Back in May, I went to IKEA with the express purpose of buying a dresser for my younger daughter. Her room really needs one – right now her clothes are all just stacked in shallow boxes on an old changing table. A four year old’s room should have a dresser, not a changing table, I reasoned so off we went to IKEA.

I’d decided I wanted a small dresser for no more than $40 and found one in the AS IS area of IKEA; a place where the slightly banged up (but pre-assembled!) floor models go after their displays are dismantled.  It was just what I wanted, except, it was black.  Not the look my daughter was going for, and for that matter, not what I envisioned either. So we bought the thing anyway, and resolved to bring it home and paint it.

My children love a good painting project. We spent a long time talking colors, patterns and tossing around ideas about what to do with the dresser. A, the girl whose dresser this is to be, decided she wanted yellow, pink and orange stripes and polka dots on her dresser.  I told her that I would see what I could do; that probably I would pick the colors out but I’d try to include her favorite color (orange) and probably pink as well. Time passed, then.

After about a week or two, the girls and I coated the black dresser with white primer in preparation for actually painting it.  (This is a process that my art savvy elder daughter refers to as Gessoing, and of course she’s quite right, as Gesso is in fact a primer. She knocks my socks off, I just have to say.)

Then time passed some more.  The darn dresser (now that eerie primer white) sat and sat and sat in my enclosed front porch awaiting proper painting. I finally got a chance to pick up some paints yesterday and the project came alive for me again.   I’d unexpectedly had the opportunity to go to the hardware store without my children (gasp! hooray! whooopeeeee!) and so I’d mulled it over and decided to go with some sherbet complimentary colors: Orange, Raspberry Pink, and Lime Green.  Very pretty; bright and cheerful.  And a nice warm “heirloom white” to be the first two layers on the dresser.

Last night I stayed up til 5 AM painting my masterpiece of a dresser. It’s really cool. I used a fish-shaped sponge to paint fish on the dresser, and then coming from their mouths are the colorful “polka dots” that A asked for.  I also cut up a regular dishwashing sponge and applied paint with it to make an interesting texture. The stripes? Well, there really aren’t any, but there are some strips of green seaweed.

The latex based paint dried very quickly while I was washing out the brushes and sponges, and getting cleaned up. I decided to lug the thing upstairs myself just to surprise A in the morning with her awesome new dresser.

With much grunted and heaving, I got the thing upstairs.  Then, just as the birds started their early morning twittering, I tumbled into bed, exhausted.  Some time shortly thereafter, A left her room, and joined me in my bed and  snuggled up beside me. (We are definitely NOT morning people; left to our own devices, we’ll have breakfast close to 11 everyday.)

Around 9:30 AM, I woke up enough to remember the dresser, and excitedly asked A to go check her room for a surprise.  Moments later, she rushed back into my room. WAILING.

“I DIDN’T WANT GREEN! I DIDN’T WANT FISHES! I WANTED YELLOW! AND STRIPES.”

She was really upset, tears running down her face, snot running down her nose. Oh boy.

Hours later, she remained adamant. C suggested that we Gesso the whole thing and start over. NO WAY, said I. I spent HOURS painting that dresser. I STAYED UP ALL NIGHT painting that dresser. BESIDES … I think it looks really good.

Finally A and I reached a compromise. The pink and orange fish can stay. We’ll add some yellow bubbles soon.  We’ll try covering the few green fish with the white paint and maybe replace them with a new color.  The bargain was sealed with a few pieces of Hershey’s chocolate.

Now we wait for me to find a chance to get to the hardware store again.

5 Rockin’ Girl Bloggers…

TBH – not only is she an incredible writer, but she manages to blog about her personal life in a fun and relevant way to the topic of her choice: Family Finances.  Check out this very smart blog and get wise to money.   Plus, she’s my really good friend.

ScienceGeekGirl – this super smart girl blogger writes about cool stuff going on in science, cyber space, and more. (And, oh yeah, we go way back, besides!) Check her out, she’s definitely a Rockin’ Girl Blogger.

Jen – This mother of triplets writes a highly amusing blog, posts adorable pictures of her kids, and recently stood up her OB/GYN when she followed her heart to not have the scheduled C-Section for her fourth baby.  For that, she wins a Rockin’ Girl Blogger Award, for sure.  Visit her site, click her ads, and send all your real labor contraction vibes her way!

The Rock Chick – With a name like that, I hardly need to explain why she qualifies.  Her blog also has a really cool name: Life is RANTastic.  Love it.  Let me just say, her blog is very entertaining.

Heather- This amazing mom not only is raising her own four little ones, she also helps other moms bring their babies into the world with the best possible information and support, both through her great personal blog and her work as a birth doula. Keep up the good work Heather!

Congrats all you Rockin’ Girl Bloggers!  Feel free to nominate 5 more fantastic girl bloggers, or not, as your heart desires.

Gee, I am so touched … Stacie, that totally amazing gelato-making, latin-speaking, grumpy english teacher and breastfeeding mom to exceeding beautiful twins J & F (I am making this sentence torturous just to bait her) … she, Stacie, a rockin’ girl blogger herself, has named little old me a:

Thanks, Stacie. I am so touched (in the head)!

In turn I am supposed to announce some five others for the award. Decisions, decisions.  Coming soon in another post….

I haven’t been writing many posts lately, and it’s not because I’ve nothing to say. It’s because I have way too much to say, and because I have been very busy.  I’d love to post about our babysitting co-op pool party, the family camp out that followed it, the birthday party I shlepped the kids to the next day, the day spent recuperating and getting ready for a trip to my mom’s, our subsequent day in New York City at the American Girl Place and the incredible excess that it entailed. I’d like to expand on my children’s new obsession with their American Girl Dolls; my feelings of you-will-be-assimilated-resistance-is-futile.  I’d like to write about what it has been like to be home with the girls these past couple of days when my husband is away at a conference in DC.  I would also like to muse on the story of the bird that my cat carried into the house, which we rescued and released….

I’d really like to do all that, but I am just too damn tired and the kitchen is dirty, there’s laundry to do, I have email piling up, and work projects still lingering. Plus, oh yeah, I have these two cute girls to look after, cook for, and so forth.

Maybe I’ll find some time this weekend to expand on some of things listed above. Life’s just too rich to not examine it.

I got my very own dental appliance today. It’s a night guard, a highly personalized piece of plastic that fits exactly over my upper teeth, and underneath of the device it’s smooth and very hard. The reason I got it is that I’ve been grinding my teeth at night and that has caused me to actually chip, wear down, and generally damage my teeth.

Tonight I’ll attempt to sleep with it in my mouth; such a strange feeling to have something in your mouth. It’s like having a slippery but stiff wad of gum stuck in my upper teeth.

None of this freaked me out, but then I read in the care instructions that I have wash it each day with warm soapy water; and soak it once a week in denture cleaning solution. Like I need another chore each day!

It was really expensive, too. But I figure it will be worth the trouble and expense if it will stop me from needing more fillings.

there are some expressions that have entered my vocabulary since being a parent that really annoy me, but I seem to say them anyway:

• use your words
• gotta go pot-pot
• That’s 1 (2, 3)

I’m sure there are more but those are the ones that are really annoying me at the moment. I do want my kids to use their words and use the toilet appropriately. But god, “use your words” sounds really asinine to me.

And, counting them for misbehaving is certainly better than, say, screaming and walloping them on their butts, like I saw two families doing yesterday at the swim club (yuck). One was a family where both parents were also smoking while spanking their kids in public (we moved to a different area of the lawn to get away from both the smoke and the awful parenting).

Well enough of this bloggity blogging, folks…. I gotta go pot-pot pee.

Does it strike you as strange that my mom has orchestrated an un-accompanied plane ride so that my nieces (ages 9 and 11) can come stay with me and my family for a week, and meanwhile I has not SPOKEN or even emailed at all with my brother or his wife about this yet? It seems I can host their children at my house for a week in July without ever talking to their parents?

Why don’t I call them? Why don’t they call me? I don’t even get it.

I railed a while back, when I was getting ready for A’s birthday about the $15 chihuahua Webkinz and how ridiculous it was to spend money on a freaking stuffed animal with a WEBSITE.   A’s grandma got her a non-Webkinz, normal chihuahua stuffed animal and A was extremely pleased and delighted.

Then… I don’t know what came over me.  Some kind of little dog madness. Some kind of big-girl adoration. Some kind of sudden loss of rational judgment, as if gravity had suddenly stopped working but we were walking on suction cups through the toy store. I was in this cutsey toy store with just C, who had just completed her last day of first grade.

I was feeling so proud of her, and pleased to get a little time with just her. She loves getting that level of intense attention. We had lunch together (I insisted on doing this first) at a little cafe and then headed for the toy store.  I was planning on spending $5 or less on just some very small token that would be a little reward for her after such a great school year.

We mulled over the options. She looked at every stuffed animal in the place, and then looked again. There were few choices in the (oh-so-cheap) price range that I wanted to limit us to. She was trying to decide, ultimately, between a rubber snake and a kind of light up bouncy ball.  Looking at these things, she saw fun toys: but I saw trash, junk and more junk… frivolous stuff that I would have to clean up off the floor. Annoying clutter.

We were up at the counter, where the cash register and clerk were.  They keep the Webkinz behind the counter, like condoms or cigarettes at a drugstore.  Apparently so fervent is the craze for these beasts that this is a necessary security precaution. Suddenly I just saw the damn chihuahua.  It was sitting there just looking at me, staring me down.

Without any will of my own, I heard myself saying to the clerk, Can you please let me see the Chihuahua? I knew I was sunk as soon as the damn thing crossed the counter line.  Suddenly it seemed like such a good idea. Get the cute chihuahua – don’t get some dumb snake or another light up bouncy ball.

C was extremely delighted, and we walked out of there, proud pet owner and slightly mystified mom.

It was several days before we got around to actually logging into the Webkinz website, and discovering a virtual world which is now teaching C all about e-commerce. First thing this morning, she was going on and on about how she wants to get on the computer and “buy” Sparky some striped pajamas. By spending time on the website playing games, you can earn Webkinz Cash and then this money can be spent in various parlors, etc. You have to buy your pet food, and take it for walks, and visit exercise and chat rooms.

It’s fairly interactive — You can try to have conversations with other pets but you can’t type in what you want to say, you just have to use the canned conversations using the menu. This keeps kids from saying inappropriate stuff, so it’s not entirely a bad idea, it is just rather inane.

We decided to set limits on how much time she can spend in Webkinz world.  Somewhat arbitrarily, I decided that a half hour per day was the limit.

I just put off two more clients, and they are not even mad at me!

Hooray!

The reality is that right now is not a good time for me to take on projects, so for two of the things I had pending, I just told the clients outright that I was not interested in starting anything until fall. If they still require my services at that time, they should get in touch.

Phew. My heart is pounding less now.

Now, just ONE project to complete (gods know how or when) and then a BIGGER sigh of relief.