Adventures in Home Improvement

For the record I did not collapse from utter exhastion. I did get out to have coffee with some friends after the funeral service on Friday. Actually I was mandated to do so. Pretty cool when your husband says, “why don?t you just go to Starbucks this afternoon.” So I did just that. The boy was content with his grandparents. We did get out to our favorite Indian restaurant Friday night and I think the heavens opened up and angels sang when the boy acually tried Chicken Pakoras!!! Monumental occasion for the child to try solid meat not in McChickenpart form. Ok, pakoras are a breaded bit of chicken, but I could readliy identify what part of the chicken the meat actually came from.

We were supposed to have family photos taken Saturday afternoon, but CS has a haircut appointment scheduled for this afternoon. He expressed that he really would like to have a haircut before being photographed. Evidently the shaggy look just wasn?t going to cut it. This got me thinking that I should probably think about a haircut myself. After all it has been since, oh, August since I had my hair cut. For the past 2 years I have only cut my hair right before we travelled to Russia. Now that we are no longer travelling to Russia I don?t know when to cut my hair. So I guess back to the every 5 weeks or so.

Since we didn?t have that photograph thing I asked CS if he wanted to paint the family room. Yes, we decided on a color and bought it last weekend. He waffled about this and I could clearly see that he didn?t want to take on such a project, but the moment he got up to use the bathroom I started unloading bookshelves. Gee honey… I was just going to dust but since all the stuff is out we might as well move the furniture and paint.

The smart parents solved our previous child in paint dilema by letting the child help paint. Have you ever given a 2 year old a paint brush and said here kid have at it? I think it is more stressful than shooing him away constantly. A 2 year old does not understand the concept of just a little on the brush and paint the yellow not over the 3 inches of white you just painted. Needless to say there is one section of wall that got a good coat of primer. 20 minutes later small child hands the brush to his father and says, “all done.” And he was off to play. Cured that!

While in the home project mood and in need of a respite from toxic paint fumes we decided to do a few outdoor projects. Our new freezer has been sitting in the middle of our garage since the week after Christmas. This meant moving a bench, cutting down the bench to make the freezer fit, moving the stuff under the bench, moving the actual freezer and leveling said freezer. A 5 minute project turned into 20. Then CS thought it would be good to nail the bit of drywall back up that he knocked down while putting boxes in the attic and while he was at it taking down the Christmas lights sounded pretty fun too. I don?t know why. I kinda liked being that family on the block. Hell I thought we?d leave them up until next year. Saves time that way.

Oh and did I forget to mention that in the midst of the painting project my trusty husband thought we might have enough baseboard molding to redo the family room? NO? Well turns out we do. So he removed all the old baseboards and we ran out of time to paint the new ones and put them up. This means I can?t put the books back in the bookshelves and they will stay in piles in my dining room until at least next weekend.

Oh Oh!!!! and AND!!! We got our post placement report from the tool. Yep. Mistakes. After it had been proofread twice, changes sent and highlighted. It is the date. It?s wrong. And the boy?s Russian name is spelled wrong. The good news is it is a page that is easily fixed. Oh if I could ever be done with this guy.

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