The Weekend I Ended Up With Fake Botox (And Other Stories)

If I were a nicer person, I would tell you all about the fake botox right off the bat. However, I'm going to make you either a) read this entire post to find the story, or b) skim the entire post to find the story!

We started out our weekend with having four kids for 24 hours. Since those friends want to be blognonymous I can't show you any pictures, but we decided to put the extra kids to work. We all walked to the liquor store to get empty boxes. And then each kid carried a box home. We also had the wagon and the Chariot filled with boxes. And no, we're not moving. We have to pack up almost every room in our house so we can get our floors refinished.

The end result will be awesome; the process of getting there, not so much.

While we waited for our two extra kids to go home, I decided to start weeding along the fence and see how far I got. Dave thought it was a slight waste of time but even he was impressed with the end result.

Then, because we are awesome, Rachel and I walked to the grocery store for a few items, and left Dave and Sam to deal with the aftermath of four kids. They did a GREAT job of cleaning the playroom.

For some reason, the kids are drawn to my whiteboard markers, which I want to use for myself, so once in awhile they get to play with them for a treat. Really, with art like this, I should let them go wild more often. This is, in her own words, "Rachel in a spaceship, searching for the treasure." The treasure is the blue circle with the cross through it.

After admiring other people's pictures of their kids on Sunday mornings, I decided to try and get pictures of Sam and Rachel when we are going to either church or synagogue. I'm going to call it "Sabbath Siblings." Getting Sam to pose for these pictures, and not read his book, was a bit of a gong show. Rachel cracked me up though!

We had a great sermon yesterday morning at church about how perceived scarcity can lead to power imbalances, and how our society runs on telling people they don't have enough. Ironically, after that powerful sermon, which I am still chewing on (and obviously not quickly enough), we headed to the mall. Funnily enough, our pastor (the one who preached the sermon (we have three pastors at our church)) and his family joined us, so I felt okay about it :) Ha ha ha!!!

After lunch, Dave took the kids to play on the rides (which we never pay for-- the kids just like climbing on them), and I browsed in a few stores. Then one of the mall kiosk employees gave me a sample of facial moisturizer and then asked if she could do a demo on me. Since they always look like fun, and I thought it was for the moisturizer, I said "Sure!" She then proceeded to smear something under one of my eyes, and as she smeared it on, she said, "In about two minutes you will feel a tingling, tightening sensation. It's like botox." Awesome.

I got out of there as quickly as I could, praying for the safety of my eye, and told Dave, "I just got fake botox on one eye. Ahhhh." He started laughing and took a picture. And then asked me how my "faux-tox" was for the rest of the afternoon. Gah. I'm never going to endure one of those demos again, especially since the skin around my eye felt wonky for a couple of hours afterwards. Also, I'm not planning on using the free sample.

After the mall we went shopping for a chair. Sam parked himself in this one and proceeded to read for the next hour. Rachel went around and picked all the chairs she wanted to buy.

We eventually made it back home, just in time to make supper. The hour between supper and bedtime was looking to be a little scary until I remembered that Willem had passed on a toy for Sam which I hadn't told him about yet. Sam spent the rest of the evening constructing various things from this set.

And then I baked cookies. They were so good that I almost forgot about the traumatic faux-tox experience. Almost.