Playset Redo

Really, I am just so proud of this re-do, I want to hug myself.

We really wanted to get a good, solid playset for our kids -- something like a Rainbow or a Backyard Adventures set with big, heavy timbers that wouldn't sag or rot easily. Of course, this type of playset is very expensive for even a base model ($1500 for a BA playset that had only monkeybars and swings; $1250 for a really basic Rainbow). We knew we needed a set with 3 swings and we were hoping to get monkey bars and a clubhouse of some sort. I scoured Craigslist for a month or more, looking for a used playset. We found several that were in good condition, but most were either too big for our yard or too expensive or both. A few were the right price and size, but we didn't act quickly enough and they were snapped up.

Finally, one day I found a Rainbow playset on Craigslist for just $700. I called immediately and left a message. Long story short, the sellers happened to live just 2 blocks from us, the set was exactly what we were looking for, was in excellent condition, and had been installed on a level yard (this is very important if you're buying a used set -- unlevel conditions mean they may have jerryrigged it to sit level and the whole set can end up warped).

Here it is when we first bought it and set it up in our yard:



The set was 6 years old, and Rainbow replaced -- for FREE -- the one board that had rotted out in that time AND the one beam that was damaged when the set was disassembled. Rainbow will do this for the original owners if they present the damaged boards and their original receipt. The sellers were more than happy to do this for us. For the record, you can still take your damaged bits in without a receipt and they'll replace them for a fee as well; still a pretty good deal to know you can always replace anything that rots or breaks with an exact match.

It needed a new stain job, so my husband power washed it (not technically difficult, but somewhat fussy as the playset has a lot of surfaces) and I stained it. I used Behr Premium Semi Transparent deck stain in Redwood Naturaltone, which is an EXACT match to the original finish on the Rainbow boards. I would probably not have chosen this color, but since we had two replacement boards that were already pre-stained, I thought it best to have everything match. When it has to be done again in 4-6 years, I'll choose a different color. I used a large deck staining pad and a little paint pad and an angled brush made for stain products. It took me about 3 hours to do the whole thing and yes, it was a pain in the you-know-what.

Here it is all beautified:



The board holding up the canopy right next to the slide was replaced, but with the new stain job, you can't really tell.

It makes me happy every time I look out my window.

I'm linking to A Soft Place to Land's DIY Day 'cause I did this MYSELF!

Fatal Attraction

Pottery Barn, Oh Pottery Barn!
Wherefore art thou so dang expensive?




My baby went to preschool today and I took advantage of my 2.25 hours of childfree time to wander through Pottery Barn. I asked a quick question about a sofa, which developed into a whole conversation, which ended with an estimate sheet detailing the exactly perfect sofa for our family room to replace the hideous mostrosity currently residing there.


Unfortunately, that estimate was for $1900. But I could have it by October 14th.....for $1900.


Not long ago, I saw some home guru on GMA or the Today Show talking about great style at affordable prices and the top pick for "affordable" was Pottery Barn. You know, with their $2000 sofas. Here's a funny thing -- the armchair that matches the sofa I am in love with costs $1100. In fact, the whole grouping I saw this morning would cost about $6000, not including throws, extra pillows and assorted tchochkes. For one room.



The heck of it is, they really do have great style. Their rooms look pulled together without being matchy-matchy. They look inviting and indeed, they are inviting. Just go to a Pottery Barn store and try to walk through it without touching anything. These places are full of beautiful colors and luscious textures that just beg you to run your hand over them. Sheepskin, chenille, pickstitching, organic cotton, sculpted metal, nubby baskets, seagrass....it's a feast for the senses. If they'd install a coffee bar, I'd probably move in.


So what, if you're trying to have great style but you have more like a Target income, are you supposed to do?



It's very, very depressing.

Not Feeling the Love

September is here, the kiddies have been back at school for 3 weeks, Baby starts preschool on Wednesday and I am feeling frustrated.

It's hard to pin down why I feel like this. It was a huge relief to send the kids back to school. The last 2 weeks before it resumed were easily the worst 2 weeks of the summer. Constant fighting, constant attitude, constant mischief, and no desire to do anything constructive on anyone's part (me included, although I tried out of sheer desperation).

But naturally, the start of school brings with it the start of other activities -- soccer, gymnastics, church activities on wednesday nights--which have to be added to piano and our weekly trips to the allergist. If my hair was on fire all summer, I am spending my days shot out of a cannon now.

My littlest has hit some kind of personality wall -- I don't remember the 3s being so grouchy/stubborn/naughty in my other two. They are excruciating with her. My husband chirped in that perhaps she needed more activity -- I should take her to the park, the play place at the mall, a friend's house, a play class... I had to point out to him that I can only do the laundry when I am, in fact, here. Also, I cannot make dinner by remote control, although I would certainly like to try. While a constant round of activity sounds great, I do have to be in the house some of the time. We do go the the library and I take her on errands -- she recognizes Target, Home Depot, TJ Maxx and Barnes and Noble and loves all of them.

Normally not being able to complete projects makes me nutty, but we've actually gotten quite a lot done over the last month. I have some indoor projects that need doing -- first up is repainting my half-bath -- but while I would like to get those done, I don't feel a huge need to do so. I think one of the things nagging at me is the sheer volume of stuff we have in this house. I am going to hit some kind of breaking point soon where I just start chucking things in the trash or the Goodwill box and get it out of here. The garage is one place I'd like to just pitch stuff out of. After that it's the basement's turn.

Maybe what I need is a good Spring cleaning. Certainly a lot of things would seem less overwhelming if there were just less of them. Like toys. Of which we have 40 million or so.

Too much stuff. Hmmm. Am going to let this idea percolate and see if that's my trouble.

Holy. Cow.

How did it get to be July?

I blinked and school was out, then my hair has been on fire for most of the summer. I have days where I feel wound tighter than a piano string because I just know there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done.

When did summer stop being relaxing?

My major accomplishment is that I finally got my boy's room redone -- paint, window (mis)treatments, artwork, all of it. Done. That feels good. On the other hand, the house looks like a landfill in a number of areas. Everything's a trade off.

I have wanted to blog for quite some time about our vacation, potty training failures, the room re-do, my son's upcoming surgery...but I just run out of time at the end of the day and it's easier to go to bed and save the blogging for another day. Right now I'm looking at Sept. 8th...Sept. 8th looks good for blogging.

I will miss my kids when they go back to school, but I will not miss this crazy, hectic schedule.

Sweet Moment

Taking Baby to Grandma's so I don't have to watch her while my oldest gets her palate expander at the dentist today. Running slightly late, feeling a little frazzled as a result. Then, from the back seat, comes this little voice, singing

Jeeeeesus wuvs me

dis I knooooooow

for da bible tells me soooooooo

Yes, Jesus wuvs meeeee.

Yes, Jesus wuvs meeeeee.

Yes, Jesus wuvs meeeee.

Daaa bible tells me soooo.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Can I get an amen?

Proverbial Rough Spots

These are my prints from L. Herbert Designs. They are on my mantle in some frames I got got at Target on clearance. The mats came with the frames and are a nubby linen. They are just about the only thing that's making me happy in my family room right now.

Can't get properly motivated this week. Trying to potty train the Most Stubborn 2 Year Old on the Planet with little success. Trying to keep the house tidy with no success at all. Fretting pointlessly about decorating and landscaping projects that I can't actually start/complete. Frustrated by a lack of money -- great thwacking piles of it would be nice right about now, but these are curiously absent. Low-frequency panic still vibrating through me occasionally when I remember the complete lack of security my husband has with his job and the very real possibility that I may have to go back to work which I do. not. want. to. do. Baby only napping every other day which means I have looooonnngggg days in which nothing -- nothing -- gets done. Oddly not fulfilled by meal planning, grocery shopping, clothes washing and cleaning. Out of town girlfriend camping on my sofa this weekend does not seem to light the fire under me that it should. Oldest child seems to have lost the ability to fall asleep at night and this has me in a tizzy, particularly since there seems to be no easy cure and she is completely vile when she's underslept.

I feel defeated.

If I were totally honest with myself, I would have to say that being a SAHM is vast periods of boredom punctuated by moments of great love and fulfillment. But it's mostly boring. Yes, I am occasionally satisfied by the completion of some task or project, but since much of what I do is highly repetitive in nature (laundry, dishes, cooking) moments of satisfaction are frequently swallowed up by the sheer relentlessness of housekeeping. So I finished the laundry -- more is coming. Dishes are clean -- time to start dinner. Family room is spic and span --wait 'til you see the basement. It just never quits.

And I am tired.

Because of the job anxiety we have going here, my husband is working 50-60 hour weeks. Which means I am single-parenting for long stretches of time and I can't remember the last time I got to leave the house ALONE to do something other than marathon grocery shopping (which I don't think really counts 'cause it's not very relaxing).

I have this recurring fantasy where I am whisked off to a spa and massaged and facialed and foot rubbed into a light, but refreshing coma. Then I come home to a sparkling clean house which looks nothing like my own and Alice has dinner already on the table.

Frankly, teaching high school was a cakewalk next to this mom gig.

Rising From the Ashes

I have had an intense month since my last post. Here's the short scoop:

1) For whatever reason, the person I thought was going to be my ex-best friend reappeared in my life and acted like she hadn't been totally AWOL for 6 weeks. We've been out for coffee and we're chatting by phone again. It's not what it was -- I can sense a distance that didn't used to be there -- but it's not gone forever as I'd feared.

2) My husband's company announced that they would NOT be laying anyone off for 6 months. This was initially good news, but we've seen some other things that they're doing that make us wonder if they're going to lay off in good earnest when those 6 months are up. This has made us take stock of a lot of things and has led to...

3) Weight loss of appreciable proportions. Am I super model thin? No. But I don't have Christmas Cookie Butt any more and I am feeling better about myself than I have in a while. This is partly from the stomach-churning anxiety over #2 which made it hard for me to eat, and partly because my response to any kind of serious stress is to exercise myself into oblivion. Instead of stomping down to the treadmill like a sulky child, I've embraced it as the exorciser of my stress demons.

4) Budgeting. This has always been a bugaboo for me. Just say the word budget and I get all cranky and indignant. I mean, there is math in this whole budgeting gig. Math. But with the possibility of a job loss ahead of us, we had to take a long hard look at our finances and what we could sustain in the event of...an event. One of the things we have decided is that we need to get off our credit card. Now, we always pay off our balance each month, but it struck us that with the credit card we are always a month behind on our expenses. When we pay it off, we're using our money to pay last month's expenses while we rack up new ones on the card. Thus, if we no longer had income, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pay off the outstanding expenses and still have money for current expenses. So we have begun to transfer our expenses to a cash or check outlay. This means I am shopping for groceries with cash. Actual money. Weird. I'm not sure how long it's been since I used cash for large purchases, but I want to say...high school? Seriously, I think I haven't used cash like this since I wadded up my babysitting money and ran down to The Limited to see about getting some acid wash jeans.

And though I'm really only 2 weeks into this process, I have to say, I really like it. Handling actual bills makes me think more before I spend and it's made me think about conserving my resources differently. My goal is to shop once every two weeks and then only go to the store for milk and bread in the interim. So far it's working; I even came in $6 under budget for the first 2 weeks. Score!

5) My nest: Something has happened to me in the last month with regard to my house. When we first moved here, we hadn't sold our old home, so we had this spectre hanging over us from the get-go that if the old house didn't sell, worst case scenario we'd put both houses on the market and move back to the old house if we had to. Since that was a possibility, I felt like I couldn't paint or even hang too many pictures for fear of damaging its resale value. We did finally sell the old house, but that feeling of not being able to change anything has persisted. Until now. My first real act of possession was painting my oldest daughter's room pink. PINK. Not a neutral; not an anybody-could-live-here color at all, but a little girl color, a color that says in no uncertain terms that a 7 year old girl lives in that room. It empowered me and I am full of ideas and plans for the rest of the house and the landscape. No more over-trimmed Stepford shrubs. I'm going to start ripping things out and planting me some flowers. Already the daffodils I planted last fall are poking their little green tips through the crappy rock.

Mama is Sad

She was my best friend for 6 1/2 years. We went through 2 pregnancies together. We learned to be moms together. We called each other often for no other reason than we were needing to chat -- to be ticked at our kids, to bounce weird kid behavior off another person, to complain about laundry, to share what we'd been thinking about.

Suddenly, around Christmastime, she began pulling away. I didn't see it at the time, maybe because I was so busy with holiday activities. First she pulled out of gymnastics, where our girls were studying together. She said her daughter was overwhelmed with activities and needed a free night. That seemed reasonable; I didn't think too much of it. But in January I began to realize that she wasn't calling. I called her the day of the inauguration and then decided to see how long it would be before she called me. Not trying to be petty, just wondering if my impression of distance was legit or if I was having a PMS-induced delusion.

Three weeks later, she called. That seemed like a long time from someone I had talked to 2-3 times a week for the last 6 years. Then, a week ago, we met up accidentally at Little Ninjas, where our sons are learning to break things. She didn't seem thrilled to see me. In fact, as we were getting ready to leave, she met someone she knew, started a conversation, and drifted out of the building. No introductions, no goodbye, just gone.

So, trying to be nonchalant, trying to shake off this confusing behavior, I called her later in the week. I kept it short, fearful of annoying. We talked about 1/2 an hour and things seemed okay. But still, no return phone calls. Then last night, when my husband took our son to Ninjas, she was there and completely blew him off. Smiled at him like he was an importunate stranger and sat alone, reading a magazine.

For 6.5 years she's been my go-to friend. The only one home, like me. The only one with kids exactly the same ages and genders as mine. The only one I could call just to vent when my momming wasn't working. The one I could be really honest with about my fears and frustrations with my kids. I have other friends, but none who seemed to fit so well as she did. It would not be understating things to say that she's been like a sister to me. And I have a sister I'm close to, so I know what I'm talking about.

I have racked my brain trying to think of how I might have offended or angered her and can't come up with anything. I've been myself, like I have been for the last 6.5 years. I know this shut down/shut out behavior is something of a pattern with her. I've seen her do this twice before, but both times to people she hadn't been friends with for very long. And I certainly never thought I'd be on the receiving end.

And now I'm in this very painful position of watching one of my most important, valuable friendships die for no reason that I can discern. I have walked around weeping for 24 hours, struggling to find some measure of peace, struggling to cope with my grief. I think, ultimately, I'm going to have to talk to her about this, if for no other reason than that I need to know what I've done to alientate her. I can't just stand idly by and watch our relationship sink into oblivion. Worse, I can't let it go as though we were never friends at all. Like it was just some casual thing of no importance. I can't just turn off my friendships like that, chuck my loyalty out the window and snap my fingers at the whole thing.

I'm too fragile to deal with it today, and she's leaving on vacation on friday, but I am going to pray about it and try to meet her for coffee in two weeks. I guess if I can't get her to meet me, I'll have my answer.

BOO!

For about a year now, I've been trying to lose 10 pounds. I am not having marked success. This is where I can tell that I am the F-word. My metabolism, it ain't what it used to be. And, let's be honest: this whole mom-gig is not helping matters either.

Back in the day, when I was slim, I often had a bowl of cereal around 5 pm and called it dinner. And then I didn't eat again until morning. The end.

My husband, he of the big dinner plate, was horrified at this behavior. Where was the meat? Where was the salad? The veggies? The potato permutation? What you are doing, woman, cannot be called dinner....get thee behind me, Satan! Blah, blah, blah....

Sometimes I would eat dessert and call that dinner. You know, 5 cookies and a diet Coke or something along those lines. But that was all I ate. I did not eat a 3 course meal and top it off with 5 cookies. That would have made me fat.

And so it has.

Cooking for other people, especially for kids, always means you end up eating more than you need to. With my current metabolism, I could get by on three Ritz crackers and a hardboiled egg. But I don't.

It is abysmally difficult to cut back when you are used to eating a certain amount. And I am more than a little p.o.'d that my best eating years were sandwiched in between bouts of violent morning sickness. What cruel irony that pregnancy, normally a nirvana of eating for most women, was a minefield of nausea and food aversions for me. All three times. All nine (ten) months. It was so bad with my last pregnancy that I only gained 16 pounds, all of which I lost in the first week post partum.....but somehow, 2.5 years later, my butt is still pregnant. Go figure that.

So, my scale ambushed me this morning. I've been working out harder and more often, I am trying to eat sensibly, and this morning I found I have budged not even one pound since last week.

I seriously wonder what would happen if I just had cereal for dinner. Would the kids mutiny and throw their pork chops in the trash? Would my husband turn me in to the dinner police? Can you even go back to how you ate in your 20s and expect it to work? How come Giada De Laurentiis cooks up a storm but doesn't look like Ina Garten?

Masochism 101

Why do I do these things to myself?

Every month about this time I get all worked up about adoption. I suspect that this is a hormone thing -- the last, frustrated gasp of my aging ovaries as they realize that they have once more been thwarted by Captain Vasectomy. There will be NO BABY this month. Or any month.

Not that even the tiniest corner of my being wants to go through another pregnancy and delivery, which for me means c-section. No thanks. But my baby, my real, live, refusing- to- be- potty-trained baby has all of a sudden grown so tall and gotten so heavy, that her babyness seems in danger of evaporating all together.

Adoption, as a topic, is not new in our house. I actually had a little article tucked away in a drawer from before I was married, when I vowed to adopt if for some reason I never met Mr. Right. Then, when baby number one proved harder to conceive than we'd thought and we were told that I had some "issues" which might prevent me from either conceiving or carrying to term, we never hesitated. In fact, the morning I realized I might actually be pregnant I was on the verge of calling an adoption agency to get the ball rolling. Little did I know that the ball had already dropped (or the rabbit died, or however you want to phrase it). Again, after our second child was born, we considered adopting at that point, but we got a little sloppy with our birth control and that was that.

Or so we thought.

This desire to adopt, for me at least, has never really gone away. It went dormant for a long time as we struggled to adapt to a third child, but in the last 6 months it's come back with a vengeance and I can't seem to shake it. Over the years my vision for adoption has changed. I no longer really want an infant. In fact, I'm no longer sure I even want a child under 2, though I could probably be talked into one.

I am on a couple of waiting child groups and lists and occasionally get emails about children who need homes and each time my heart breaks a little for all the kids (so, so many) who need families. Once in a while a child just tugs at my heartstrings and I find myself really anxious over his or her future. Sometimes it's a little one, but lately it's been older kids -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- whose ability to find families dwindles every day because of their age. And while the little girls always make me smile, I find I worry more about the boys, who are less likely to find homes because they're boys. Sometimes kids get under my skin to the point that I wake up in the night to pray for them because I can find no other way to relieve my anxiety.

What I should do is take myself off these lists. My husband seems no closer to embarking on this process, and with the economy as it is, it's unlikely we'll ever have a spare $20grand lying around. Then, too, there's the issue of how we'd really cope with another child. It took us forever to be able to cope with a 3rd -- heck, she still derails us at least once a week -- could we really manage our life with a 4th? And one who came with whatever baggage derives from orphanage life? One who probably speaks no English? And would disrupt our birth order? I must be crazy even to think about taking this on.

And yet....and yet I am once again smitten with a picture. A little boy in China with a repaired heart defect who is all of 6 years old. Much older than I ever thought possible for us in an adoption scenario. Right now I'm just praying for him, because that's all I can do. But oh how I am asking God for a family for him. He's so cute, so handsome, and he made a face for his photo just like my son makes; that face that says "I may be cute, but I am about to get up to some serious mischief!" He is breaking my heart.

Damn these hormones.

Dreams, Deferred

Today I wanted to write about hot, steamy sex. Unfortunately, I am not having any hot, steamy sex right now, so I find my mind sadly blank.

After nearly 12 years of marriage, middle age has begun to take its toll on our sex life. Prior to this year, we enjoyed active, fully participatory encounters 2 or 3 times a week. But this year...this year we just can't seem to make it all click.

And by "it" I am referring not to the act itself -- that still pretty much works -- but to the milieu of our sex life; the thousands of interactions that occur throughout the day leading up to the Big Nasty (remember that term? Ah, high school). It's all that extraneous stuff that seems to be consistently derailing us.

One of the most pernicious is the sudden realization that we are not hip, young twenty-somethings anymore (or, sadly, even thirty-somethings). We are not as slim, toned and unlined as we were when we got married. One of us has been through 3 pregnancies, which do such a whammy on the bod that's it's often hard to feel desirable. Things just aren't as perky as they used to be. One of us has had to curtail his weight-lifting regimen in favor of gymnastics and Little Ninja classes. We both bring a lot of insecurity about our older selves into the bedroom with us now, and that occasionally makes us circle each other like embarrassed teenagers ("will she notice my zit?" "what if he finds out I stuff my bra?")

I mean, we knew we weren't getting any younger, but somehow that has been made blindingly clear in the last few months.

Then there's the constant round of childcare for our three monkeys that often leaves us too tired for sex, no matter how much we've been thinking about it (like, all day. Or whatever.)

There's also the Mandatory Waiting Period in the evening, so you can be absolutely certain the kids are fully asleep. This is a dangerous time because one or both of you might get too wrapped up in either working out or watching TV and opt not to have sex so you can finish Law and Order or get in that last set of bicep curls.

And then there are the Romance Killers. For me, these take two forms. First and foremost is any sound that indicates a child might be a) awake and/or b) about to burst in on us in such a way that s/he will see things requiring years of therapy to exorcise. We have a lock on our door, but that doesn't entirely relieve me of stress in this area. The second mood-killer is something I like to call Negotiations. This is like the Yalta Conference of Sex, when you have to look each other in the eye and say "are we having sex later? I can do it before 10, but after 10 is a no-go." and your partner says, "Well, Lost is on at 8, so 9 looks pretty good. But if we don't do it tonight I'm not free again until Friday because of basketball." Or my personal favorite: "We can have sex now, but it's kind of late, so no foreplay." (No what? ) Nothing ruins the romance like Negotiations. If I have to hammer it out like this, ain't nobody gettin' laid, least of all me.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when we reached for each other in the dark, heedless of the time because what did we care about the next day? All we had to do was stay awake and maybe explain the dopey grins on our faces. Desire never had to take a back seat to breakfast or bus schedules. The sheer scarcity of our encounters now makes each one that much more critical, which increases the sense of pressure we have to really make it count -- and sometimes you don't want to be the author of fireworks and love poems; you just want a good roll in the hay.

On the other hand, the odd firework wouldn't necessarily be unwelcome.

Anatomy of a Shower

Mother's Duties:

Distribute food to children. Whisper to eldest girl that you are going to take a shower and can she please watch the baby so that she doesn't interrupt said shower. Also, could she please not fight with her brother for the next 20 minutes. Remind her that she can bribe baby with raisins if necessary. Whisper to son that you are going to take a shower. Make him repeat that you are going to take a shower. Sneak upstairs and barricade self in bathroom. Listen through floor vents to see if World War III has errupted yet. Strain to hear something, anything, over the extremely loud TV. Get in shower and lather, rinse, repeat as though pursued by a pack of wolves. Wonder briefly if speed showering should be an Olympic sport.

Eldest Daughter's Duties:

Ignore baby. Begin argument with brother over volume of TV. Scream like you're caught in a bear trap. Suddenly realize that baby is not in family room. Chase baby through main floor, blocking her way upstairs until she is shrieking with frustration. When baby is a panting, sobbing mess, give up pursuit and yell to mom that "This baby is IMPOSSIBLE." Be sure to mention that this is NOT FAIR. Go back to family room and resume argument with brother.

Son's Duties:

Wait five minutes. Notice Mom is missing and wonder where she is. Begin shouting for Mom. In absence of Mom, begin argument over TV clicker. Stand your ground -- you're always getting screwed by either the big one or the baby, so now is a good time to let everyone know you're not going to take it anymore. When the girls finally leave the family room, crank the volume up to 55, then go to the basement and play game cube.


Baby's Duties:

Refuse to be engaged by the excellent PBS Kids programming. As soon as siblings are squabbling, attempt to get upstairs. Run like heck when the big one chases you, screaming to emphasize that you will not be oppressed any longer. When the big one gives up, drag yourself upstairs, punctuating your progress with sobs. Throw self repeatedly at mom's door, wailing and crying. If neccessary, poop your pants.

History

So very cool to watch the inauguration this morning and be filled yet again with a sense of hope. Besides the speech, which was excellent, this little musical moment was inspiring -- a real portrait of what our country can be like at its very best. We have all the talent and resources; now if we could just catch the vision we need to truly move forward.