7QT: Unaccompanied minors, amazing customer service, and why my hideous redecoration of our little-used living room has me smiling so big

1. You know who's awesome lately? The customer service industry. Or rather, two particular companies (FitBit and Timi & Leslie) which have been completely and utterly surprising in their responsiveness and kindness to a poor customer in need of service.

Exhibit A:

My beautiful diaper bag, purchased in a fit of hormonal indulgence at 37 weeks with Evie. I get compliments on its beauty at least twice a week, and nobody ever suspects it's a diaper bag. But the material is pulling at this one teeny corner of the notleather and I was saddened and surprised. My last T&L bag lasted me 2 years, including one spent trotting back and forth to Italy, with no such signs of stress. I emailed the company, the asked for my receipt and a picture of the offending corner, and bada bing, a brand new bag is coming my way and I get to keep the "old" one. Sadly they have discontinued the color I loved and purchased it for, so it turns out my lucky little sister is probably the one getting a new diaper bag out of this situation, because none of these really struck my fancy. Shhhh.

2. I've also got an email in to the good peeps at FitBit, thanks to your lovely suggestions, and I'm feeling pretty optimistic about that whole situation, too. The week of retail redemption is at hand!

3. I'm getting so excited to meet all my Edel girls in just 2 short weeks! I'm also kind of in denial that I'm going to be getting a weekend "off," albeit with a baby in hand and a mic in the other, but hey, one can't accurately call any sort of trip a vacation once offspring have sprung, am I right?

4. I have gone ballistic decorating and rearranging my house ever since the Nesting Place burned up my Kindle a few weeks back, thanks to Jen's recommendation. Steph says it well when she identified it as a shot of decorating heroin to the vein, or something along those lines.

Anywho, I've got a happy new edition resting comfortably in our living room that goes absolutely not at all with anything decor related, and yet when I behold its ugliness I smile to myself and whisper inaudibly It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful. But what about the opposing corollary, it doesn't have to be beautiful to be perfect? Copyrighting it.

Definitely not feng shui. And yet, perfect...

5. So yeah, I finally pulled my itching trigger finger on a Craigslist treadmill at long last after walking into the feral kid's club at our gym Tuesday morning to retrieve my rat pack and had a few moments during which I could not locate the youngest member. Not in the stroller I'd wheeled in, not in the caretaker's arms...oh, there she is... sitting on the bottom level of the soft play structure IN THE ARMS OF A RANDOM 5-YEAR-OLD GIRL. Just to clarify, my 6 month old daughter, who cannot sit up, was being held by a strange child. The daycare worker happily fetched the baby along with her accompanying brothers while my normally confrontational self stared dumbly, accepted the compromised baby without a word. (Don't worry, I picked my jaw up off the floor and called the front desk after I got home. But still.) Needless to stay, Evie's kid's club days are over until she turns 4 or gains 20 lbs, whichever happens first.

6. I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' Perelandra for perhaps the seventh time, but definitely the first time in several years, and I had forgotten how utterly astonishing it is, how deeply spiritual and how moving, and how very good fiction is for the soul. I'm all about memoirs, DIY manifestos and self-helping manuals, but once it a while it's just so good to get lost in another world. (Thus far in my literary life, only C.S. Lewis and Michael O'Brien have the capacity to move me on a deep spiritual level, but I'm always open to suggestions.) Perelandra is the kind of book that will, quite unassumingly, cause you to set it down and momentarily lose yourself in contemplation of the nature of God. And it is most definitely not what one would traditionally call spiritual reading. It's beautiful, captivating and engaging prose of the first degree.

7. I have a problem with terrible music. The problem is, I like it. The corollary problem is that my 3-year-old son sometimes asks me to sing "every word to the airplane song for me, Mommy." and then I can't. Because adult themes and language. At least he's not into Ke$ha. Yet.

See you at Jen's place?