Freedom Found in the Supermarket.

Photo credit: anankkml
www.freedigitalphotos.net

My car is in the shop.  This means I'm home-bound with Stella while we wait for it to be fixed.  We are friendly with our repair-guys as they see us so often.  We own both of our cars, they are both pretty old with very high mileage, but no car payments has worked really well for us...even if the cars spend a little more time (and sometimes money) in the shop than they would otherwise.  Today, Stella and I walked to the neighborhood post office...something I will never do again with the baby.  Our street is BUSY, but I had to mail a bunch of thank you's and so I bundled Stella in her pink snowsuit (so cute, by the way) and headed to the P.O. about 0.2 miles up the road.  Tonight I went to the grocery store while my wonderful husband took care of the nighttime routine with the babe.  These two outings (post office and grocery store) were the only times I've left the house in FOUR, that's right, 4 days.  Needless to say, I was almost dancing down the aisles of Market Basket...whistling to Christmas carols (shout out to my friend, Samara, who does the same and also gets weird looks from fellow customers...) and chatting with random shoppers periodically; conversation with adults is a novelty these days - you get it where you can.  My free time is certainly different now that Stella is a near-constant part of my world, but I'm grateful that something like grocery shopping can be appreciated as a moment to breathe, to be by myself, and to accomplish a task without interruption.  It's just another example of how having a baby has changed my perspective on things!

Photo credit: Salvatore Vuono
www.freedigitalphotos.net