Strange Side Effects

Ok, this is not a post about some strange medical phenomena. This hotel living has had some interesting effects on my life that I wouldn't have expected.

First, I've been reflecting on how much I love the location of my house. Living in Orem for the past week has made me realize how living in Northern Utah County has changed my habits. OK, so I'm talking mostly about shopping, but still. I spend a lot of time going to stores, browsing around, looking for things to add to my ever growing list of things I want to buy. Window shopping is ok, isn't it? Anyway, when I lived in Provo I almost never went to Salt Lake City to shop. Occasionally I would go up with a date, or after I got married, with Jeremy. Now I head North for almsot everything. And I like it. This week I've wanted to go to Restoration Hardware to look at stuff for my laundry room. The problem is that by the time Kaitlin and I have breakfast, get ready and actually get in the car to go, we don't really have enough time. It takes an hour to get to Trolly Square--twice as long as it takes me when I leave from my house. With Kaitlin's strict nap schedule (we don't mess with the nap schedule!) I don't have time for an almost two hour round trip to Salt Lake. It seems trivial, ok, it is trivial, but I never realized how the location of my house gives me the freedom to do much more of what I want to do.

Second, I've come to fully realize the importance of downtime for children. I have this deserate need to be gone from our room as much as possible. It's not very fun to be here. We don't have a DVD player for Kaitlin, so she tends to wander up and down the hallway, dumping the dirty laundry out of the laundry basket, dumping toys out of the laundry basket that I'm storing the toys in, dumping crayons out of their box. See a pettern here? Anyway, it drives my crazy, but yesterday I decided to hang out here and see how Kaitlin did. She did all of the above dumping, but she was so much happier than she is when I drag her all over town. The up side to my frustration--she fell asleep a lot faster than she did when I keep her out until bedtime. This translates into a much happier baby in the morning.

Finally, and this is probably the most serious of the three side effects, I have almost completely given up watching TV. I haven't watched an episode of any of the mulitude of TV shows I usually watch in a week. Jeremy and I were going to have our Tivo plugged in at home, but we decided against that, just so we could see hwo we did. I actually kind of like it! I've done a lot of reading, a lot of writing in my journal, I'm getting more sleep at night. I'm not sure how this will translate when we move back into our house, since I do have things to do that I liek to do in front of the TV. But I will say right now that I feel quite liberated, no longer a slave to the boob tube. I'll follow up on this later.

Well, if you've stuck with me this far, I thank you! I'm feeling the need to spout off even more than I usually do. Blogging withdrawal. What a dangerous thing!