The Half Bath

Darn it all, the before picture was taken by a professional with a magic camera lens so no picture I take with my semi-functioning camera can compare.  You'll have to take my word for it when I tell you there was nowhere to go but up:  the wallpaper was peeling and coated with a yellowish (gag) film around the toilet and THE BATHROOM WAS CARPETED.




After:

Maybe the blue cabinets are a bit much, but redoing the bathroom was like childbirth: after all that hard labor, I'm gonna love it with all my heart no matter how the red little wrinkly cone-headed alien it looks.

quid pro quo

In exchange for letting me post his goofy birthday picture, I now must post a picture of myself of Damon's choosing.  I am sorry, my five faithful followers.  Look away, baby, look away.

The Cloth Diaper

My mom gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday.  Then I got a $105 speeding ticket.  In order to punish myself, I spent part of the gift card on a $12 cloth diaper, thinking, "If I use it 400 times, I'll have paid for the ticket."  This seemed totally plausible at the time.

The diaper arrived, and that first week, I used it almost every day ('cause I did a load of wash every day, see).  It was awesome because Julia was only urinating it.  Easy peazy.  Then she did a number two in it, but the stool was hard and rolled right into the toilet.  No problem.  Then the next week her stool was soft.  Super soft.  Smashed into the fuzzy diaper fabric soft.

So I spent 15 minutes bent over the toilet bowl trying to get the poo out.  The smell was horrific.  I threw it in the wash with lots of bleach.  It came out smelling the same way it did going in (a little less bad, I guess) with an after-sniff of Clorox.  No bueno.  Washed it again.  Still stinky but after all that work, it was going back on the baby by golly, who had decided this was her favorite thing to poop in.  Spent another 15 minutes over the toilet bowl.  Did some internet research.  Soaked it with baking soda in hot hot hot water, hand washed it with dish soap, and threw it in the washing machine with detergent and vinegar.  Finally came out smelling clean.

If you're my age and you know your mom used cloth diapers, call her up and tell her how much you love and admire her.  Think thoughts of gratitude for your grandmothers and great grandmothers.  I promise, these new expensive cloth diapers are a huge step up from what they used, and they're still a nightmare.  I'm astonished my mother had more children after me (I'm the oldest).  Once again I am reminded that my mom is extraordinary and tough like the pioneer women, while I am not so much.

This also leads to musings on what kinds of people today use cloth diapers in wealthy countries like ours.  (To women in 3rd world countries who have no alternative, we need to send love and prayers.  And maybe disposable diapers.)  I'm going to assume that cloth diapers really are more environmentally friendly, even after all the hot water, detergent, and bleach.  To believe otherwise would be to believe in a bitterly cruel joke on the environmentalist parents.  My conclusions on cloth diaperers:

1. They love Mother Earth more than their own lives or
2.  they care about the earth and can afford to pay someone else to do their laundry or
3.  they love doing laundry, especially if it involves feces or
4.  they feel a need to punish themselves for something they've done wrong.

Now go call your mom and pay homage.

Damon and his room

This young man was ordained to the Aaronic priesthood today:

He's a good kid with "a strong moral compass," as Lynsey likes to say.  Once, when he was 4 or 5, she tried to get him to eat some m&ms behind my back.  He refused.  Nothing she said could get him to take one.  "Have you asked my mom?" he kept asking her.  His biggest flaw is refusing to smile nicely at the camera.  This is the best picture I could get of him.  It's 5 million times better than the picture I have to post of myself as payback for putting the above picture on my blog.  Stay tuned for horrors you've never even dreamed of.

I've mostly finished his bedroom.  I am sorry for the black shadow in every top-right corner.  This is what happens when you let a baby play with your camera.

Here are the befores:

Removed popcorn ceiling and replaced with knock-down texture; replaced nasty rotting mini-blinds with cordless Roman shades.  1 room down.  11ish to go.  At present rate, should be done by 2021.

The $4 Jar Light

I didn't like the light over the kitchen table.  If you have time to kill, you can see it here when the video gets to "Open Kitchen with blah blah blah".  I forgot to take my own before picture but it was

Frosted glass
trimmed with brass
and now I'd better stop rhyming.

So I spray painted it with oil-rubbed bronze paint (which is what I did to every brass thing in our MI house, and which is why it sold in a week.  That, or we listed it for $10,000 less than what we should have.).  This time the spray paint failed me.  The light wasn't any prettier, and now it was also much less functional because I painted the glass along with the brass.  Alas, I forgot to take a picture again, but it was

Dark
like the far side of the moon,
The kitchen transformed
into interrogation room.

Then I found a $4 jar at Walt-Mart, and one of Julia's naps later our light looked like this:

The kids think it's stupid, but I'm proud of it.  It's functional, anyway.  And best of all, it still inspires bad poetry:

Home made Jar Light,
Twinkling like Star Light,
The children think you mar light
and call your design lunacy.
Their opinions don't matter:
The kitchen is not a democracy.

The Work Party

Professional photographers at work parties are the best.  They help you pretend you went to Prom with your spouse.  They also help you remember forever, if you're me, that you never wear the right thing work parties.  Every year when Jake tells me to save the date, I think, "I'm going to get something to wear for that."  Then, the party sneaks up on me, and once again, I'm left scrounging around in the closet for something that isn't there.  One of my [not so] secret [anymore] fantasies is that some day I'll be a millionaire with a person who does my shopping for me.  Someone with impeccable taste, so I never end up at another work party looking like a middle school teacher who thought she was going to Back to School Night, but somehow ended up at the fanciest hotel ballroom in town.  Where everyone else had the right thing to wear.  Oh well.  Jake acted like he wasn't embarrassed to be seen with me, anyway.