—1—
After putting a few pairs of reasonably-priced boxer briefs in the Amazon cart, I asked my son which ones he wanted. Pointing to a camouflage-patterned pair, he joked, "Is this so that no one can see I'm wearing underwear?"
These didn't make the final cut, but I did show them to my son with a smile:
"Do you want some messy underwear?" I asked. Of course I know who Lionel Messi is, but this was too good a pun. Wild horses couldn't have dragged me away from making this joke.
"They come pre-soiled," Phillip added, confirming once again that he and I belong together.
—2—
I promise that one of these weeks I will stop talking about painting. But not this week.
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| Teamwork makes the dream work. |
I'm pleased to say that the living room is officially finished. I finished the accent wall by myself during the week, but Phillip and I worked all day Saturday to do the other tall walls with a rented scaffolding.
The three kids were asking to help, too, but I've been a mom for way too long to be fooled by that. First of all, they've never painted before, and the main living area of the house isn't the place to make beginner mistakes. They can do that when we paint their bedrooms. Second of all, there's a difference between "helping" and "being helpful." They only wanted to "help," which means painting for 30 seconds, getting paint on their clothes, then skipping off to play while I drop everything to work on getting Smokey Taupe out of their favorite pants. This is not my first rodeo.
—3—
On Monday, I finished up the entryway, which is just a single story. Turns out, I don't mind painting a normal one-story room at all. I actually find it kind of meditative. Only when it's broken up by going up and down a scaffolding and moving it around 1,000 times does it make me slightly homicidal.
Which is good, because the bathroom, kitchen, and mudroom still need to be painted. I'm going to take a break until next week, though.
—4—
The family was starting to watch an episode of a TV series, and the 10-year-old sat down with a glass of milk and spilled it on the couch almost instantly.
He went to go get a rag to clean it up, and then I remembered a Facebook post I'd just seen. It said something like "you can tell what kind of parent you are by how you react in the first 3 seconds after your kids break something." What had been our initial reactions?
What I did: shake my head and mutter "I don't want to see that."
What Phillip did: calmly remark "Wow."
I don't have a clue what that says about us. Probably that we're tired.
—5—
I pulled up behind a car with a funny sticker on the rear window. It was a silhouette of Bigfoot with the words "Gone Squatchin'."
I took a picture, but the light had changed so the car had already started moving and I was a little too far away. Since it was blurry I wasn't going to post it here, but when I thought about it, I realized that an out-of-focus picture of a Bigfoot sticker sighting is actually perfect.
—6—
Speaking of other funny things I see on the road, I drive by this lone tree covered in vines sometimes, and I always think it looks like a wizard raising him arms to the horizon in an incantation:
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| Alakazam! |
I have thought that for years and sometimes literally laugh as I drive past the old sorcerer at his tricks, especially if there's a song on the radio that makes him seem particularly ridiculous. But I pointed it out to my kids this week and they were like "Huh?" They couldn't see it, even after I showed them where his head, robe, and arms were.
—7—
Here's a nice video that kind of puts into perspective all the pains and irritations large and small of family life:
This is really good advice, and it helps that it comes from an older woman who probably knows a thing or two. But also, one might argue that when it comes to your babies becoming teenagers, you actually had no idea what you were asking for.
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