There's nesting . .

. . and then there's going completely overboard. This is a lesson in the latter.

With Avery out of town this weekend, we planned to get a few things done around the house. Apparently my impression of "a few" and Mandi's are somewhat different. What I thought was going to be the painting of one room and stocking of the freezer turned out to be one of the busiest weekends I can ever remember.

I suppose it's my fault for not insisting on a list. I always do well with lists, no matter how long it is I'll happily work until it's finished. But when I come in thinking "paint one room and make some food" and it turns into "paint half of the house and cook enough to feed a small army, then do a thorough deep cleaning of the whole house while simultaneously keeping Lily occupied all weekend", I get a little ill. The truth is that as I type this, I'm completely whooped. To top it off, tomorrow's a holiday and our gym is closed, so my daily 2-hour respite from Lily will not happen. Serenity now!!!!

Anyway, the first project of the weekend was to transform Lily's lavender bedroom into Lily and Mason's two-toned "jungle" room. I don't really care for painting, but I do love paint. Paint brings new life to spaces, and it offers immediate gratification. It hides dirt pretty well, too. This is the progression of the project, neatly arranged in this convenient slideshow for you.

Lily loves her new room, and her new monkey Mandi's friend Sara gave her. She named it George . . so original.

Project number two was the freezer. Earlier in the week I was put in charge of defrosting the freezer in our garage to "get it ready" for this weekend. If I'd only known. I half listened as Mandi made her list of stuff she was planning to cook, but the enormity of the task didn't set in until about 6:00 yesterday evening, when she was barely halfway finished. Holy crap, that's a lot of food. Somehow our refrigerator still had ingredients in it, and she pushed on through the day today, finishing up just before dinner time. I won't list what she cooked, but if we chose to we could go about 3 weeks without cooking a single dinner. Gonna come in really handy when there's an infant to chase around the house. Here's what the freezer looked like before it got really full . .


And here's the after. Those stacks of aluminum pans go 2 deep, the big bags on the door are homemade meatballs, and there are 2 giant containers of Beef and Chorizo Chili hiding down near the bottom. Yum!


As if that wasn't enough accomplishment for the weekend, we decided to get some of our white touch-up paint and go over "some of the bad spots". Not my words. That of course turned into me painting all of the white walls from the top of the stairs, down to the foyer, through the living room, and all the way into the play room. Again, I love paint, just not painting.

The fourth and final project was by far the most frustrating, at least partly because of its proximity to Lily's mouth. I love that kid, but Holy Hannah does she have a set of pipes on her! We decided, almost on a whim, to paint the laundry room. It was the only room on the bottom floor of our house that was completely white, and the dirty walls just made the house feel, well, dirty. We'd talked a couple of times about doing something like a tangerine color in there, with the idea being that laundry's such a mundane task, why not at least make the room exciting. I bit the hook on that, and went to Sherwin Williams to pick up a gallon of "Sunburst". Well . . it looked orange on the card.

As small as our laundry room is (probably 8'x6'), it took almost as long to paint as did Lily's much larger bedroom. There's the chore of removing all of the accessories from the wall, like ironing board hangers and broom caddies and the like. The over-washer shelf came out with relative ease, but the whole process became quite tedious. By the time I'd washed the half inch of built-up lint from the baseboards and was ready to tape, it'd been almost an hour since I started. Couple that with the perpetual dance with the washer and dryer to get them away from the wall (I chose not to move them out of the room), and I was over this project before I really even got started. Mercifully I got it taped off and got the first coat of paint on before lunch time, and I felt OK taking a quick break for some leftover pizza. The second coat went on much faster than the first, and I was beginning to get the hang of standing on top of the washer to reach the ceiling by the time I finished. With a whim of creativity we decided to add an accent color to the strange little triangular-shaped intrusion into the wall from the staircase that goes above it. By the time I'd finished it and removed the tape I was completely sick of painting, and decided to leave the crisp white stripe left by the tape as my own artistic touch. Watch out Michelangelo . .




Now to prove to you that I'm not just over-reacting about a little work, I have indisputable visual evidence to support my theory that we have in fact gone well beyond the point of nesting. We are at 33 weeks pregnant as of today, with a solid 6 weeks worth of non-cluttered-by-baby-toys left to go in our current phase of life. Well so much for that idea. Project number five for the weekend was to get all of the baby related materials down from the attic, clean them thoroughly, install new batteries in all of them, and place them in their predetermined locations. Hell, it looks so much like we've got a baby in the house already that I thought Mandi was going to make me wear the baby carrier around while I painted! Here's your proof . .




Seeing that swing in the living room brings back a lot of memories. It's so funny . . when I vacuumed the living room tonight and came to the spot where the swing is sitting, I vividly remembered doing the same thing 3 years ago, leaning over the exact same way I did tonight to grab the swing, hold it out of the way, and just vacuum what I could get to. There is no moving furniture out of the way when there's a baby in the house. You're doing good just to get the vacuum out every third day as it is. Good times those were, and good times they will be.

One funny story from the weekend to leave you with. After Mandi and Sara finished hanging Mason's name on the wall, Lily came up to tell them that dinner was ready. She walked into her new jungle room with them and admired their work. She said, "Hey, that spells Mason!" She paused, then said "M, A, S, Zero, N!" She's such a smart booger, but you can't help but laugh when she has a "whoops" moment like that one. Another true classic.