This weekend we painted our living room. It is the first time since we bought this house three and a half years ago that we updated a room on the main floor. The old, slightly washed out greenish colour is gone and the room is now a cream colour on the bottom half with a deep, almost plum stained red on top. It’s beautiful, its striking and sophisticated and very grown up. I absolutely love it.
It took us two days of moving furniture and cleaning to get the room emptied out, repainted, and put back together, but it was worth it. We even replaced the old sofa that we bought at a yard sale for $20 about a year ago with a brand new couch.
As we unpacked the new furniture in our newly decorated room, the hubs and I mused that in the almost 17 years that we’ve been married, this was the first time we had bought a couch brand new, not used, not second-hand, not something someone had given us because *they* were getting a new couch. We’ve finally reached a place where we can buy something brand new just for us and feel confident that it will be kept in pretty good shape for a long time.
You see, when we first married, we were really young. 19 and 20. For reals. We had no money and I was already pregnant with our second kid. We got everything we owned back then from thrift shops and from friends and relatives. Our first couch in our first rented house was left there by the previous tenants. We adopted it.
But with small kids, you can’t really own nice things. Small kids tend to destroy things. No, not always on purpose, but because they are small and they just don’t think like normal people. It’s perfectly reasonable for a toddler to try to feed his puppets real food, and then leave it there, jammed in a felt covered mouth until the room starts to smell like dead people. To them, they’re just sharing with their friends. See, it’s not malicious.
Case in point. When my oldest daughter, now 16, was about four or five, we had been given a big roll of paper for the kids to draw on. It was huge. Standing it up on the floor it was about two feet tall and it had lots still left on the roll. I used to cut off sheets the same length of the kids and trace them lying down on it to make life sized pictures of them. They loved it.
Anyway, we had recently purchased a bunk bed. I think it was one of the newer things we had bought, an investment, since I was about eight months or so pregnant with my fourth child. We had two girls then, and we bought the bunk bed for them to share so the room wouldn’t have all the good space taken up by two beds.
One day, I was probably down in the kitchen making dinner or something, or I could have been napping on the couch, I don’t remember exactly what I was doing because what happened next took all the focus of the day. The point is, I was doing something on the main floor when I had to go to the bathroom. We only had one bathroom in the house at the time and it was at the top of the stairs right beside the girls’ room. I went, but it was eerily quiet in there and all I could smell was mint.
I thought that was weird, but only kind of, since when I was pregnant my sense of smell went bananas and I could literally sniff strange things from a distance, or pretty much tell what you had for breakfast…yesterday, if you leaned in too close to talk.
So, more out of the impending doom of quiet toddlers and small kids than the scent of mint wafting around the upstairs, I went into the girls room.
Holy muthafuckin bat balls.
Let me paint the scene for you.
My darling daughter had pulled off a sheet of paper from the roll the same length of the bed. She had brilliantly snuck into the bathroom, presumably to look for tape or glue or something else that wouldn’t possibly be actually kept in the bathroom, grabbed a whole, brand new tube of toothpaste and had used it to plaster the wall and stick her paper to it so that it ran the whole of the wall alongside the lower bed.
Then, apparently there was too much toothpaste left, because it was all over the headboard, the wall behind the headboard, herself, her tiny little sister and the carpet.
Yes.
Let me tell you a little something about toothpaste. That shit sticks like a bastard. It left shards of the paper stuck to the wall like a spackled on second skin. As I scrubbed, it took paint off with it. If you use warm water to wash it off, the sharpness of the mint hurls itself up your nose and assaults you until you’re in tears. It’s dreadfully hard to get out of hair and almost impossible to get out of a carpet. I swear to god anyone who came to the house and saw that one spot on the bedroom floor for the next year thought that my husband was being careless, not that we had kids with a toothpaste fetish.
Back then, I remember being frustrated beyond belief and probably in tears once or twice. Looking back on it now, it makes me laugh so hard tears run down my leg.
Thankfully the kids are older, calmer, and wiser. They don’t paint with toiletries anymore, though I *have* found the occasional hard dried booger stuck to the wall of the bathroom, but then, I have a ten-year old boy and that math ain’t hard.
The point is, I guess, that I’m thankful to be at a stage with the kids that we can FINALLY have a house that looks like a nice, inviting home rather than a swap meet with tiny little carnies running around asking for more peanut butter.
It’s refreshing, it’s relaxing, and it’s my home.
I really do enjoy reading your blog, but sometimes….oh those TMI posts, or ones embaressing me….-_-
I loved being little. I love you mum!
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I laughed. I’m sorry. It’s funny. And I think it’s a little comfortiing to me to know that I’m not the only one who has forced her children to scrub their own a) boogers b) poop and c) unidentified bodily objects off of their bedroom or bathroom walls at some point iin their childhood. I also have one who is so damn creative (I’ll post it later today or perhaps tomorrow) that he’s spackled 12-foot high ceilings with heavy whipping cream, painted walls and furniture with a mixture of loose tea leaves, a brand new jar of instant coffee and a kilo of sugar, as well as relieved himself in my oven simply because he could.
We should get medals of honor for not choking our own kids before they reach their teens. We should get hazard pay for even continuing to raise them once they reach their teens. *sigh* But they don’t tell you this shit while you’re on your back GETTING pregnant, do they?
It makes for good writing though, doesn’t it. Congratulations on your new couch and your “big girl paint job.”
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The payback though is posting like this. My daughter is 16 now, doesn’t remember it but laughed so hard after reading it. I spent an hour last night going through old photos trying to find the picture I took of it at the time, but I couldn’t find it. :-). Can’t wait to read your post!!
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