Saturday, April 30, 2011

Always wear a mu-mu to Wal-Mart

Katie.  She's my oldest daughter.  She's sitting right next to me, talkin' my ear off while I'm trying to write this.  And I'm all "I just need a word.  I just need one word to start writing and then I'll be good" and she, being cut from ye olde same cloth of smart assery from whence her good mother was also cut says "Katie.  That's a good word" so I says "Fine" and I wrote "Katie".  See it up there?  True story.

Yesterday, I was going to finish that hallway, oh yes I was.  And finish painting the trim.  And scrape wallpaper, and do laundry, and learn to make a mean turducken and then maybe actually make a mean turducken.  Oh, and probably throw some cheerios at the kids too.  But then at the very almost end of the whole entire thing, just when I was barely starting to hear the sweet sounds of Jay Z rising up from the depths of my subconscious, my conscious quite rudely interrupted and said "No! You canNOT get a What What, because you, you of the poor math skills having obtained a liberal arts post secondary education, have just run out of tiles."  Three measly tiles away from finishing the whole blasted floor and I had to stop...again.  I may or may not have considered uttering some choice phrases at that particular moment in time.  Because I have a DEADLINE.  And he will be here tomorrow.  And he wants the friggin' floors finished.  Ya know?

So I got smart and decided that today, this morning, I would scurry to Lowe's to pick up just one single little ol' box of tiles and I would just DO it and then it would be done, and then I could commence singing.  'Cause I do like beltin' me out a good tune, I sure do.  Well, what does a smart girl do when she leaves Lowe's and realizes that she is in the same parking lot as Wal-Mart?  That's right, she puts the pedal to the metal and gets the heck out of there as quick as she can.  But see, I am not so smart.  I am a foolish fool who went to Wal-Mart after going to Lowe's.  Wal-Mart in Battle Creek, Michigan on a Saturday morning.

Now let me give you a little piece of advice, friends.  If you are going to go to Wal-Mart in Battle Creek, Michigan on a Saturday morning, I advise you clad yourself in some sort of mu-mu type garb and cover your head in a large hat of some sort.  Also wear a mask.  Like a hockey mask.  Because if instead you are wearing, for example, "jeans" and a "shirt" and you have "combed" your hair (mind you, I make no mention of wearing any make-up or having non-ugly shoes on...because I wasn't and I didn't) you will be, apparently, the single most attractive human being to ever set foot in the Wal-Mart of Battle Creek.  The...ahem...gentleman in the motorized cart wearing the leather POW vest and the fellow stocking the frozen pizzas were tolerable.  I told myself both times that I was imagining their "appreciative glances".  And the dude at Lowe's who decided to tell me all about the Weather Channel?  Well, he was just being helpful.  But then I got to the checkout line.

Note to self: If the dude looks creepy, he is probably creepy.

Poor guy.  He was just a nerd in his 20's.  Just a dorky nerd, earning an honest living scanning groceries at Wal-mart on a Saturday morning.  He didn't even say "hello" at first, which to me was just dandy.  I gotta tell ya- I can barely keep up with all the talking I'm supposed to do to people I know.  Don't need any extra chatter from the checker dude at Wal-Mart, and that is the truth.  So there I am, speedily unloading my cart onto the belt, when Creeperson clears his throat...

"Um, I hope you don't mind me saying...."

Oh god...

"...but you are a very nice looking lady!"

Oh for the love of all that is holy and good.  Please tell me that did not just happen!

"I mean..."

No, no...please don't tell me what you mean...

"...I just thought it might be nice for you to hear that."

Well you are WRONG my young friend.  You are wrongy wrongy wrong wrong!

It was not nice.  It was bad.  It was bad and wrong.  And I had to finish unloading my cart and then wait while he bagged everything and then reload the cart and then show him my i.d. for the purchasing of the beer and then put my i.d. away and then pay for the groceries and all the while he is there with his creeperson  eyeballs and I am over here trying not to make eye contact because I am sure (have you SEEN my enormous eyeballs?  Very, very difficult for me to keep a secret the thing that I am thinking which is, in most cases, "What the frap is wrong with you?!?!?") it will only make him feel sad and as much as he was my least favorite person in the world at the moment I am still totally averse to hurting people's feelings and....ohmygod what is taking him so long????  The longest time I have ever spent checking out at a store, I swear to jebus.

The good news is that I survived, so you can all stop holding your breath(s).  Woo hoo!  Then I came home and we busted out our renovations like a couple of people with a screamin' deadline.

day 1
today
before
after
before
during
after
Then I sat here, looking at this picture, thinking about everything that has gone into making this the kind of house that my kids are proud to invite their friends to.  And I looked back through the album of photos we took on that first day when I thought my heart was going to break and that my children were going to be homeless.  And I looked all around me...at this house, that land, those kids.  A smile spread across my face. 

And I cried.

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Friday, April 29, 2011

7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 1)


So, we've got this here house and all these here kids and I got to thinking today that if you have kids and you are considering some fool undertaking similar to the undertaking we undertook like fools, there are some things you should practice.  Or at least prepare yourself for.

Seven Things I've Done While Holding a Baby

1) Painting the trim around the windows.
This one is pretty intuitive, really.  If you want to paint something, your baby will put her hands in the paint.  Then she will put her paint covered hands all over the super cheap carpet that you bought from Home Depot, and even though you don't really like the carpet, you will like it even less when it has baby sized paint hand prints on it.  So instead, you hold the baby with your left arm and you paint with your right.  Also, you can count this as your workout for the day because it requires approximately the same ab strength and balance as scaling a level-orange rock climbing wall (I have never gone rock climbing.  I don't even know if there's any such thing as levels.  Maybe level orange is the easy level, in which case ignore what I just said.)

2) Scraping off Wallpaper
This is basically the same concept as the trim painting except you'll wanna replace "put her hands in the paint.  Then she will put her paint covered hands all over the super cheap carpet that you bought from Home Depot, and even though you don't really like the carpet, you will like it even less when it has baby sized paint hand prints on it" with "pick up the moistened bits of old wallpaper that still have some glue residue on the back and who-knows-how-many-years-of-grime-on-the-front and shove them into her mouth and/or spray whatever special concoction you've created into her eyes"

3) Scrubbing the Toilet
This one is not limited to renovating households, but it is something I've done recently.  Many times.  See, if you let her come into the bathroom, she will put her hands into the toilet and suck on the bottle of toilet bowl cleaner.  Ideally simultaneously.  The AAP generally discourages parents from allowing this kind of behavior...something about salmonella or whatever, so you're going to want to avoid it if at all possible.  On the other hand, if you lock her out of the bathroom, she will eat wallpaper and put her hands into paint.  Solution: administer under-armpit clutch hold with child's head facing backwards and butt pointed toward toilet.

4) Installing Flooring
One of the main reasons we chose the self-adhesive floor tiles (no, NOT just because they're cheap.  And easy to transport. And easy to install.  That would be, like, selfish or something.) is that they provide the safest renovation environment for curious young tots (translation: your baby can forcibly climb into your lap while you're sitting on the floor messing with them and the only danger might be that you give yourself a paper cut 'cause you're trying to peel off that backing all careful like)

5) Spackling (is that a noun?  how do you verbify that? Spacklinging?  Someone find out quick!)
See 1 and 2

6) Hanging wet laundry on the line
If you're using an outdoor line to dry your clothes in a place that actually has seasons and rains (little cold water droplets that actually fall straight from the sky.  I know!  So weird!) on a regular basis, you're gonna need to get your butt in gear and get it out there as soon as it's done and whenever you can.  This means that maybe you won't have time to pick up the dog poop first.  Now, maybe you don't mind if your baby has a little turdy snack every now and then (I mean really, who am I to judge?  Have you seen my house?) but the thought of having to smell that on her breath all day kinda makes me cringe, so I am regularly forced to hang the clothes while the small one is propped on my left hip



7) The Charleston
You will not want to do what you are supposed to do, so you will google "How to do the Charleston" because you've forgotten since your college days when you thought it was so cool to swing dance to every genre of music (when you weren't doing that other super cool kind of dancing while standing on the arms of people's couches who probably didn't event invite you to their party in the first place) and then the second you start trying to show your 3 year old how to do it, the baby will demand to be held.  Because that is the baby code.  And you will hold her and try to do the Charleston.  And she will giggle, and then you won't mind so much anymore.

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