April 8, 2005

what have I been up to? let’s see . . .

Yesterday I

. . . discovered that the two and half cans of paint clearly marked ‘trim’ were not, as I assumed, the nice latex paint we have used for the last couple of painting projects but were instead the oil-based paint last used five years ago in our family room.

. . . learned that oil-based paint does not weather well when stored for five years in an uninsulated, unairconditioned garage.

. . . painted the doors to the boys’ rooms. They look nice; they would look even nicer if I had USED THE RIGHT DAMN PAINT (for the second time, I confused the flat white paint we have used on the ceilings with the white semi-gloss we are using for the trim. The doors were going to need two coats anyway, but it still pissed me off).

. . . realized that I should just paint the whole bathroom too, why not, it’s not like I have anything ELSE to do in the next three weeks, right?

. . . went to SuperTarget and bought new towels, rugs, and shower curtain for the guest bath (because if I’m going to PAINT it, we can’t have the old linens messing up The Look–of course, the tub still doesn’t have a spigot, but really, what’s a little plumbing problem when you have beautiful new soft white towels?).

So far, then, the Total Home Redecoration Project is going pretty well, by which I mean the painting has started and I am neither drunk nor hysterical (I am sure I will be both before it’s over, although hopefully not at the same time, and hopefully before our company arrives).

April 6, 2005

better than a poke in the eye

Tonight, after the boys had their baths, we all piled into Henry’s bed (which is a double bed, thank god, though we barely fit anyway) to read On the Day You Were Born. For those of you not familiar with this lovely book, it is an environmentalist welcome to the new baby which seems to assume both that the mommy gave birth naked in a tub of warm water with the help of a midwife but without any drugs, and that said new baby will be swaddled solely in unbleached cotton diapers, washed by hand in water cleansed of all additives and impurities. This so does NOT describe either of my childbirth or diapering experiences. And yet we love this book with all our hearts.

So we’re reading the book, having a wonderful time pointing to the various gingerbread-like babies on each page to decide which is Henry and which is Charlie (they all look alike, people, but the boys are very determined that some are one and some the other. Yes, they are odd, those kids of mine)–we’re reading the book, as I said, when, for no clear reason, Charlie starts to cry.

‘Ouch! My eye!’ he yells, dramatically.

Wade looks at him and says, ‘Did you put your finger in it?’

‘Yes,’ Charlie admits sadly.

‘Well, I bet that hurt.’ And he keeps reading.

We finish the book, and Wade carts Charlie off to his own room while Henry and I read one more book. Again, I hear Charlie say, ‘OUCH! MY EYE!’

And Wade says, ‘Stop putting your finger in it.’

‘Okay, Daddy. Goodnight!’

And Henry says to me, ‘Stop laughing and read.’

April 5, 2005

why can’t they always be this cute?

Henry: I’m glad you’re my mommy. I always wanted you to be my mommy.

Me: You did?

Henry: Yeah. Even before I was here.

Me: Really?

Henry: Yeah. I thought, she looks like a nice girl. I’d like her to be my mommy.

this old house

My family have all decided to come visit us the last weekend in April. We are delighted about this, as we have not seen my brother and sister-in-law (and, more importantly, the lovely Tess, favorite cousin of Henry and Charlie, in over a year)–so delighted, in fact, that we are REDECORATING OUR ENTIRE HOUSE.

Ahem.

Okay, not exactly the entire house, but two of our four bedrooms–to be specific, the guest room and Charlie’s room. To be more specific, we will be doing the following: repainting our guest room a lovely blue-tinted white (it is now a dark terra cotta color, so this ‘repainting’ will require at LEAST two coats of primer, plus two coats of actual paint), moving all of Charlie’s furniture (including a big plastic desk, a tool bench, and a play kitchen, all of which are currently living in our family room) into the newly painted room, repainting Charlie’s room (which is yellow now but will be a nice beige-y color called ‘tortilla’–and will also require priming) and moving a bed in to make a new guest room.

But it gets better! The bed we will be putting in the newly tortilla-colored guest room is our BRAND NEW CALIFORNIA KING bed, the one currrenly living in the master bedroom. That space will be filled with the twelve-year-old queen bed we were replacing when we bought the king.

Why, you ask, are we putting the fab new bed in the teeny tiny guest room, to be slept in solely by visiting members of my family? Because Wade doesn’t like it. I’ve been sleeping all by myself in said fab king bed since January; Wade says the bed is too hard and he doesn’t sleep well in it. And then, in the next breath, he says, ‘Maybe I could try sleeping in it again and just see.’ And then he thinks about it some more. ‘Do you think it’s comfortable?’ he asks me. Yes, I say. ‘Are you sleeping all right?’ he asks. Besides laying awake at night fretting about how on earth I’m going to get all the toys out of the living room if Charlie doesn’t move into the bigger bedroom, which he can’t because the stupid king-sized bed won’t fit in the smaller room, which means that we will be living with plastic kid furniture and toys all over the house FOREVER, and how in the hell I got talked into this when all I wanted was a new MATTRESS—-other than that, I’m sleeping just fine, thanks.

After literally months of seething about this, I met Wade at the door the other night and announced: ‘Here is the deal: we are going to move Charlie into the big room and get the toys out of the family room. The big bed is going in the little room. There will be no more talking about how you might give the big bed one more try. I’m done. We are going to start painting, and we will have this all finished when my family get here.’

‘Okay,’ he said. And that was that.

So this is a little bit of a nightmare. We have a LOT of painting to do (did I mention that we also need to finish the trim paint in the hallway, a project we started nearly TWO YEARS AGO?), all of which will need to be done on the weekends or at night, and we have a lot of furniture to move around. The king bed will fit (barely) in the soon-to-be guest room, so long as it is the ONLY piece of furniture in that room, which means we need to find a new home for the dresser and vanity that are currently in the guest room. By ‘find a new home’ I mean ‘relocate in this house’–our guest room furniture all belonged to my grandmother, and is not anything we want to part with. The logistics are, as I said, a nightmare.

So, to get the ball rolling, I bought primer and paint yesterday; tonight I think I’ll start taping the (current) guest room and the hallway, and tomorrow I’ll start painting the hall. Wade will have to sleep in the ‘big’ bed while we paint (unless he wants to take a chance of being overcome by paint fumes) so there is still the possiblility he will decide he likes the new bed after all (ha ha ha ha I am so funny). And today, in an effort to get closure on the whole bed thing, I’m going to order a new bedskirt and new shams for the OLD bed–it may be squashy, but it might as well look nice.

Finally, I have grand plans of sanding and repainting the doors of the armoire in Charlie’s room. Currently, they have teddy bears painted on them, but the bears have thse bright blue eyes that give me the heebies, so the doors are in the back of Wade’s closet. But we’re going to put an old TV in there, as Charlie’s room is going to double as a playroom, and I want to be able to close the armoire up and not have the TV there all the time (the boys won’t have cable, just a circa-1992 TV and VCR, so they can watch CinderElmo and The Wiggles without driving me berserk). I’m hoping to do that after all the other painting is done. And all before April 27th. Whew.

Internet, I hope I survive.

April 1, 2005

oh Friday how I love thee

Things I Did Not Do Today:

1. Take Henry to get a haircut, even though he so very desperately needs one.
2. Vacuum.
3. Get anything for dinner (we were supposed to go out tomorrow night AND Sunday night, so I figured we could wing it tonight. But now our plans for tomorrow have fallen through and I feel compelled to find SOMETHING to serve Wade for dinner. Cereal, perhaps?).
4. Buy new dishrags at Target (we’re down to about two dishrags, and we’re a little anal about putting them in the wash AS SOON AS they touch ANY food particles. The really sad part is that the stupid dishrags were the sole reason I went to Target in the first place–and yet, I did not buy them).

Things I DID Do Today:

1. Had lunch with my friend Jamie and her fabulous children (Turns out her son needs glasses! Like Henry! Because he’s farsighted! Like Henry! It was a lovely bonding lunch, made all the better by her reporting that in the car on the way from school to the restaurant, her kids fought over who would sit next to Henry while we ate. And then her son asked about fifty times if Henry and Charlie could pleasepleaseplease come over for a playdate today).
2. Watched CNN for an hour, to see if the Pope had died yet.
3. Washed and folded four loads of laundry (I folded the laundry while I watched CNN, lest you think I just laze around and do nothing here).
4. Picked up enrollment forms for Henry to go to an extended-day program at school next year. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he will stay until 2:50–which means that, one day a week, from 9:00 to 2:30, I WILL HAVE NO CHILDREN WITH ME. Hallelujia!
5. Finally remembered to buy Scotch tape at Target (along with milk, frozen French toast, and new Incredibles masks for the kids–but nothing for dinner, and no dishrags).

Wow, I’ve been busy. I think I’ll go watch a little more CNN.