The delicate balance

I mowed the grass yesterday afternoon and it was really, really hot. The whole time I was mowing I was imagining what I would be doing when I got done. The image involved ice water, possibly ice cream, a slightly warm shower, clean clothes and some relaxation including laying on the couch with the kids before I headed out for my evening activities. I cleaned up the outside and came inside to accomplish my first goal--the ice water. As I was drinking the water I checked the answering machine (I really need to teach my kids to answer the phone!). It was after 4pm. There was a message from a very harried sounding woman from our realty company telling us that there was a person(s) who wanted to see our house at 5:30. If it wasn't going to work I needed to call her IMMEDIATELY! Well, of course it is going to work--I want my house to sell. What obviously wasn't going to work was my fantasy of my after mowing experience. The first thing I did was call Joe to inform him that I needed a fellow bumblebee to fly around the house with. Then I went upstairs. Now when you have babies in the house, you expect to have certain odors created occasionally. There is just baby smell--both good (baby bath soap, baby lotion, etc) and bad (don't think a description is needed here). When you are showing a house you need to have a delicate balance of baby smell--pretty much no smell at all is the perfect balance. While Nathan was taking his nap he had upset the delicate balance--this became very evident as I walked up the stairs. And so Joe and I attempted to create the perfect balance again by opening windows and spraying fabreeze (which I realized the other day that my girls think fabreeze is perfume). Despite other claims, as Joe and I have looked at other houses, we have realized that you truly can spray too much fabreeze. So we were trying to decide how much was too much. Joe kept saying "they will know we have a baby, right? I mean there is a crib in the room" We thought we had found the balance right up to the point that Sara (who has a nose of a beagle) walked upstairs and said "EWWWW can you spray some in my room" And so we can always hope and pray that the family that looked at it either has babies themselves or possibly some kind of cold or some sort of nose disorder (not that I would wish that on anyone). For good measure Joe put out chocolate cookies in the dining room for their eating enjoyment--maybe the chocolate will create a lapse of memory of the upstairs smell...