Mallory

Hey Tough Guy

Sweet baby Mallory took a trio of spills this weekend.

The first tumble happened at daycare Friday afternoon– and we witnessed the whole thing. We were standing at the gate waiting for Mallory to see us…well, she noticed us and got so excited that she took a step off the play equipment (about 2’ off the ground) and fell flat on her face in the sand. Thank GOD it was sand and not a hard[er] surface. Rick & I didn’t move, either because we were unfazed by her fall (99% of the time if she falls – she gets right up and goes on her way) or because we were sort of in shock ~ I think it was a combination of the two. But it seemed like she fell in slow motion and then the teacher yelled and went running. I let Rick go out to get her and comfort her first because I knew when she saw me she would want only me. She was COVERED in sand – it was in her eyes, up her nose, in her ears, and CAKED in her hair. She must have been sweating pretty good to have that much sand stuck to her head! It was so sad, though, because she was crying about the sand in her eyes and wanting to rub them but of course that would only make it worse. It took a good 10 minutes to calm her down and cleaned off enough. Poor kid :-(

The second fall happened on Sunday morning. We went to the metropark because I was scheduled to take pictures of my friend & her family and Rick & the kids came along so Mallory could play with my friend’s son after we did pictures. Rick & Mallory left to play on the slide while I was waiting for my friend. Three minutes after they left to go play, I heard Mallory crying. I saw Rick carrying her back to the car and figured she was just crying because she couldn’t see me, etc. But then they got closer and I saw they were both bloody. She had it running down her face and at first it was hard to tell if it was coming from her mouth or her nose. Apparently she fell and hit her nose trying to climb back down the ladder of the slide and ended up with a bloody nose. Rick had his Black Dog shirt on and it was covered in blood so it looked like the black dog on the front had a bloody nose – LOL!

Her third mishap was probably the least dramatic injury-wise, but still a little scary, especially for Mallory. She has started this thing of tickling Rick’s back and pushing him in the water off the swim platform on the back of the boat. I guess she sort of lost her balance when she pushed Rick because she fell in too – thank goodness for her boat coat! I wasn’t there so I can’t tell you if she freaked out or not (you know my husband is a man of few words so it’s amazing I even heard that she fell).

Rick just reminded me that she had a trio of spills plus one because she fell off the swing at the metropark on Sunday too. Oops.

* * *

The weekend continued to be busy. We are trying to cram in a ton of errands and family time into the few weekends we have before football starts up in August.

Friday night we had to go to stupid Art Van to look at beds again. Their delivery people ruined our mattress bringing it up the stairs so they tried to bring us another one, but without even trying to get another one up our stairs (carefully), they told us we had to come pick out a foam mattress. So we went back to Art Van to look at foam mattresses, and of course the only one we liked was $1000 more than the buttload of money we’d already spent. And they told us we would have to pay a $130 return fee for them to take back the mattress, PLUS we have to pay shipping on the new mattress (Rick actually laughed out loud when the guy told us that). The guy was being a jerk “we can’t tell you if the mattress is going to fit up your stairs or not…” – basically saying it was unreasonable for us to want to return the mattress. After some back and forth, we told them we just wanted them to take the mattress back and give us our money back. They told us that mattresses are a non-refundable item and the best they could do was 15% off the fancy foam mattress (and no return fee or delivery charge) but that was still going to more money than we wanted to spend. We told them we had to think about it and that we’d get back to them.

Sunday we visited Gardner-White – Rick saw an ad where you can get a free HDTV if you spend a certain amount of money. We got there and found a couple of beds we liked (one foam and one regular one). On top of the free TV sale, they had a “buy a king for the price of a queen” sale PLUS 25% off! Are you kidding me? We realized we only qualified for the 15” free TV so Rick had the idea that if we spent another $700 that we could get the 26” TV. We’ve been talking about getting a bunk bed for the kid’s room and they had the kind we liked – it has stairs on the side instead of a ladder. So that would also be 25% off and we could get it delivered for free since we were buying the mattress. The sale was actually the free TV or no sales tax – this is important for later in the story.

But first things first – we had to get Art Van to let us return the damaged mattress. Our saleslady gave us the heads-up about which manager we should talk to so I got my gloves on and was ready to fight. And when I talked to the manager, he agreed to refund our money and he’d just have to talk to our salesperson. The salesman called me back later in the afternoon and offered us 20% off – but I told him that still wasn’t enough. Rick & I had sort of decided that if they agreed to do an even swap that we might do that as a last resort. Then they offered us 25% off – I was starting to cave, figuring it would just be easier that way to do a one-for-one swap on the mattress, and not deal with coordinating a pissed off Art Van removing the damaged mattress with Gardner-White delivering a new mattress (and we certainly don’t need both mattresses). But even 25% off wasn’t enough. So we told them we just wanted to have them take the mattress and give us our money back – which they are supposedly going to do on Friday of this week.

We ended up waiving off the bunk bed ~ when we home and measured, we realized there just wasn’t enough room in their room. There is also the thought that when Carson is out of his crib in 2-ish years, Mallory will be almost ready to start kindergarten (ie NO MORE DAYCARE BILL for her!) and we will either do the addition to our house or we will move closer to Dexter. Both of those options would mean they wouldn’t have to share a room = bunkbeds would be unnecessary. So we took the no sales tax instead of the TV. Boring, but responsible.

Who would have thought just getting a new bed would be so involved! I do love our new mattress, even though it slants to my side of the bed right now (the new one is supposedly coming today!) and I love our new headboard from Ikea. I love that our room looks so beachy-cottagy-lakey, especially since we live on a lake. LOL.

Ok, that’s enough rambling for one post. I have pictures to post tomorrow if I have time!