Background Noise

I need Alice

So we’re thinking about hiring a housecleaner. Typing that sentence made me cringe because I hate thinking of myself as a person who needs to give money to another human being to clean up my messes. It infuriates me that I cannot keep my home free of dirt and dust and mildew and rotting food without giving up something I love, like the nightly game of slide tag I play with Joey after dinner that can go on for an hour sometimes with us running back and forth through the house in our socks chasing each other while we pretend to be dinosaurs (unless someone accidentally loses control and clips the wall, cutting the game short and requiring intervention of lots of hugs and a frozen bag of peas pressed delicately to the head). And every week when I have a whole day off from work I am faced with the choice of doing something fun like taking Joey outside to run around and play, or putting him in front of the TV so I can disinfect the bathrooms.

Eli and I were both off yesterday and we spent the entire day cleaning. The only time we took a break from cleaning was to run errands and eat. And it sucked. I was angry all day long, but especially during the few minutes when I was hovered over the toilet scrubbing pee off the outside of the bowl. And when I get angry I pick fights with Eli.

J: Your aim sucks

E:That wasn’t me...

J: Are you saying it was me?

E: …

J: Are you seriously accusing me of PEEING AROUND MY OWN ASS???

 

And then Eli starts laughing, but I am still mad.

We also have a two year-old running around making messes faster than we can clean them up. If you had asked me two years ago how many individual cheerios I’ve picked up off the floor in my life I would’ve probably said something like two. Now the number is up in the billions and I just can’t keep up.

For example:

 

The child has more toys than cells in his body, yet groceries hold more appeal than anything in his toybox. Somehow things like eggs, sugar and loose pieces of cereal are his favorite things to play with. Maybe it satisfies some kind of toddler multitasking need, enabling him to snack while he plays. On this particular day I was otherwise occupied in the kitchen, probably scrubbing hardened banana scum off the inside of the sink, when Joey took advantage of my distraction and smuggled a brand new loaf of bread off the counter. You can't really see it in the video but he had taken a bite out of each and every piece and was happily digging his sticky little hands into the bread as he stacked. He ruined an entire loaf of bread and as his punishment I sent him to school with sandwiches made from pita bread the whole next week. Which he loved so it wasn't really a punishment at all and if I really wanted to teach a lesson I should've replaced the bread with pressed vegetables.

Anyway, I think I am going to keep the housekeeper thing to myself for a while, around family and friends who are likely to judge and condemn me for being a lazy slob. Which I am, of course. I would just like no one to think that I'd rather spend an entire evening constructing a jail for Mr. Potato Head out of mega blocks than scrubbing jelly handprints off the windows. That's no kind of homemaker.

why we don't eat popsicles in the house

And here's a closeup of what could have happened to my beautiful hardwood floors.

At least I can hose off the deck.

don't ask me if I took my medicine today

Things have been stupid busy around here lately. I have a lot of stuff rolling around in my head and I’ve been doing my best to just disconnect from it when I feel myself starting to fixate and obsess. Patience is not one of my strengths, and it’s some of what has gotten me in a mess in the past. So I’m working on slowly formulating my plans for world domination rather than deciding on some random Tuesday evening that I must change and fix and sort out everything in my life by sunrise.

Remodeling with a toddler in the house is the psychological equivalent of being paralyzed and then placed into a nest of biting ants who don’t sleep. You can’t run, you can’t hide, you simply have to SUCK IT UP and pray that you don’t die.

Last weekend we ripped out the carpeting in the downstairs and put in hardwood floors. Well, Eli and his buddies did the actual work, my job was to simply entertain Joey outside of the house without naps for twelve hours straight for two whole days. And it was exactly as much fun as it sounds. It only took us four years to get the floors done, but it was worth the wait. We had our hearts set on some beautiful wood that we picked out at Lowes almost two years ago. It was expensive, so we were saving up for it, and we’d visit the wood at the store at least once a month to keep our motivation to save for it going. But sometime last fall, after I quit my job and it was looking like we’d never be able to buy the wood, I tried to get Eli to consider putting in something cheaper instead. I said the word Pergo and he sneered at me as though I’d suggested we cover the floors in hay.

Things only got worse for the floors last fall when we put in new kitchen and bathroom tile and redid the entryway in slate. In order to put the slate in, Eli had to cut some of the carpeting out, but then there was no way to secure the loose edges so he TAPED IT DOWN WITH SILVER ELECTRICAL TAPE. And there it stayed, in all its glory, an electrical tape border running through the middle of our living room for almost a year. Our carpets were bad. From what we can tell they’re the original carpets, which would make them 19 years old, and they were stained and frayed at the edges near the wall, and because of Joey’s fondness for spilling and slopping and spraying his food all over the floors like some kind of animal in the wild who needs to slaughter its prey before eating it (in Joey’s case, all cheerios need to be wrestled out of the bowl, flung far and wide, and only the ones who are strong enough to cling to his high chair tray are suitable for eating) our house was beginning to smell like a barn. And on rainy days, an outhouse.

The sounds of pounding, power tools, air compressors and baby screams are only starting to fade from my memory. There is nothing more frazzling than trying to feed lunch to a child who has not napped in two days, in a tiny corner of the kitchen that’s covered in wood shavings and dust, with a flooring stapler splintering the air and shaking the house every few seconds, the air compressor switching on and off outside on the deck freaking the child out so badly that all he can do is scream and throw his jelly sandwich at your face. Jelly side up.

So many times during those two days I had to clench my jaw and talk myself down. I had to work for part of one of the flooring days, so we had the babysitter come over for a few hours to entertain Joey. I’d hoped they would play outside, but instead they played in his room and trashed it so bad I could barely find the crib when I walked in the door. The toyboxes and shelves stood empty, and every book, toy, ball, puzzle, stuffed animal and weeble was strewn about as though someone had tipped the room upside down and shook it. I had a mini breakdown that day because I was tired and dirty, my couch was in the kitchen, we couldn’t watch tv or walk around anywhere without stepping on staples or nails or piles of wood dust an dloose boards, and now the messes were moving into the upstairs rooms.

I had a blowout with Eli because he approached the job like an outside contractor, trashing the place like it was a stranger’s house. Coke bottles tipped over and leaking on the kitchen counter and splashed all over my laptop, my plants knocked over and spilling soil, and a water spill that took out all of my papers on the counter in the kitchen, including a big stack of coupons and some pictures. I cleaned the kitchen after the first day, but then when I came home on the second day and it was in even worse condition, I had to pull Eli aside and say something.

Jaeme: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN HERE???

Eli: I…

Jaeme: You realize you live here, right? And you’re trashing your OWN FUCKING HOUSE!!!

Eli: I didn’t…

Jaeme: At least close the door when you cut the boards! THERE ARE WOOD CHIPS IN THE FUCKING TOASTER!

Okay but that’s all over now and the floors came out fantastic. Here are some pictures:

And here's a closeup of my beautiful flowers. I saw them in my neighbor's yard so I went out with my scissors and cut them down. I thought about doing it sneaky at night, but then I decided to hell with it, grabbed my big kitchen scissors and walked over in the middle of the day. The long yellow ones are from a tree.

Hmm, I’m broke, I have no time for anything, what to do, what to do? I know! I’ll go to medical school!!!

I’ve decided I will be going to graduate school if it kills me, which it probably will, because I’m sick of dicking around with a part-time paycheck, making part-time money to do a job that takes less than a part-time brain. I love my job, that hasn’t changed, but it’s starting to make me feel like a loser that I busted my brain in classes like organic chemistry, advanced genetics, and two semesters of physics when my daily work life involves scolding people because they’re sticking their elbows out, and that’s not the right way to do a tricep press!

I’m looking into programs right now, and congratulating myself for having the foresight to take biochemistry and statistics and abnormal psychology in undergrad, even though I didn’t need it for my major, because I just knew someday I would be looking into grad school and those would be prerequisites. I will talk more about it when I get the details worked out, but I’ve made some decisions about what I will study, and what my career focus will be. The things that are uncertain right now are how the hell am I going to pay for more school, and also, how the hell am I going to study and work and raise Joey at the same time. Oh, and try to have a marriage. And I think I’m stuck on the time and money stuff because the solution is that I can’t. It is simply not possible. But me being me, I can’t accept that so I will continue to search for a way to make it happen.

How I put my CPR certification to good use.

Every week I have to lifeguard at the pool for a couple of hours during my shift at work. Which means I sit an office next to the pool reading magazines waiting for someone to drown so I can do CPR and call EMS. So far no one has come close to drowning so I’ve been able to read a lot of magazines. I usually read National Geographic because someone has a subscription and leaves them lying around, and I’ve discovered that it’s an excellent magazine. I've even started looking forward to reading it each week. Last week there was an interview with an ant researcher, and his answer to a question about spirituality and natural selection was so perfect I had to photocopy the page so I could remember it.

Obviously you find a spiritual sense in nature, a sense of wonder. How do you find meaning in a world that came about through random mutations and natural selection?

Well, the human mind has evolved to search for meaning. The universe is so beautiful and complex and surprising, and life is too. You remember Darwin’s line, “Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”? We see this far more than Darwin could. We see right down to the molecular level, how truly extraordinary life is as a phenomenon. There you have more to summon spirituality than anything provided by the late Iron Age desert kingdom scribes who wrote the Holy Bible. They created an impressive piece of literature. But they really didn’t understand the world around them or the stars above. They metaphorized them, put poetry into them—they did the best they could. But still and all, they fell far short of what humanity is capable of feeling in a sense of the sacred and of aesthetic beauty.

I love his answer.

Hey! You should have another baby!

Even more annoying than the people who would bug me about having kids before I knew it was even possible for me to have children, are the people who insist that now that my first baby is all grown up (at eighteen whole months), I need to have another one. I am so torn about having another baby probably because my last postpartum experience was a living nightmare that almost destroyed everything that’s important in my life. I know what I went through wasn’t exactly normal, and I know how to get help if it ever happened again, but I still get a little nervous when I think about those first few weeks and months at home with a new baby. And there are things I want to do in my life that might be difficult if we start all over again with another baby. And if I’m so selfish to think of how a baby would be an interruption in my life, then maybe I don’t deserve one.

Anyway, what kills me about people mentioning that I should have another kid is how nonchalant everyone is about it. Like it doesn’t take planning, financial consideration and thought. Just have a kid, it’ll be fine. I learned how not fine it can be the last time I just had a kid without knowing what the hell I was doing. But maybe (probably) it’s just me and I’m ovethinking it. But then I think about the reality of two little kids, one a baby, and how much it would cost to put them in daycare, and how it wouldn’t even be worth working, and anyways, how the hell would I go to school with TWO little ones running around? I know these are dilemmas everyone has to deal with, my own parents included, but what I don’t get is why does it seem so easy for some people, so easy in fact that they have families of two or even THREE whole children, when there are people like me who angst over it until it seems like having two children and making it work is about as unlikely and impossible as there ever being a successful human head transplant.

Am I psyching myself out? Or just being realistic? Do I have some kind of warped view because of what happened last time? By the way, this round and round stuff goes on in my head all the time. It’s a lovely little side effects of being post traumatically NEUROTIC!

POM POMS

The best toy I’ve ever bought for Joey is a big bag of colored pom poms. I had planned to glue them, along with some pipe cleaners, to popsicle sticks to make stick figure puppets. But before I could get the figures assembled, Joey got a hold of the bag of pom poms and started playing with them. He holds the bag and pulls them out one at a time while I say the color.

We do this through the whole bag until it's empty and the pom poms are spread out all over the floor.

Then I arrange them into groups because I like order, and I tell him to give me the orange one, or give me the purple one, and on it goes until they’re all back in the bag.

Then we do it again. And again. And again…until I get bored with it and start tossing them at his head.
==
Well, that's about a month's worth of updating.

picture pages picture pages

Here are some photos from my camera. I take pictures all the time, but mostly in my house because I forget to bring the camera any time we do something interesting. I don't have pictures of Joey's first ride on a carousel horse, sledding in the snow, or playing with another baby at the park, but I do have hundreds of pictures of him eating in his high chair and standing in the living room.

The state of my living room after a day of playing. It’s like living in a toy store. But in the evening, once Joey is in bed for the night, I gather up all the baby debris and deposit it all into a huge deck box in the corner of the living room and our home once again looks like a place where adults live. We bought the deck box because it’s huge and we thought we could fit all the toys in it. Since Christmas the box has become cramped and each night I have to get in there and dig around to reposition the toys and make them stop singing.

This was a gift from my best friend for my birthday. It’s the most random present I’ve ever received, which is why I cherish it. She said she knew right away that I would love it, and the weird thing is…I do. But I don’t know why. And yes, it’s really autographed. Now I’m going to be receiving all kinds of mail from rabid Lisa K. fans and all I have to say is: Don’t bother, bitches, because you can't have it.  It’s MINE.

And behind Lisa is the dopest lava lamp in existence. It’s over thirty years old and it still delights me as much as it did when I was a child and I would stare at it on my grandmother’s shelf for hours watching the lava stretch and twirl. I took a picture of it because with a toddler in the house, I can’t guarantee its survival.

Here's my nightstand. I bet you're wondering who that is in the picture. Let's take a closer look:

Jude and Ewan enjoying a relaxing Sunday morning in bed together. I keep this picture by my bed because when I look at it I know that everything is right in the world.

Pipe cleaner animals are my favorite toy. First up we have the spider:

It was the first toy I made, but it was a little boring so I then made a mutant:

This is superbug, technically not a spider, for it has triple the legs and it is also the wrong color. I tell Joey that this is what happens when spiders are exposed to environmental toxins. Or eat candy.

My lunch. Rice, corn and salad. I tried to get Joey to eat some with me but he has developed an almost eerie intuition about healthy foods. He doesn’t even need to taste them to know he doesn’t want them in his mouth.  Any time I try to approach him with something healthy, he clamps his lips shut tight before I can get a grain of rice or a piece of vegetable anywhere near his mouth.

This is the sticky hand of a child eating a jelly sandwich for lunch. The default lunch food that always meets baby standards. Usually given after several failed attempts at healthier fare.

The trees in my backyard. I live practically in the woods, which I used to love until my neighbors’ house got broken into and I realized that houses close to the woods make excellent targets for crime.

It has been so warm lately that I was tricked into thinking it was spring. This is my new spring bag I bought the other day when I was out shopping for sunglasses. And of course, the minute I get my spring gear all ready, the temperature drops, the snow falls and I am reminded once again, it’s winter still, jackass.

Okay I found one taken outside of my home.

This is the park down the street where we go to hang out when the weather is nice. Joey ate his first worm here. It is also where he has had many violent confrontations with small friendly dogs who are stupid enough to approach him hoping for a friendly pat on the head, not realizing that toddlers do not pat dogs, they hit them. 

I tried to place Joey in the grass and have him sit there while I ran far away to take a picture that would look like he was all alone in a field. But every time I ran away, he would roll forward and start crawling after me screaming, and ruining the effect I was trying to achieve: Happy baby sitting alone in a field quietly pondering the meaning of life.

Meanwhile, the child would happily break his own hand off at the wrist to get away from me whenever we're walking around in a crowded place full of danger. Like the grocery store.

Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = CRAZY DELICIOUS

Christmas always makes me nervous.  Not fearful nervous, but overwhelmed and twitchy.  I think it’s the stimulation overload.  Once all the presents are unwrapped, all the food is eaten and everyone goes home, I’m left in my house on Christmas night with stacks of new things and I look around and I don’t know where to start.  Do I bust out the Play Doh or my new cookbook?  Should I read something new, watch a movie or listen to a CD?  Should I go shopping tomorrow with my gift cards or introduce my new clothes to the closet?
Too much.

I have a hard time going from famine to feast.  Last week I went to the library I was so desperate for reading material, and now I have piles of new books to read.  I was down to my last ten bucks yesterday and now I have spare cash.  I was wearing maternity underwear because I had no money for new bras and girly underthings, and now I have a card that will let me shop for new stuff free at Victoria’s Secret.

Oh, wait, that’s what I wanted to talk about.  Eli told me a story last night about how one of his friends went to Victoria’s Secret to buy his wife a present for Christmas.  And when he went in he was assigned a personal shopper.  This VS personal shopper turns out to be a beautiful woman with a smokin’ body who TRIES ON AND MODELS ALL THE LINGERIE FOR HIM.  I’ve never heard of such a thing, but it’s actually brilliant because I bet guys eat that shit right up.   I think Eli told me a guy secret that I shouldn’t know about because I then told him that I don’t want him to buy me stuff from there ever again.  It’s bad enough not having a perfect body, but knowing that some Double-D bimbo pranced around in front of my husband wearing the same bra that he will then come home and see me in is too much pressure for any girl.  Especially a girl who has early alphabet boobs.

Our Christmas had a special theme this year.  On Christmas Eve, we’d finished everything early so we sat on the couch to relax while the baby was napping and watched an episode of Saturday Night Live on Tivo from a couple of weeks ago.  I have to take a moment here to celebrate Tivo.  And especially reflect on how important it has become in our lives, especially since the baby moved in and forced us into a schedule which means going to sleep at a reasonable hour and not being able to watch the shows we like when they’re on.  Tivo has become the fourth member of our household, and I love it almost more than the pets.  Tivo makes life beautiful but all the cats do around here is pee in the sink and lick my mouth while I’m sleeping.  And those things suck.

Anyway, have you ever seen Chris Parnell rap?  He’s brilliant.  So when this short came on SNL, Eli and I sat there mesmerized because it is the best thing we’ve seen on TV in a long time, maybe ever.  We watched it three times and still wanted more, but then people started to arrive and we had to turn the TV off.  But it didn’t matter.  Parnell had already invaded our brains. 

All night, whenever Eli or I caught each others’ eye or had a private moment alone in the kitchen, it went a little something like this:

Eli: Chroni-
Jaeme: WHAT?
Eli: -cles of Narnia!

Jaeme: Chroni-
Eli: WHAT?
Jaeme: -cles of Narnia

This has been going on for three days now and it’s showing no signs of stopping.  Watch it and you will understand.

3-in-1

The best part of my shower is my shower gel.  It’s a huge bottle full of thick green gel and I read the front of the bottle every time I’m in the shower with it.  This is what it says:

It’s a bubble bath!  It’s a shower gel!  It’s a shampoo!  It’s a big, fat LIME in a big, fat bottle.  It’s the LIME that ate Brooklyn.  Wall-to-wall LIME.  A gigantic, storewide LIME.  It’s the biggest LIME to ever hit Hollywood.  A LIME of historic proportions.  An all-star LIME extravaganza.  The LIME of the century.  Standing room only LIME.  A larger-than-life LIME.  Sea-to-shining-sea LIME.  A LIME to end all LIMES.  One LIME to rule them all.

All the other bottles in my shower are boring, always going on about healthy hair and gentle cleansing and advanced microsphere technology.  If I ever start my own bath product line, my packaging will be just as important as the product inside because everyone needs something good to read in the shower.

my closet

My medicine has not taken away my energy, it has just redirected it and turned it into a more positive energy.  Where before I would use my extra energy to pace the floors and fret and walk walk walk from one room to the other, picking things up and putting them down again, feeling overwhelmed with things to do and not knowing where to start, now I am able to select a project and really focus and get it done.  Well, okay, not always, but much more than before.

This weekend I had a date with my closet.  I didn’t realize until Saturday when I went looking for my boots what a clusterfuck of chaos my closet has become.  The neighbors were building a fort outside in the snow and I wanted to take Joey out to get in on the action.  I just needed to find my boots.  That I haven’t worn in a year.  I searched around on the floor of my closet, through piles of shoes and stacks of old maternity clothes and more flip-flops than a person with only two feet should be allowed to own at one time, and while I was in there I triggered an avalanche from the top shelf and a pile of my old clothes rained down on me.

I do laundry just about every day, so all my clothes are usually clean, which is why I’ve become so lazy with my outfits.  I have a rotation of about five different outfits I wear all the time, usually fresh from the dryer, so I never really need to go into my closet.  This is good because my closet scares me.  I have things in there from when I was a big huge pregnant girl waddling around with an 8 lb baby sticking out off the front of my body, down to size 4 pre-pregnancy skinny chick jeans so small that I can’t believe I ever got my whole ass into them at once. But when my old sweatshirts and jeans fell down on me, it woke me up to the fact that I have so many choices!  I could have variety in my life!  I have a pretty pink sweater I forgot about that I haven’t worn once this winter!  I should stop eating all the time now because I am not pregnant, my baby is a year old and I need to stop letting my body stay such a run-down wreck!

So on Sunday I was in the mood to tackle the mess.  I went to my room with a big box of trashbags and a dream…by the end of the day, this closet will be clean.  And this time I even remembered to take a picture before I started.

I ended up with three bags full of stuff good enough to donate and two bags of trash.  And my closet is still full.  I was on such a cleaning high, I couldn’t stop with just the closet.  I cleaned out my bureau and my tee shirt hutch too.  Here’s a little secret about me: I love tee shirts and my love borders on obsession, so I have hundreds of them.  I’ve collected so many through the years that they’ve become like a scrapbook of my life.  And that’s why I have a whole piece of furniture in my room devoted to the storage of tee shirts.  I have tee shirts from concerts, from labs I’ve worked in, colleges I’ve attended and not attended.  Tiny tees, oversized tees, logo tees…every tee for every occasion.  And this is how they’re usually organized:

I dragged Eli up to the room to work on the tee shirt hutch with me, because I know I am weak.  I keep even the unflattering tees I never wear because I can’t handle throwing a memory in the trash.  Eli is there to remind me that the Superman tee shirt has the logo that makes your boobs itch, remember?  Or, you said you’d stop wearing your WHORE tee shirt when you were thirty, remember how you swore that?

So we went through everything and I lost a lot of friends.  Thinking about it now that they’re gone, I have some regrets.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hasty.  I could’ve cut them up and made something out of them, like a quilt.  But seeing as the last time I tried to sew, and went at a piece of orange burlap with a sewing machine trying to make it into funky curtains with a hem and almost took my own eye out when the needle snapped off and flew up in my face, stabbing me in the cheek, goodwill is probably the best place for my old tees.  And I can’t outsource the work to a pro because it’s not like you can ask you mother-in-law, who creates beautiful quilts full of artistry, to sew your coed naked swim team tee shirt to your collection of college frat party tee shirts, to the W-H-O-R-E shirt up in the center and then add backing and batting and make it pretty, without her thinking her son is married to some kind of SKANK.

But I did find, and keep, my World of Meats tee shirt.

It used to be one of my favorites before I got pregnant and couldn’t wear anything that didn’t stretch around the middle and puff out like a giant tent in the front.  I’d forgotten about it and I found it there all smashed into the back of the hutch with no dignity like a free Weight Watchers shirt.  I wore it today and though it doesn’t fit exactly like it used to, it still feels pretty fine.

Here is the before and after of my closet:

Hmm.  I don’t think the pictures capture the true difference between what a mess my closet was before I started, and how deliciously organized it is now. Looking at them side by side doesn’t look as dramatic as it does when I stand in my room in front of the closet and soak in the neat.  I’ve been wandering into my room all day to make sure everything is still beautiful like I left it and it all wasn’t just something I dreamed.  And I know I’m going to be dragging everyone who walks through my front door this week up to my room to look at my closet.   I bet the UPS man will be impressed with my work.  And maybe on the way to the basement, I’ll take the furnace cleaner guy on a little detour.

projects progress

The Loft

I finally cleaned the loft.  I know, my life must be pretty simple if all I have to angst about is a messy room in my house.  I forced myself to work on it the other night and it only took six trash bags, four moving boxes, and three hours of my time.

I realize that in order to appreciate the after picture, you should be able to experience the before.  Since I didn’t think to take a before, just imagine six bags of trash and four big moving boxes full of shit all scattered around, and about a gallon of dust delicately covering all of it.

Oh yeah, and this is my clean desk.

Alphabet Mural

I’m still in the process of finishing the alphabet mural in my son’s room.  I started it when he was born with some leftover canvas from another project and I thought, hey!  I can pick the things I want him to know and it will be magnificent!  I’ve been working on it here and there.  (Here and there means doing five tiles then taking a break for two months, then doing five more tiles and taking another break for six months…like that) I didn't realize how much paint it would take and I'm always running out of colors.  But if I don’t get my ass going and finish it, he is going to start reading and think the alphabet ends with T.

Wonka Bar inspired bathroom.

When we put the new tile in the bathroom, it clashed with the yellow walls, so we decided to paint them brown.  I got up early one morning and decided to tackle the project and get it all done before lunch.  I cut in with the finish paint, making sure to avoid getting any brown on the ceiling or moldings or cabinets.  I had a small paintbrush and I went over my work three times around the borders of the whole room, making sure everything was covered perfectly and there were no streaks.  Then I primed the walls twice just to prevent any yellow from getting through.  Then I finished up with two coats of finish color.  I went a little over on my timeline, and it took all day, but I had it done by the time Eli came home from work.  I was so proud of my work and I was standing in the middle of the room trying to decide if it needed one more coat of finish color when Eli walked over to my paint can and held it up.

Did you paint with this?

What?

Did you paint the room with this paint right here?

Yes.  But it might need another coat…

Jaeme, this is PRIMER!

I didn’t look at the cans carefully and I mixed up the finish color and the primer.  I won’t elaborate on what happened after the revelation that I’d painted the entire bathroom WITH PRIMER, but there were some tears and a late night of repainting.  I learned on this project that sometimes my excitement gets in the way of my ability to follow directions and apply COMMON SENSE to my home decorating.  And forever more I will slow it down and not waste my own time on stupid mistakes.

Kitchen

New tile floors, new stove and fridge (not pictured), and old cabinets accented with new gray electrical tape to keep the baby out of the spices.  We also keep the sugar in the taped up cabinets and so many days I go without sweetener in my coffee because it’s just not worth wrestling with the tape first thing in the morning and then fighting off the baby when he realizes that I’m in the cabinet.  Baby hearing is an interesting thing.  I can sit next to the kid and say his name: Joey.  Joey.  Joey, look at mama.  JOEYYYYY! and if he’s playing with something fun he pretends not to hear me, but the second I pull the tape, in a small corner across the house and far away from where he is playing, his supersonic selective baby hearing kicks in and two seconds later I’m trying to pull baby hands off sticky tape without also removing a layer of skin.  Supersonic selective baby hearing comes into play also when I open the dishwasher, open the bathroom door, or touch my keys and they jingle.  He hears any of those things and he’s all over me like a cat on a tuna can.

I've also painted the wall in the hallway downstairs, but I can't show a picture because I still have to spraypaint the doorbell box to match.  I don't know what's next on my project list, but I'm starting to think that I want to do something that requires a saw.

house-work

I have a lot of work to do in my house.  My loft is torn apart from when we started cleaning it out a couple of weeks ago and got side-tracked by a big box of old pictures.  My kitchen is a mess, even though I clean it faithfully each week, because it has seen an enormous amount of food preparation lately.  I used to have to dust my stove I used it so infrequently.  And now I’m in there making oatmeal for breakfast, grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, quesadillas for dinner and pouring milk into sippy cups all day long.  And the laundry.  How do three people make so much laundry?  The baby is a slob and goes through at least two outfits a day, but he’s allowed because he’s a baby and still learning how to eat.  Also, his clothes are small.  But Eli wears two pairs of jeans and a sweatshirt and there’s a whole load of laundry right there. 

A few weeks after the baby was born, when he was doing that new baby thing they all do--peeing, puking and shitting all over everything every day, I was feeling exhausted, overworked and just pissed-off about how much time I was spending in front of the washer,  so I went on a laundry ban.  Just for Eli’s stuff.  I rationalized it in my head that since he was so fucking big, he could do his own damn laundry or lose some fucking weight and go down a couple of sizes and maybe then his clothes wouldn’t have so much material and take up so much room in the wash.  (I’d like to point out that this kind of thinking happened every day in the weeks following the birth of my son and it was entirely unreasonable.  I was a lunatic on a blame spree.) I separated everything out and just washed my clothes and the baby’s clothes and it was wonderful because we’re small and our clothes don’t take up a lot of room and I had lots more time for other important pursuits like watching over the baby while he slept to make sure he was still breathing and obsessively scrubbing the sink.  Eli’s stuff just formed this huge mountain in the corner of the basement until one night before going to bed, he looked into his underwear drawer and saw that it was empty.  The laundry fairy had failed to replenish his supply of clean underwear and clean socks.  And when he said something to me about the problem I told him to LICK MY ASS if you think I am your FUCKING SLAVE!  As you can see, things were a little rocky back then.

And then there are the projects that just need to be done like painting one of the walls downstairs, putting up the new baseboards in the entryway where we replaced the tile and fixing two holes in the walls: one in the living room wall from when I threw the phone at it in a fit of rage and the other in the bedroom wall from when I threw the baby monitor at it for the same reason.  It’s a good thing I got help for my mental state because I was acting like a monster and starting to destroy too much.  One day a couple of months ago I was driving home from work feeling terrible.  I tried to think about what I could do to feel better, and it quickly flashed across my mind that I could go home, pull all the dishes out of the cupboards and smash them in a big pile in the middle of the kitchen floor.  That would definitely make me feel better.  But the fallout would’ve been too extreme because Eli gets very distraught when things get broken when I’m mad.  He doesn’t understand it.  Anyway, I didn’t break the dishes.  If I had, I wouldn’t be writing this anyway, I’d be in a hospital recovering from a broken neck and multiple, hundreds, thousands of lacerations from being dragged through a pile of broken dishes.

I also need to Windex every solid surface from 3 ft down, like the sliding glass door, the oven, the dishwasher, the stereo receiver and the walls.  Now that the baby is wall walking, he smears his drooly, milky hands all over everything he can hold on to and when the sun his a room just right, it looks like puppies licked everything. There are also cobwebs, dust bunnies and carpeting to be edged.  We’re having a big party this weekend and that’s why I’m thinking about everything that’s a mess.  The real question is, why am I here writing this when I could be cleaning?  Because I’m not your FUCKING SLAVE.  That’s why.