Laundry

"It's okay," I told Jonathan. "I line up all your socks in rows for you."

I'm sure he really appreciates that.

Moving week

We're moving this week. I thought I'd liveblog.


10:11: It's barely ten in the morning, and I want to quit. Can I go back to bed?

11:00: Taking down our bedroom curtains. The only thing left on the walls are the miniblinds, which stay with the house, and a starburst clock. My walls are lonely and I do not approve.

11:15: Start the girls making birthday cards for Grandma. We are all about colored pencils and stickers today. I regret that I packed her present instead of mailing it back in June, but it's gone now. Quickly, while the girls are preoccupied, I toss or pack the baby silverware that they totally don't need to use.

11:30: Encouraging email from friend, and more emails, also potentially encouraging but which require decisions on my part. I put off answering them because I don't know the answers.

12:09: "Why are there Cleopatra and dinosaurs?" I ask. Meg answers, "The dinosaurs are the audience." True enough, and Cleopatra is part of the band. This is apparently completely normal for Peg+Cat world. I go back to fixing grilled cheese.

12:45: I explain to Meg that she can't use "stupid" because it's a word that carries a cloud of other meanings around with it, and she can't use it properly until she's old enough to understand all the other meanings too. I add there are other words like that too. Like "dang it," she asks? Yes. Exactly like "dang it."

1:31: Have a deep urge to gold-leaf the top ring on all my terra cotta flower pots. I resist, not least because I don't have any gold leaf. I put Kate down for her nap instead.

1:43 While sorting laundry and rummaging for lip gloss, I found my long-lost good tweezers. That's exciting.

2:18 I went downstairs to put in a load of laundry and found myself dusting and sweeping the back half of the basement.

3:44 Fell down a Pinterest rabbit hole, devised a scheme for reupholstering four ottomans in pink tweed with gold nail-head trim, changed out the laundry, and finished sweeping the basement. It's ready for mopping. Meanwhile, I'm going to start the packing and cleaning list for Thursday.

4:28: Finished the cleaning list, got Kate up from her nap, and got Meg out from her bath. Put on oldies and started doing dishes.

6:15: Discovered tomorrow is Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-fil-A, so made two sets of cow ears out of construction paper.

6:58: Dinner.

7:30, sharp: Kate to bed.

8:30: Kate up, requiring fresh linens and stories.

8:45: I finally begin my after dinner work. 

Vegetables are hard

We're about to move, so I sat down one day, made a list of all the main-dish-ish food in the house, and made a meal plan to eat through it. We had two weeks' worth of meals -- two weeks! -- and sadly, that was a week and a half ago. So while I've dropped by the store for milk and eggs and bread and fruit, we're kind of reaching the point where I'm all, "spaghetti sauce counts as a vegetable, right?" (In my defense, my sauce starts with "open a three-pound can of crushed tomatoes." So maybe it really does.)

We were going to have calabacitas last night with our enchiladas, but my last zucchini was a squashy mess. It wasn't quite a puddle, but it was getting there. Alas. A cucumber just isn't the same.

Also, Target has the weirdest pricing on groceries. Today, they had Rainier cherries for $4/lb, which is the cheapest I've ever seen them anywhere, and zucchini for 3.19/lb. Over $3, in JULY. I swear. I didn't buy any.

Empty like a worm

I spent the day packing and cleaning.

"I want you to admire the vast emptiness that is in the craft room," I informed Jonathan.
Meg piped up, "It's empty like a worm!"

Jonathan and I looked at each other, nonplussed.

"I don't know what to say to that," I said.
Jonathan asserted, "No, it's empty in a way that worm is not."
"Then how IS a worm empty?" said Meg.

"I know very little about how a worm is empty. My knowledge of worm emptiness is purely that of the via negativa. 'I thought it best to warn you, my dear Theophilous, not to empty your soul in the way that a worm is empty.'" said Jonathan.

Meg decided that made sense, or possibly no sense, and took a different tack. "You're right. A worm doesn't have scraps of paper or a door in it. Or a lamp or Bismarck in it. Also, the worm is not empty forever!"

Sending a spider to a better place

"Well, I don't blame the spider for wanting to live in our nice house, but I'm not going to let him." Me
"That's right! Go find a haunted house to live in! Or, a broken-up tower with bats and --- and creatures of the night. Creatures of the night INCLUUUUUUDING insects! That way they'll be eaten up and won't be a bother." Meg

Mystery plants identified

Dogwood.

Peony.

This yard is full of plants I didn't recognize when we moved in. I'm not from the south, and we arrived in midsummer when most things were done blooming. Also, a poison ivy attacked me the first week we were here when I was sweeping the deck, and we had to clear out wasps and a huge snake, and all I could identify were yew berries (don't eat) and pokeweed berries (also don't eat), so I was not feeling the great outdoors for a while there. Who knew what other vicious plant forms were out to get us?

Anyway, all fall and winter I had this mystery tree at the end of the drive, that produced burgundy leaves and these little pod cherry things. I asked around and searched and searched online to figure it out, with absolutely no success. The bark looked like maybe a fruit tree? But the pod things didn't look edible?

And then this spring it bloomed. Ta-da! Dogwood!


Then there were these bush things out front. They got pretty big and then died completely flat for the winter. What are they? Will they poison us? The girls and I went on a field trip today to the gardens at Ida Lee, and one of the master gardeners happened to be in. I saw another of these mystery plants and asked her, and she was able not only to identify it for me, but also describe its habits, which also lined up exactly with ours. Peony, people.

It's kind of nice, figuring things out.

Potted plants

"That planter is EVIL. It drips rust all over," I told Jonathan. Emphatically.
"As you have expressed before."
"And I will KEEP expressing it until I do something about it!"

Breaking dishes

It is my experience that when I'm about to have a move or major life change, God gives me a bit of a kick out the door by breaking dishes. I have no explanation for this. My motto for college graduation was, "the grace and the coffee will be sufficient," followed closely by, "and He will break my dishes until I let them go." So over the years, I've learned to hold dishes loosely. Also, I kind of rejoice at their demise, because it means (probably) good things coming.


In the last three days, we've broken a framed picture, a china mug from our honeymoon in Scotland, and my thrift store rose china serving bowl. Smashed to smithereens. :-D

Jonathan wanted me to add this story, too... so yesterday I spent HOURS helping Meg clean up her room. We finally finished just about bedtime, and I called Jonathan in to admire the clean. He fell on his knees in the middle of the room, proclaiming, "I AM NOT WORTHY!" and on cue, a framed treasure map and a dinosaur postcard fluttered to the floor, and something else thumped down from inside the closet. Apparently he really wasn't worthy of the clean, or wasn't good for it, or something. It was a great moment.

Word art

I've been admiring all that hand-drawn and chalkboard-esque word art that's been floating around. There have been some I very nearly bought, but I thought I'd try my hand at it, you know, before spending actual money. I had a canvas that needed repurposing, so I got out paint and a metallic Sharpie. I like how it turned out.

I hung it over our gigantic TV in an effort to distract from it. This TV, I'm grateful for it, but it absolutely dominates the living room. It's right by the front door and takes up as much visual space as the recliner, and it's actually so big as to affect my self-image. Come to find out I'd kind of been proud of being a person who didn't have a big TV! So, y'all, I have a giant TV, and it needed not to be the center of the living room. The word art gives your eye something to look at on that wall besides the screen.

The pink bed of doom

In case you were wondering whether all my crafts turn out, the answer is no. No, they really don't.

I have had a twin-size headboard, footboard, and whatnots clogging up my kitchen passage for about a month, waiting for a non-rainy interlude. A friend found them for me free, and they were fine (especially because they have snazzy twist-off knobs on top! so cool!) but they would be MUCH COOLER in hot pink for Meg. Obviously. So I bought a can of spray primer and another of paint and seized the weekend, which was warm and sunny.

While we do have a lovely huge backyard, it is also quite grassy, so the dropcloth didn't lie flat. It bunched up and flopped around in the wind, strategic rocks and all, and stuck to the painted bed parts. It made weird wrinkles. It also, charmingly, flung layers of white primer back on top of the pink, and they stuck there and couldn't even be sanded off with the sandpaper I have.

I didn't get enough primer or paint the first time, not having painted a bed before, so I wasted a day and a half chasing after more paint of the same color, which is apparently only sold at Wal-Mart in Winchester and not at True Value, Lowes, Target, or Wal-Mart in Leesburg. I wasn't going to Wal-Mart in Winchester because it's 25 minutes away the wrong direction, although in hindsight I could have. I hadn't expected that color would be so rare. I finally got a slightly different pink paint at Wal-Mart in Leesburg, because by then I didn't care, and I got three cans.

Well, the new paint was awful. It dripped and spurted and made blobs. It actually failed to adhere to the primer, in some places, and went scattered and shattered-looking. I'd have done far better to buy a bucket of paint and use a brush. Or, plan of plans, I could have assembled it unpainted and let Meg have a brown bed. I am never buying Krylon spray paint again.

The now wrinkled, shattered-looking, blobby, and smudged pink bed is drying out back. Tomorrow we will bring it in, hopefully before the rains start, and we will assemble it and let Meg have her pink bed. Because not all projects are wins, but a home is still worth making. So there.

Also, the bed has spinny knobs on top that twist off. I don't think she'll mind paint blobs.

In which my library card opens a door

This afternoon we locked ourselves out of the main bathroom. It's the kind of doorknob where you twist the inside knob and the outer one can't turn. There's a little hole in the middle of the outer one, but don't think you can poke a wire hanger in there and unlock it, because there's nothing to unlock. (Jonathan says, acording to his research, you can use a particular kind of screwdriver and twist the thing around.)

Bedtime arrived. Meg's toothbrush was still in chancery, as were all our spare toothbrushes. And the toothbrushing sticker chart was in there. It was unthinkable to skip brushing teeth for a night, because this night (oh joy of joys!) she was due for a prize. Also, we kind of like having two bathrooms accessible.

So I went and got a credit card. Actually, I got an old library card. I was able to slide it between the door and the frame and persuade the latch to open, and hurray! The door opened!

So there you have it, folks: your library card really can open doors.

Yes, we have no paper towels

I have a bad cold this week which has turned me into the Great Slime Monster. Slime Monsters apparently like hot tea, recliners, endless rounds of Winne the Pooh and Octonauts, and have a terrible temper when confronted with unnecessary messes.

Meg was helping me by washing sweet potatoes while I fed Kate. I looked up from a bite of yogurt to see Meg calmly squirting water through the hole in the sink -- not the drain hole, but the one on the top that sometimes has a soap dispenser in it. You know, the hole with no plumbing attached. I store paper towels under there.

I shrieked, "MEG!!!!!!!" and leapt to turn the water off. Meg looked confused and explained that she just wanted to find out where the hole went. "SO YOU SQUIRTED WATER THROUGH IT?????" Well... yes. Actually. Sorry, Mom.

I called Jonathan and let him explain to her why we don't randomly run water under the sink while I surveyed the damage. There actually wasn't much. There was a lot of water on the counters and floor, which I wiped up with towels, and a lot of water in the four backup rolls of paper towels under the sink. I set the soggy paper towels out on the back deck to dry. Jonathan set up a fan underneath to help air things out. Everything was fine.

Except, of course, the paper towels. Because it rained last night and all day. Poor paper towels.

She's up to something

I've taken to putting up a baby gate at the doorway to Meg's room. We had been keeping the door closed to keep Kate out of Meg's decidedly non-baby-approved toys, but then that room didn't get any air circulation. But gate or no gate, those Barbie shoes are so attractive and Kate knows they're in there. So when I need to chase Kate away from the baby gate, I usually say something like, "No, no, sweetie. Not for you."

Meg has a more direct approach. "NO! You'll never get away with your evil plan, Kate!" or, possibly, "Be off, creature!"

The country has bugs

Also, I got caught behind a hay truck yesterday and people held the door for me at the dollar store. True story.

Meg: Mom, did God make flies?
Me, confidently: Yes.
Meg: RATS! Then it's a BAD UNIVERSE!

We moved to Berryville this weekend, which isn't that far from Leesburg, except for being worlds away. I am in shock. Hang on if I haven't gotten back to you; we just got internet this morning.

Top Ten Activities that Don't Involve Cleaning

I spend a lot... a lot... of time cleaning, but that's not very interesting to blog about. So, in lieu of fascinating tales about scrubbing, I thought you might be mildly entertained by some of Meg's and my other activities.

1. Put glitter on shoes. She had a pair of worn-out Sunday shoes, so I painted them with turquoise craft paint and turquoise glitter glue, with silver glitter glue for the touches. It turned out surprisingly well, though the craft paint cracked in a couple places, so I touched those up with turquoise nail polish. Then, I had a pair of hot pink flats in dismal shape, so I touched them up with permanent marker (red, since I didn't have hot pink) and kraft glue and pink glitter. They aren't done yet, due to a severe glitter shortage.

2. Put glitter glue on dinosaur coloring pages. Using glitter glue is not to be confused with putting glue and glitter on things, an activity to be undertaken only with great care and trepidation, because if you put glue and glitter on anything, it'll be on everything. Meg wasn't even in the room when I glue-and-glittered the pink shoes and she got glitter all over her face. Though, small girls may just have a magnetic attraction to glitter. Glitter glue, on the other hand, comes in little squirt bottles and is almost tidy.

3. Tickle Kate. You might have trouble with this if you don't have a Kate, but it's so satisfying. She grins and giggles and generally sparkles brighter than glitter, which is saying a lot.

4. Do something with the semi-forbidden drinking straws, the pretty much forbidden yarn, the theoretically controlled scotch tape, the kid scissors, and rubber bands.

5. Build a bow and arrows. Today, for instance, we built a bow out of a paper towel tube and a belt. It only shot invisible arrows and somehow wasn't all that satisfying. Then we made a better bow out of her inflatable horse, a rubber band, and the rarely permitted straws. I fletched straws and they were pretty awesome.

6. Make up your own words to whatever you're singing. Today Meg rejiggered the "Timmy Time" theme song to become a Franklin the Turtle theme song.

7. Line up toys. We've been doing this for about three and a half years now and it never gets old. We have some new variations. Now we like to line up Little People animals for Kate to grab, line Imaginexts up just out of her reach for her not to grab, and line dinosaurs up precariously dangling off of things.

8. Embellish a boring shirt. I recommend sparkly fabric paint (see glitter glue, above, but you have to use the kind intended for fabric). I also recommend fabric, lace, and the cunning use of scissors - though maybe not all at once. Today I cut off the ugly neckline ribbing off a t-shirt and it not only looked better without ugly ribbing, but somewhat astonishingly, it actually fit better. The only trouble with this activity is that soon you run out of boring shirts.

9. String beads. The trick to this is to only have awesome beads in your stash, and then the creations will turn out gorgeous and look high-end and quite wearable and possibly even giftable. Plastic pony beads always look like plastic pony beads, which is why I let Meg use my nicer beads. Sometimes. She made me a rather cool necklace the other day out of brass wire and big pink beads that looked like it might have come from Anthropologie.

10. Hang out while Jonathan computes. You never know what might turn up.

Me: Why are there people yelling in Spanish?
Jonathan: It's Italian. I don't know. And one of them is waving a sea bass. ::reading the news story:: "He was eventually ejected by Deputy House Speaker Luigi Di Maio after failed attempts to make him stop waving the fish."

The peacemaker

Our golden bust of Bismarck usually wears Meg's lei and necklaces, but tonight Jonathan found them jumbled in the living room and picked them up. Meg came running over in alarm.

"No, Daddy! They're mine!"
"No. Bismarck's."
She grinned suddenly. "Okay."

That's Bismarck, still averting crises a hundred-some-odd years after his death. Not bad at all.

I at least outwitted the hamburger

My great housekeeping success for the week was buying a ginormo-pack of hamburger and getting it all cooked or frozen by the cook-or-freeze-by date. This is a bigger deal than you might think. Hamburger is sneaky.

Also... I haven't had this baby yet. But I'm going to.

The patience of Meg

This morning I successfully dumped my divider full of beading supplies and the beads went all over. Meg helped me pick them off the floor, and then I showed her how to put them back in their sections, each kind in its own little house.

About half an hour later I wandered back. She had most of the bigger beads in place and was still moving infinitesimal ones around.

"Mom?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I like organizing."

I'm not surprised. I like organizing; Jonathan likes organizing; she's one of us!

In which we rearrange, which is always more complicated than it looks

Jonathan is now officially full-time job hunting. His last position ended last Friday. He has some good leads, with one he's really excited about, so all that's coming along, and also we're re-thinking our house set-up. We love having Daddy home, and we're pretty sure Daddy likes us, but at the same time everyone's happier if he can just go away and shut the door. I hear new retirees have this problem, too.

Inconveniently, we don't have a spare room, so Jonathan's computer was smack dab in the middle of the living room, which translated into the middle of everything. There is a limit to how much Meg and I can be out of the house, especially when it's always either over ninety outside or else raining and I'm trying not to go shopping every day, so nobody was getting anything done and by Thursday the Time Had Come to Rearrange. However, it was the Fourth of July and we had other things to do, so it got put off.

The only thing I could think of was our room. The bed only takes up a little more than half the length of the room, and the other end mostly gets used for holding stuff. Admittedly, it's useful stuff like clothes and shoes, but maybe we could get creative...?

July 5 we got up, not very early because we'd been at the fireworks, and started organizing. We had cleaned our room earlier in the week, so it was in pretty good shape. We started by cleaning Meg's room, moved most of the moveables out of our bedroom and into hers, cleaned off the sci-fi-and-fantasy bookshelf in our room, and made the inconvenient discovery that the desktop is plugged into the modem, doesn't have a wireless card, and the modem has to be plugged in in the living room. Um. Jonathan assured me he did want internet access on that machine, unfortunately. But giving up was not to be thought of! We must rearrange! We'll figure it out later. Jonathan hoisted the computer desk from the living room into the bedroom to make a kind of office nook, adding three boxes of law books, two short filing cabinets, and the now sci-fi- and fantasy-free sci-fi-and-fantasy shelf for extra beauty, and tidily arranged all the computer stuff around on it. Then we moved dressers, other shelves, and stuff around the rest of our room.

It actually looked pretty good. At this point the bed was covered with sci-fi and fantasy, not to mention all the usual flotsam, jetsam, and paraphernalia that magically appears when you move furniture. Meg's room was full of the rest of our junk, I mean treasures. The living room had big dusty holes where there used to be a computer desk and two filing cabinets. But it looked pretty hopeful.

Mid-afternoon Jonathan had to go out and do something, so he went and did it. Meg and I took a nap.

When he got back, we tidied up and started rearranging books for real. The shelf at the end of the hall - pshh! The shelves are all bending down in the middle, but they'll be fine. We can fit a LOT more books onto that. In fact, maybe I can hold up the middle of shelves with stacks of books on the shelf below. Also, I started a massive giveaway pile of books in the middle of the hall, because we didn't really need to walk down that hall. After vacuuming the desk hole, we moved two shelves into it, and loaded them up with cookbooks, Shakespeare, and medieval-ish fiction and theology, because obviously those belong together. The Greek and Latin all moved into the shelf at the end of the hall with the other history and language, which freed up enough room in the living room for the sci-fi and fantasy. Which freed up our bed. Which meant, happily, that we could get into it, which we did, and called it a day.

All we're lacking now is wireless for Jonathan's computer and somewhere to put laundry, my shoes, and bedside stuff, and we might need a charging station and another lamp because it's kind of dark in his office nook when the sun goes down. Not too bad!

Please don't apologize for your house

No, seriously.

You can consider it a ministry, if you like. The reason is, it's so very depressing for someone to decry the state of their bedroom and I go in, expecting something really epic, and it's actually a lot cleaner than my own. Now I feel like the bad housekeeper in this situation.

I'm usually just grateful to have a place to set up a pack'n'play in!