Baked Goods

This past weekend I met five friends at a place called Baked Goods Pottery. It is a studio where you can choose a ceramic item, paint it, and then they fire it for you. I don't have any artistic skill whatsoever, but it was really fun. The hardest part was trying to figure out what I should make! I ended up choosing a small bud vase because I broke ours in Chicago. It was interesting to see what everyone else made and secret, hidden talents they each have. The first picture above shows a portion of the wall where you browse to find what you want to paint. In the second picture, P. and I are holding my vase while my friend Angie is holding her super cute tea light holder. The paint is really chalky in color until they are fired, so it is hard to even see what was painted in the picture. We can't pick up our items until the 10th and I can't wait to see how they all turned out!

The nurturer
S. is becoming really nurturing. She is giving kisses and hugs all of the time. She is always looking out for others and bringing them potentially “lost” items. And recently she has been wanting to make sure P. is okay and covered up with blankets, has a stuffed animal, etc. While we have to be careful because she doesn't fully understand not to cover P.'s head, it is really cute to catch her in action. While cleaning up after dinner tonight, S. was doting on P. again. I “caught” her kissing P. and then tucking her in with a dish towel!

State taxes
We finally finished both sets of our state taxes last night. I had been putting it off because our federal taxes had already been filed and I wasn't too excited about tackling the state filings at the same time. They took much longer than I thought they would and to my dismay I uncovered that we also have to file in Kentucky. It appears that I have been filing our Illinois taxes wrong for the past three years and each year I should have filed in both IL and KY because of my employer being in KY. Oops. IL has a special agreement with KY stating that KY won't take taxes from employees residing in IL, and vice versa. It actually worked out to KY's advantage because they should have been paying me my overpayment and not IL. (You, dear reader, don't work for the IL Department of Revenue, do you?) Sigh. Thankfully April 15th is still a decent amount of time away and I can wait for my third wind to kick in!