Tidbits

• Grace has discovered the joy that is peanut butter and boy, has she DISCOVERED it.  She wants to eat it at every meal now.  This means she will finally eat sandwiches, which is great, sandwiches being such a convenient portable, packable type of food.  I suspect her new openness to peanut butter is a result of seeing her little classmates eat it at preschool.  She is head-over-heels in love with the stuff; it's like it is the new chocolate.  She still loves chocolate too, though, and now I wonder what paroxysms of joy she might experience if we combined them.  Maybe I'll try making these-- they look delicious and are vegan to boot.
• Violet had her 4-month check-up last week and is doing well.  She is 15 lbs 4 oz-- so big!  She gained about 2.5 lbs from her 2-month check-up, which is good and adequate and all that.  In the same timeframe, I lost almost 15 lbs, which I also consider good and adequate.  Violet's latest developmental trick is rolling from her back on to her front.  For some reason, watching her do this is endlessly amusing to me; it is so funny to watch her heave her little baby self and giant cloth-diapered booty over on to her tummy.
• This time last year, I knew that I was pregnant, just barely pregnant with the tiny person who Violet was.  It is am amazing, mysterious miracle to contemplate but goodness, life is so much better now-- I find being pregnant fairly miserable but having a baby is great!
• Speaking of Violet, she is such a delightful, beautiful baby.  I sometimes can't believe my good luck at having a baby who is so content, so lovely, so delicious.  Her skin is so beautiful and smooth and soft, and her cheeks and her arms and her legs are just plain delicious, just the perfect balance of squishy and firm.  I shall eat her up.
• We are considering doing some energy-efficiency-type improvements to our house before summer hits us in full force.  We try to keep our house at 78 degrees when the AC is on and last summer on the 100+ degree days our AC couldn't manage it.  As the afternoon would crawl by, the AC would run constantly and the thermometer would creep upwards-- 78, 79, 80.  It has become very obvious to us over the past year that our house has serious efficiency issues; we have duct work problems and insulation inadequacies and terrible 50-year-old windows and a slightly under-powered AC unit.  We went to an Earth Day green living expo and talked to a bunch of contractors and companies and whatnot to figure out what we can do.  We're definitely going to repair the ducts and seal up things and do the insulation, and now we are trying to decide between replacing the windows with fancy windows that block infrared radiation and replacing our furnace and AC with a geothermal heat pump.  I normally get depressed about spending money on such utilitarian stuff but for some reason I am super-excited about sealing up our ducts and making our house more efficient.