complete with the Sodor airport, the logging station, the Shake-Shake bridge, Tidmouth sheds, Brendam docks, a water tower, and various hills and bridges.

As you can see, the boy is very proud of it. But I'm pretty sure it was Daddy's idea. It was also Daddy's idea to go to the circus this week. This child is three years old and has already been to the circus three times. I never went to the circus as a child, though I remember wanting to and watching the Circus of the Stars (is that a thing?) on TV.

We bought him an overpriced light-up spinny thing that entranced him perhaps more than the circus itself. But he did enjoy watching the dancing camels and the motorcycles and the elephants and the ponies. And we even got to ride an elephant, which he has been wanting to do since the first circus he saw last winter.

But it hasn't all been fun and games. We've had some serious work to do at the house. Case in point, my husband's out-of-control ties.

Pastor Zach and I have the exact same personality when it comes to order. Deep down, we're a bit OCD about organizing. We like things like ties or spools of thread to be ordered precisely by color and lined up nicely. But we are also inexplicably lax about putting things away after we use them. So Zach's ties have slowly given in to entropy and were calling out in pain for more order. So they all made their way to the couch and I ordered them by color and Zach put them away nicely on his three tie racks. Yes, three. The man has almost 70 ties. Really. He managed to part with perhaps half a dozen as we were organizing, which were blessed subtractions ('90s in an unironic way...*shudder*).

Zach contemplates a couch full of ties.

In fact, I've recently gotten the purging bug again and I've been looking into closets and toy boxes and shoe racks with my eagle eyes, searching for dead weight. I've managed to pile a bunch of my shoes and some toys and some clothing into the last of our diaper boxes and they are sitting on the landing, waiting for transport to the thrift shop. And pretty soon I will have to deal with the sinkhole of junk that is the garage.

The lawn needs mowing and the gardens need weeding (and mulch) and the laundry needs doing. I suppose as summer winds down it's time to get down to business and reign in the chaos. Wish me luck!