Once again, I took a picture of a bento I made this week but did not get a chance to upload it to the computer.

Instead, here is a picture of my son eating a corn dog at the State Fair. This is the child who will not eat meat of any kind (including chicken or chicken strips), beans, or soy, and we only recently convinced to eat pizza.

I don’t claim to be a great cook over here, but I usually make edible things. Unfortunately, this week I managed to screw up Rice Crispy Treats. Oh yes. Somehow they would not maintain their structural integrity – when you tried to cut them or pick up a “bar”, it would crumble into delicious marshmallow-coated handfuls of cereal. What did I do wrong?? Does that mean I used too much butter or not enough marshmallow creme? Could my marshmallow creme have gone bad? It was soooo sticky in the jar!

I am a terrible, terrible birthday planner but I think we are almost ready for Little Sir’s 2 year birthday party next week. It’s really just going to be family and a few friends, so it’s nothing big. The best thing ever is that we are having pizza delivered for the food. It’s the only “real” food he will eat other than fruit. Even then, he’s not consistent. He might not eat any, after all.

I realize that it would be much healthier and much more “green” if I made the cupcakes or cake myself rather than buying them, but I also had to realize that was completely insane. I am hardly able to make our dinners right now, much less anything fancy. My high-needs children never sleep. I am just not going to be one of those moms who has a Pinterest-worthy party. I am OK with that.

We might have bought a house! We are in the contract period right now, next week will be the inspections and such. So we’ll see how that goes.

I’d be interested to hear from any of you who have done any of the following home repairs or remodels (you can email me at jenny [at] conscientiousconfusion [dot] com or send me a Facebook message):

• “green” windows
• new carpeting in combination with new baseboards
• sanding and refinishing wood stairs
• exterior paint or aluminum siding (which did you pick and why?)
• knocking out part of a wall in the kitchen

I’d like to know mainly if there are things we should be looking for that would save us money – ways to do or NOT do these projects. I’m sure the contractor has a default way of doing things but if there are ways we can step in and change things to save some, we’d love to do that.

Here is another fun thing about buying any house: I am terrible at picking out paint colors and both of us hate making decisions. So the whole paint thing should be tons of fun!!! But, once it’s done hopefully we won’t have to do it for a while.

If you follow my friends the EcoMaids on Facebook, you might have seen that they are looking to trade some house cleaning (in the DFW area) for the services of a massage therapist. Any massage therapists out there? If so, let me know too!

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Well that’s all for this week, be sure to visit Conversion Diary for links to more 7 Quick Takes Fridays.