Brigid Day

Entries categorized as ‘the lived in house’

the funniest wrapping paper around

December 16, 2009 · 6 Comments

I have been going on to my friends for a while now about how stressed I am. I overbooked my time. (All my own fault.) And I don’t know who I think I am pretending that I am any more stressed/busy than everyone else.

One thing has kept me laughing though.

Our wrapping paper from last year.

See, I bought this extra-long wrapping paper to wrap all those odd sized children’s presents. Except I didn’t really have that many odd sized presents and I ended up cutting all my extra-long paper down to regular paper size.

Then when Christmas was over, I had three partially used rolls left over to store for a year. (In addition to the new regular-sized rolls that I bought last year on clearance.)

Two years ago, in one of my many attempts at getting organized, I bought a wrapping paper caddy. (A big plastic container that fits long rolls.) Except, you guessed it, it doesn’t fit extra-long rolls.

So there I was last year with three extra-long rolls and a regular sized caddy. What to do? If I remember correctly, I waited until I was pissed about something else, then went down to the basement and took out my post-holiday vengeance. I grabbed a pair of scissors and went nutso on the extra-long rolls. I chopped at them, cussing and trying to pare them down to normal size. To make them fit.

And when they proved to be too much for me, when I proved to be too weak, I resorted to folding the ripped up ends over so that I could at least shut the lid to the caddy.

And this year I have laughed at the never-freaking ending supply of paper on those three rolls. I have to cut off the part that I hacked on, so basically I trim each few feet down to a regular-sized roll as I go. Unrolling has become impossible as the massacred end flops over with each twist of the roll.

But I laugh.

I laugh at the anger I knew I was feeling when I did it.

I laugh at how absurd most of my attempts at organization turn out.

I laugh at all the promises I make that next year I will start earlier. That I will enjoy more. Do less.

It’s a maniacal kind of laugh.

Categories: Brigid · the lived in house
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nine

November 21, 2009 · 1 Comment

I just had a realization. It’s Saturday so the whole family is together today. Tomorrow is Sunday. We will pick up Maggie from her first sleepover tomorrow morning. Then the kids go to school on Monday and Tuesday while Mike and I finish “the great paint of ‘09.”

Then we will visit family for Thanksgiving since the kids will be off school Wednesday-Friday. Then it’s another weekend.

That’s nine days with my family. Yay! (Except I thrive on also being alone. Boo.) So I will be doing my best to enjoy my family, finish painting without needing to consult an attorney, and scheduling some me-time in there.

Categories: Brigid · parenting - my way · the lived in house
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Gluey

November 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Well, I peeled wallpaper most of the morning. And Mike and I finished the rest tonight. We have decidedly different styles of wallpaper removal. I’m trying to remember that I’m not always right. (There is that 1% of the time when I’m wrong…)

Anyway, my brain is fried from thinking all day. (What else are you supposed to do when staring at a wall and picking at glue?)

And I’m writing this on my phone, so forgive my brevity.

NaBloPoMo is making me a tad grumpy right now. Deep thoughts, tomorrow. OK?

Categories: Brigid · exercise - sort of · the lived in house
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paint

November 15, 2009 · 1 Comment

Holy hell. We’re getting ready to paint.

This week marks the four-year anniversary of moving into our house. And wallpaper remains that we swore we would take down “right after the holidays were over.” Umm, four years ago.

And apparently the time has come. I am typically the interior painter in this marriage. I painted every inch of our last house (it came with white, white, white sawdusty builder walls that sucked up paint by the gallon. ugh.) Actually, I take that back. Mike and I painted the upstairs bonus room right before we had it carpeted. And it was a good thing we worked in that order. Let’s just say, my side had zero drips and his side had less than a thousand. Maybe.

And he told me the other day he wants to paint the kitchen. We have had plans to paint the kitchen for a while. I have colors picked out, which we finalized tonight.  (I think we finalized. I plan on waffling on colors for at least a few more days, just to make myself miserable.)

So tomorrow I will commence with wallpaper removal.

(Maggie was so darn cute tonight. She heard us talking and got all defensive of the wallpaper. She kept touching it and telling us how much she loved it. I will say, after four years it has grown in me a little, but not enough to keep it.)

The kicker is, painting the kitchen and dining room, means also painting two hallways, a staircase and the sloped ceiling bonus room. And woodwork. We are doomed lucky to have copious amounts of woodwork. That alone will take me a year to do. We have agreed that the kitchen and dining room are our current project and the rest will have to wait four more years until after the holidays.

And I was going to start with the guest room. One simple room. Ha.

One thing I know, I’m going to get one serious drop cloth.

 

Categories: Brigid · the lived in house
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finally

November 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I am finally, finally, starting to feel caught up on my life. Since I wallow all the time about being behind, I figured I would also share being almost caught up. (Please, if there is a hubris diety out there waiting to strike me down, I beg you to pretend you never read that.)

I have had some major projects come my way in the last few weeks and I have crossed them all off the list.

The kids played outside all weekend, which is one of the most lovely things I can ask for.

I have nothing waiting to be monogrammed. No lie. As I was typing that I remembered another item I need to purchase and monogram. Drat. Oh well. It’s only one thing. And I have a gift or two rattling around in my brain so maybe I’ll get them all done and feel like a monogramming olympian.

The house is still pretty messy. That much hasn’t changed. Bet hey, I’m not a perfect person.

And I’m going to totally pretend that not being on the computer (much) for five days had nothing to do with it.

Categories: Brigid · the lived in house
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the desk

October 6, 2009 · 2 Comments

My husband got me a desk. A desk that will fit my sewing machine and my computer and all my piles of papers, as he puts it.

Not exactly the desk I had in mind, but a lovely desk nonetheless.

Oh, and free.  That’s always a bonus.

But gargantuan.  Not so much a bonus, when you take into account that my “office” is a miniature room at the top of the stairs between the kids’ rooms. Just big enough for a desk.

This new desk is an L-shaped desk. The major drawback being that the long side was 2 inches too long from fitting where it needed to go.  So he rotated it, which left three feet of desk jutting out into the hallway.

Ummm, no.

Except, he was so in love with the free desk that he wouldn’t budge.  He thought it looked great.

I waited, silently willing him to see the error of his ways.

And it worked!  This morning he came up and asked if I really hated it.  Ummm, yes.  Not the desk per se, but the fact that it was sticking out three feet into the hallway.

“If it fit on the original wall like we thought it would, that would be great. I don’t even need the second piece (of the L), just the long piece would be fine.”

(But it was FREE, and he was not going to waste something that was FREE.)

So he told me of his plans to cut it with a saw to make it fit.

And I died a little inside. I imagined him losing a digit or two over a FREE desk. Then he wouldn’t be able to work and I would be forced to get a job. And I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to support the family and we would have to sell our FREE desk to buy dog food to eat.

But I kept my mouth shut. (Except for one tiny FB status.)

And by golly. As I sit here right now, there is a desk that is a few inches shorter than it was this morning, and it fits perfectly, and no one lost a digit, and I got to eat a tasty dinner of my own words.  (Though because I kept my mouth shut except for a few people who heard the story today, I really only had to eat a light snack instead of a whole meal.)

And I did post a retraction on FB, with the words “I was wrong” included.  Too bad he isn’t on FB.

Categories: Brigid · the lived in house
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passing the torch

September 30, 2009 · 1 Comment

Fall arrived in about a day’s time.  I have no idea how it snuck in without any warning – could be the two weeks of rain.  But it’s here.  Or is it?  It’s kind of trying to be fall, and October starts tomorrow, but seriously, there have been plenty of October days spent in shorts and t-shirts. So I’m a little leery.

Not leery enough that I haven’t dug out a few pairs of long pants and long-sleeved shirts for the kids.  Well, I shouldn’t say long pants for Maggie, they are more aptly described as pants that sit two inches above her shoes.  All of her long pants are high waters.  According to her last endocrinology appointment, she has grown over two inches in the last six months.  And all her pants are making that painfully obvious.

Nick, on the other hand, finally has pants that fit his length, but now he’s thinned out enough that they fall off his waist.  All.day.long.  As in plumber’s butt. All day. Nice.

So we will be heading out to the consignment store soon to get some properly fitting pants (if such a thing actually exists.)  But we are going out of town this weekend, and I have found after-school shopping to be not-the-most-fun-I-have-ever-had. So I’m rooting for a touch of a warm-up so we can eek out another two weeks of shorts wearing.

I am also looking into finding some leg warmers for Maggie to give those pants of hers new life.

As she was taking off a pair of painfully short long-pants, pants I knew she was particularly fond of, she asked if she could keep them for house-clothes. You know, clothes you wouldn’t really wear out of the house, but stuff that is too comfortable to part with.  Like pretty much half of my closet. Of course I said yes.

And that, my friends, is the birth of another generation of hoarders.

Categories: Brigid · Maggie · Nicholas · parenting - my way · the lived in house
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a hex

August 9, 2009 · 5 Comments

I spent the morning deciding just what type of hex to put on companies that market to young children.  You know the ones, PixOs, Elephun, Moon Sand.

In a moment of horrendous judgement, we bought some replacement PixOs for Maggie yesterday.  Since we had invested in the original kit, it only made sense to buy more so she could keep using it.  Right?  Ha, don’t answer that.

Not familiar with PixOs?  They are tiny, over-priced pieces of PVC made-in-China bullshit.  Yet according to the bright packaging, they are the greatest thing ever.

So after one false start this morning, (washing the colors off from the last time we used it because it didn’t work right) we finally got her going on her project.  You know, the project that she can do all by herself while I am doing all the things I need to do by myself?  Yeah, that project.

And then came the crash.

She was putting them away and tripped.  With the whole container of teeny, tiny, little balls of crap.  And it not only spilled, (because the locking lid apparently doesn’t work) it scattered.  It multiplied and then it scattered.  Across the floor, into the toy closet, into the box of dominoes, into the box of legos, into the box of trains.  EVERYWHERE.

They look soft.  You may think because they look so soft, that they wouldn’t hurt to step on.  You would be wrong.  They have little souls of hate and poison that feel like you’re stepping on a nail.

So after we dried the tears, hers, not mine (though I wasn’t too far behind) we commenced PixOs cleanup.  I can’t think of many things more frustrating than crawling around on the floor, trying not to step or kneel on the little monsters.

Oh, wait.

About midway through the cleanup, I heard my son say “Pee pee on the potty!”

Except he was a tad late in his exclamation.  So I got to clean up some bodily fluids and then get back to cleaning up PixOs.  I’m such a lucky girl.

By the time I got back to help Maggie, there were fresh tears.  She had knocked over the half that we had already picked up and they whole thing spilled again.  At this point I burst out laughing.  Because seriously, I paid money for these!

We managed to get the majority of (I kid you not, as I typed that last phrase, my son just peed again on the floor, and we are now out of paper towels) the PixOs cleaned up.  I KNOW we will be finding those little fu@kers for months to come.  Maggie spent the next half hour sorting half of them by color back into the tray, before she declared she needed a break.  Sorting them by color was a far better learning experience than using them as they are intended to be used.

I hope the marketers of toys like PixOs have a special corner in hell where it’s extra hot.

Categories: Maggie · Nicholas · parenting - my way · the lived in house
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the condensed version

July 31, 2009 · Leave a Comment

OK, let’s see.  Where to begin…

The washing machine made a miraculous recovery thanks in large part to my husband.  (OK, more than large part – more like all part)  And now he thinks the moaning dryer seems to be less of an issue.  Hmmm.  I think this story will be continued in the near future.

I’m pretty sure Annie the rat might be going crazy.  She has had admittedly less human contact than is desirable, largely due to the fact that she bit Maggie a few weeks ago, and then bit Nick yesterday.  No one wants to see if she’s in a good mood, so we kind of leave her alone.  To go stark raving mad, apparently.  I put a hammock in the cage the other day, which she really enjoyed that last time we had one in there.  This time she has started eating the fabric on all the edges.  Hmmm.  I think this story will be continued in the near future.

I worked my last day of summer school yesterday.  Whew!!  (I fell asleep before Nick did last night.) Glad to be finished.  I didn’t realize how much I had come to need the two days a week sans children.  But for now, Nick has two weeks off from school and Maggie has a whole month off.  Gulp.  I know this story will be continued in the near future.

Did I mention that I’m giving a presentation during in-service week at the Montessori school?  No?  Yes, I am.  A whole day. Me.  I have videos to use as part of the presentation, except they are from 1989 which is the year I graduated high school.  Mike watched some with me last night and said he really got over the 1980-ish-ness of the whole thing and really found the message to be helpful.  (Does anyone have a projector that works with a laptop that I could borrow?) I know this story will be continued in the near future.

It seems like I had a few more tidbits of interest (at least to me) but I lost them in the four-lane traffic tie up that is my head these days.

{Edit: I remembered one more – Maggie tested completely clear of strep throat germs – for the first time since June 3rd.  Thankfully the tonsillectomy talks are over.  At least for now.}

Categories: parenting - my way · preschool teachers should be treated like royalty · rat tales · the lived in house

Silver lining

July 29, 2009 · 1 Comment

There once was a little girl who slept very soundly.  She slept so soundly, in fact, that she continued to wear pull ups to bed into her fifth year of life.  Finally, she and her mother decided it was time to toss the pull ups.

At first, the mom woke the little girl every night a few hours after she went to sleep to go sit on the potty.  The girl was funny, because she was still mostly asleep and wandered into closets if she wasn’t directed back to her bed.  Most mornings, she didn’t even remember getting up.

After over a month of this, the mom decided to see if the little girl could go all night without any accidents.  There were many nights of success in a row.  Everyone was thrilled.

Then one random, oh say, Tuesday night, the mom heard the little girl crying in her room at 2am.  The mom went to see what was wrong and discovered the little girl was so sad because she had had an accident in her bed.

The mom changed the sheets while the little girl changed her pajamas.  In less that four minutes they were ready to get back in bed. (Thank you waterproof mattress pad.)  The mom snuggled up with the little girl and the little girl fell almost instantly back to sleep.  (The mom tossed and turned for two hours, but that is a different story.)

The next morning, the mom took the wet sheets and pillow down to the laundry.

Later that day the mom saw that the pillow has gotten caught in the washing machine and had a small tear in it.  Moving right along, she started another load of laundry.

Upon returning to switch the load of laundry, the mom realized she was standing in a pool of water.  Hmmmmm.

The mom found a small leak on the back of the machine.  She mentioned it to her husband who went down to look at it.  After he took the machine apart, he called for the mom to show her the problem.

There was a hose that had been damaged (it would appear from the pillow getting caught.)  The hose wasn’t really much of a hose anymore – it was more like a snake that had been slit from end to end.  Apparently the job of the hose was to direct the water into the washing tub of the machine instead of down the interior walls of the machine onto the floor.

The husband went to the store to try to find a replacement hose.  After his return, the mom heard some four-letter words coming from the work area, and one loud yell of pain (it appears no fingers have been lost in the fixing of said hose.)

The mom hopes everyone stays dry tonight since the washer is not yet ready for it’s initial run with a DIY hose repair.  The mom is also going to be looking at the Sunday paper for a back-to-school washing machine sale.  (The husband also mentioned that it might he time to get a new dryer.  The current dryer has been moaning in pain with every load for over three years.  The mom kind of got used to it after a while, but is keeping her mouth quite closed if a new dryer is in the realm of possibility.)

Categories: parenting - my way · the lived in house
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