A Clean Floor

Something I should admit: my house is filthy. Like, really filthy, can't walk on the floor without stepping on stuff filthy, filthy as in barely sanitary, filthy as in I'm always sort of vaguely fearing the sudden, unexpected visit of a social worker who would step in the doorway, take a look at the filthy living room, and snatch my babies away to foster care filthy. Sure, I want to clean, and sure, I do clean, every single day, but mostly I do other stuff--play with the girls, read books to the girls, do art projects with the girls, grade papers and create lesson plans, sew, read, garden with the girls, eat delicious things, goof around on the internet--you know, stuff.

But part of being committed to an environmental ethic is a commitment to not filth up your living space. How different is filthing up my own house to filthing up highway medians, or the oceans, or the atmosphere? It reflects and teaches my children an irresponsible attitude to one's living environment, and to one's possessions. Although it might not seem so, an environmental ethic should be very concerned with stuff--we should be mindful of our possessions as one of the many aspects of mindful living. We should, obviously, have few things, but those things that we do have should be really important to us. When something is important to us we keep it rather than disposing of it for a new or "better" something, and when something is important to us we take care of it, keeping it nice and in good repair so that we don't have to dispose of it and purchase new stuff.

So this morning I got disgusted with myself and my house and decided to make a change. In the morning, I took "before" photos of one filthy part of my home, and made a vow to straighten it, organize it, and clean it before bedtime. And so I give to you.....my study floor and the things it contains:

• Pizza Express cup
• construction paper
• crayons
• Legos
• miniature bead path
• lid for Tupperware container that's supposed to hold crayons
• two books that show diagrams of the insides of stuff
• paint pens
• collage materials (ie. stuff)
• foam letters and letter cut-outs
• basket that's supposed to hold miniature racecars
• pipe cleaners

• cat
• stickers
• more construction paper
• more crayons
• Sydney's artwork of fingerpainting on construction paper
• wool leftover from Fatty Stegasaurus creation
• fleece blanket leftover from dino quilt creation
• another Tupperware lid, this time for colored pencils
• Ziploc bag of collage materials
• Ziploc bag of stickers
• cloth book of color recognition in French
• Willow's artwork of stickers on construction paper
• book cover separated from book in previous photo
• record bowl
• matching dinosaurs game piece
• more construction paper
• filing box holding computer equipment
• more Legos
• Longman's grammar
• scooter
• dinosaur
• top of a racecar storage box
• stacking tower pieces
• purse for dress-up
• cropped edges trimmed from photos
  
• wrapping paper from purchased hook-and-latch kit
• fleece blanket trimmed from dino quilt
• more construction paper
• miniature race cars
• library books
• My Pretty Pony from my childhood, now Willow's
• romance novels leftover from a freshman comp class project
• bottle of vinegar used for cleaning the glass in soldered pendants

I'm actually surprised to see that hardly any of this filth is actually mine. Hmm. So I worked away at the floor off and on all day, in between reading books and playing with the girls and going to the library for storytime and drawing on construction paper and making it into fans with the girls and telling each other "April Fools" and gardening out in the cold and working out at the YMCA and making dinner and eating dinner, and here's what I finally have:

Glorious. Mind you, the actual floor itself still looks like crap, partly because the previous owners had a really pissy dog or something and also didn't put down tarps when they painted the walls white and partly because the girls and I use the floor as our work surface for all sorts of projects and I'd just rather refinish the thing in ten years than harp at them over spilling paint or glue or being momentarily careless with markers or scissors--I'll get into my manifesto about children's art in today's society some other time.

And here's what happened literally five minutes after I'd finally finished:

Willow's rubber ball bounced under their art cubbies and Matt and the girls began scraping everything out from under the cubbies onto the floor in search of it. Just after this photo was taken, Matt turned to me and said, "You forgot to clean under this," and I replied something that is unprintable and is largely why Willow is able to swear so impressively, although I usually blame that on Matt's dad, a former Navy sailor. But then while I sat across the room and muttered to myself some things about husbands, Matt and the girls picked up all that stuff and put it away, which he certainly wouldn't have bothered to do if the floor had been otherwise covered in stuff, and later when Willow emptied all the crayons out of her big crayon box looking for chalk she put all the crayons back, another thing she definitely wouldn't have done if the floor had been filthy. Thus encouraged, tomorrow I tackle the livingroom table.

Breaking News: Our House is a Disaster

OMG you guys, I have been so discombobulated for this entire year so far!

Right at the beginning of the year, it was finally our turn with the construction crew Matt had first contacted back in... oh, March 2020 or so. Turns out that EVERYONE felt like a global pandemic was a great time to get those nagging home renovation issues taken care of! 

We desperately needed to have our main shower retiled, and it turned out when they finally demolished the shower that we ALSO desperately needed to have several joists, several walls, and the floor in three different rooms replaced because that shower had also apparently been leaking into our subfloor for years.

Here's what your house will look like if your shower's been leaking for eight years!

The joists look like they've been through a fire, and they were about as structurally stable.

The head guy, showing me those joists rotted through with mold, said, "I'm surprised you're not constantly sick!"

Fun fact: I AM kind of constantly sick? Although lately my nagging cough has been a LOT better, ahem...

So now we get to have not only a new shower, but also a new closet floor, new bathroom floor, new family room floor, and new drywall in all those rooms, too. And if we're going to have new drywall, we might as well paint. And if we're painting and getting new flooring... well, we HAVE been wanting a new giant couch for several years now.

It's definitely a yay, because we've been living with the previous homeowner's 1980's-era tile, carpet, vinyl laminate, and dingy white wall paint since we moved in. And that couch used to live in a dorm lounge. So, you know, it's always fun to upgrade to stuff that's more one's taste, I guess.

Except if you know me, then you know that's not actually fun for me. The presence of the construction crew, the mess, the need to pick out and purchase new stuff, the drop cloths and stacks of tiles and non-functioning amenities are really getting to me, and I fervently look forward to one day being once again in my own put-together home without strangers.

Currently, the family room floor is done, with solid bamboo installed on top of our gross old vinyl:

Yes, that's Syd mopping the walls, because a clean room with new flooring made us suddenly notice that there are cobwebs all over the tops of our walls. Does everyone periodically mop their walls, and this is yet another piece of home training that passed me by?

And for some reason I noticed just last night that the workers who installed the floor also nailed our front door shut? You can actually see the board in that above photo! I need to add this to my list of random crap to ask them about.

Also, the bamboo floor is no longer nearly that clean. I don't know if it's always going to show dirt like crazy, or if it's just because I've got construction workers tromping through all day every day, or if it only feels like it shows dirt like crazy because the one good thing about the gross old vinyl floor is that it NEVER showed dirt so maybe I'm just used to being filthy.

These are the two walls we're going to repaint:

Syd suggested burgundy, and I was all, "Yeah, that sounds cool," because I don't know or care about wall color and just didn't want to have to make a decision myself, but Matt does NOT think burgundy is a good idea and so has promised me that he'll take some photos of the room and Photoshop wall colors onto it so we can see what looks good.

It probably won't be burgundy...

Here's the shower tile coming together:

Thank gawd for Matt, who is interested and detail-oriented and design-savvy so all I had to do was follow him around Menard's and be bored while he picked out beautiful tile for us.

Our tile guy, whom I call Tyler in my head and I'm going to be SO embarrassed when I inevitably call him Tyler to his face one day since that's not his name, leaves his empty Skoal cans lying around his work area:

I stole one the other day, intending to clean it and make a cute craft out of it, but when I opened it the lingering--not even lingering. Overpowering? Noxious? Amber waves?--of Wintergreen Skoal fumes about knocked me on my butt. Seriously, just remembering the smell makes me feel like gagging. I held my breath while submerging the empty can halves in bleach water and then left them there for a day, but I swore I could still smell it when I rinsed them off, and anyway, the can is just plastic, not metal like I'd first thought, so I dumped it.

Tyler is, nevertheless, my favorite construction guy, because unlike the other guys, who are gregarious and pleasant and make small talk, Tyler just minds his business, coming and going without fanfare. I unlock the door for him when I get up in the morning, and he lets himself in without a word when he arrives, then leaves without a word eight or so hours later. I have even almost forgiven him for this:

That photo is Tyler, having left for the day without a word, locking me out of the bathroom. Which would be fine, even though I really miss that toilet and sink when they're gone, except that my clothes closet and my homeschool closet are both on the other side of the bathroom. The kids were able to bravely soldier on without the homeschool supplies I wanted for them, ahem, but I needed my CLOTHES! My socks! My underwear! My best hoodie! My comfiest jammy pants! All locked away without warning, along with my heartburn medicine and hair ties and tampons!

And Tyler has done that TWICE so far.

It's for a good cause, though, because check out what he installed underneath our tile:

It's gonna be one of them fancy underfloor radiant heating things so my precious toesies don't get cold without that 1980s bathroom carpet underfoot!

And here's Matt floor-is-lava-ing something I absolutely HAD to have from the homeschool closet:

You guys, I don't even KNOW the timeline for when this crew is going to be finished, and even then Matt and I have to paint and I'm trying to talk him into calling an electrician to put more outlets into the family room because I read an online article that scared the snot out of me on the subject of power strips and extension cords, and the other day I caught him showing the contractor the kids' bathroom and planning for Tyler to retile it, too, and how many rotten joists do you think there are under THAT floor, and if they're retiling it we might as well replace the sink and the toilet and WHEN WILL THIS END?!?!?!?

Just... send soothing thoughts my way, and ocean sounds mixtapes, and frozen pizzas, and links to flexible shared workplaces.

Pajama Pants for Everyone (Except Me!)

Well, to be fair, I guess the cats didn't get new pajama pants, either...

But everyone else did. I'd been saving out this yellow striped vintage sheet, scavenged from the Goodwill Outlet Store, to make pajama pants with for a while, but it was only late last week that I even got the chance to start (something along the lines of teaching/parenting/writing/crafting for pay/watching a lot of Netflix holding me back). First, you know, I had to clean the living room, my only large pattern-cutting space, and then scrub the filthy floor, and then cobble together the pattern out of lots of taped-together pieces of used typing paper, because I used up my last large piece of tracing paper making my wrap skirt pattern and haven't replaced it yet--are you tired yet? This is kind of making me tired, but I actually did enjoy it, you know--I'm a putterer, perhaps.

Anyway, just before I was going to start cutting, I went to check on Matt putting the girls to bed and mentioned that I was going to make myself and the girls some matching pajama pants.

"I want matching pajama pants," Matt said.

There was enough material in the vintage sheet for two children's pants and one adult's pants, not two, but today is Matt's birthday, so matching pajama pants it is:
The girls' patterns were a little too big even at a size small, so I probably should have used my pattern for their pants, but if you're going to have jammies that match with Dadda, I suppose you might as well have them with room to grow, in anticipation of all the Dadda plus kitten plus Lyle Lyle Crocodile book breaks yet to come:Don't worry about me, though--I have a vintage blue flowered sheet back in my fabric stash that I think might be big enough for some momma/daughter mitchy-matchies, too.

Another Clean Table

At last, the work desk is clean:

I found some overdue library books, one of the girls' Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series DVDs, a couple of tax forms, the clear packing tape we'd been looking for, a student's homework paper (oops!)--it was quite the treasure trove. I was even inspired, after looking at this very photo of the unattractive wall with the electrical cords hanging down and the one sad little postcard from our vacation to France when Willow, who is almost four, was 8 months old, to whip out my brand new duct tape in pretty colors and organize all the very, very many cords at my desk: It still looks a little wild, but they're not tangled, they're off the ground, I can see what goes with what, and they're relatively inaccessible to the babies. Up on top of the desk, now, I have a second power strip, and I've plugged all the power vampires--scanner, printer, back-up drive, laptop--into that power strip, even if I've taped their cords to the wall down below. I can easily reach the power strip on the desk top to turn it and the vampires off, and below the desk I've plugged in the stuff that isn't vampiric--desk lamp, pencil sharpener, sewing machine--and the wi-fi thingy, which needs to stay on regardless.

So I'm still going to do my next project, which is my supply lockers in the study--
--but otherwise this plan is a bust. All my previous projects--study floor, livingroom table, etc.--are as filthy again as they were before, and the rest of the house is even filthier because instead of lowering the overall filth factor of the house by a little bit every day, I've been spending most of my very short cleaning time just trying to lower the filth factor of my few project spots a lot. Sigh. So until a new plan emerges, we'll keep to our previous workable strategies of kicking stuff over to the walls when we need floor space and enforcing the rule that when you trip over something, you have to pick it up and put it away (Willow tries to get around this rule by, while getting back up after falling on her face, tears in her eyes and readying the screams, insisting, "I didn't trip over anything!").

Disney Day #3: Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom was originally on my itinerary as a park to possibly skip--I'd heard that it was the smallest, and had the shortest hours, and so my thinking was that if we didn't get to everything that we wanted to see in Hollywood Studios or EPCOT, we could always return to one of those for a second day and simply omit Animal Kingdom.

I'm glad that I didn't omit Animal Kingdom, because this turned out to be Willow's favorite park!

For my part, I don't know how I could ever have contemplated skipping a park that has a Dino Land:

We rode Dinosaur four times--

--the kids rode Primeval Whirl and Triceratops spin a couple of times, and Willow decided that the Boneyard playground was basically the best playground that she's ever been to. It has dino bones!

I really liked the fact that the queues for the major rides were actually walks through themed museums, with fascinating artifacts to stop our racing through miles of empty queue to look at:

All the rides, the safari and the train trip and Kali River Rapids and Expedition Everest (which Sydney managed to ride THREE times, once with the family, once with just me, and once with just Matt)--

--were so fabulous and lots of fun, but Animal Kingdom also had what turned out to be my favorite show, The Festival of the Lion King. 

Why was it my favorite show, you may ask? Well, it has great costumes, with the dancers dressed like animals--

This monkey dancer pissed Sydney off by stopping to pick bugs out of her hair and eat them.

 --and it was truly engaging--

--AND we got our day's short rain shower while we were inside, so that we missed it almost entirely, but my real  reason for having this particular show as my favorite is that my kids? Were all OVER it!

The show was pretty full, but not overcrowded, and as soon as the doors to the auditorium were closed a CM walked over to us and asked if we'd like to sit in the Reserved seating, on a bench right in front on the stage floor. Um...yeah! Then, when our emcees and main characters came out and introduced themselves, one of them came over and asked the girls if they'd like to help her. Um...yeah!

They got pulled out again to help in the finale:

How cool is that?!?

Matt and Willow never had a hard day at Disney. Syd had her hard day at EPCOT the day before. This day, though, was my hard day. I often don't sleep well, and I was up for hours the night before (I finished up Dearly Devoted Dexter, and got well into The Water Wars); I was exhausted, and I had a headache. I really liked the shows because they were air-conditioned and I could sit on a nice bench and watch them--

--and I really liked the rides because they were also cooling (sometimes that cooling was from big splashes of water!) and again, I could sit down.

The walking around and sight-seeing, however--

--was really more of a trudge on my part, and although the rest of the family was quite happy to hang out in rain gear and eat their lunches and wait for the afternoon parade that was a little delayed by the sprinkle--

Do you recognize our rain gear from Niagara?

--I really just had my game face on and that was about it. I have, therefore, never appreciated strangers like these engaging Disney CMs more. One particularly fabulous CM, who, as she was clearing the parade path must have heard me tell the girls three times to stop splashing water on my jeans (puddles, ya know), each time with a little more edge to my voice, came up to them just as they were about to splash me for the fourth, sanity-breaking, time, and said, "My lovely little ladies! That filthy water is not for stomping in and splashing your beautiful mother!" Do YOUR kids obey strangers much more readily than they obey you? Mine do!

Another CM, walking the parade route as well, stopped to entertain the girls by asking them what their favorite animal was. Upon hearing their answer (T-Rex, of course!), she did a T-Rex dance for them!

I, personally, was quite impressed by her short arms and two-fingered hands.

Of course the parade was WELL worth the wait:

Willow bought some great toys for herself in this park, a remote-controlled time machine and an absolutely huge carnotaur, both from the Dinosaur ride gift shop. I did NOT purchase this warm Wookie hat:

Nevertheless, the 5:00 closing time was just what I needed. We headed back to the condo, Matt took the girls swimming while the chicken strips and French fries baked, we all ate a nice dinner together, got the kids ready for bed early, then let them watch a movie on the DVD player in their room while Matt and I went swimming, all by ourselves.

By the time we set our alarm even earlier for our next day at Magic Kingdom--and our homeschool class!--I was feeling MUCH better.

And I slept great, hallelujah.

In Which Pig-Filthy Becomes Less So

In general, I have control over about 35% of my life. A few things I am very on top of, many things I'm handling okay, and most things are just going all to hell--what I'm on top of and what is going all to hell generally shift around a lot.

For instance, currently I am on top of my teaching--I'm past that beginning of the semester slump that had me so worried for a while, I'm feeling that my students enjoy me and are learning, and if I could just keep all their papers graded and get those four kids to keep their laptops closed during class, all would be peachy. I'm also happily on top of my blog writing--I'm a writer and a photographer by vocation, and this is a creative outlet that I'd missed since my undergraduate days. Our family has managed to eat home-cooked food for most of our meals for a couple of weeks, now--that's a big challenge for us, because neither Matt nor I enjoy cooking, nor are either of us particularly good at it. The yard, which often looks as redneck as our roots, is coming together for the fall with some lasagna garden plots set up and some shrubs moved to better locations and a likelier location for yard toys--it would be nice if Matt finally hauled away the trash he cleared out of the garage on LABOR DAY, however.

Things I'm handling--the children are happy and well-parented, though I always want to spend more time with them and focus on them more. Matt and I are paying more attention to each other with our put-the-kids-to-bed-early-and-then-order-out date nights; yeah, out-of-the-house date nights would be nice, but neither of us are wired to like leaving our kiddos. I'm getting some exercise and outdoor time, although more would be much better. My etsy shop is doing okay, although just okay. I've been able to spend some good time making things for my house and my family, which is nice for the nurturing, you know.

Things that are going all to hell--well, the house is pig-filthy, for one thing. Eh, not so much the house--the girls and I do a lot of work at the living room tables, so those are spotless. The playroom is pretty neat, and the bedroom and nursery basically just need to be vacuumed. The kitchen isn't as sticky or gnat-y as it can be. My study, however...well, I've had a busy couple of crafting months, remember? Remember?Oh, dear--have you lost all respect for me now? Mind you, I can see that this is a problem. I mean, this is supposed to be my creative sanctuary, my workspace, my mental clearinghouse, and my mental clearinghouse looks like...THIS? So yeah, I dig to the bottom of my big blue bin of fabric, dumping stuff out on the floor so I can see better, and when I find what I need I don't exactly put every piece of fabric back in the bin. The girls spend the morning coloring on construction paper and don't exactly put every piece of paper away when they're finished. Will didn't put her abacus back on its shelf after doing some math work. The grocery bag is full of paper for the recycling bin. That big grey backpack is my teaching stuff. Some of the other stuff is just...stuff.

That was 9:00 am. Here's 11:00:We did not go to the wonderlab for storytime, we've not gone to play in the leaves or over to the park, we've not made beer bread or peanut butter cookies. Hell, the girls aren't even dressed. But the study's a little cleaner, especially the closet and the bookshelf, which you can't see, and the lockers, and the cubbies on the left, which I want to move out of the room completely.

2:00 pm. As I uncover additional layers of stuff, I'm having to vacuum periodically, now. The fabric from the big blue bin is now stacked neatly in the lockers where it's supposed to go, the stuff from the lockers has been moved to the closet where it's supposed to go, I've reclaimed an entire level of the bookshelf from toys to books, and gotten rid of a LOT of recycled fabric that instead needed to be dishrags or just somebody else's fabric, frankly. What I have not done is read a single book to a single kid today, encourage anyone to eat a vegetable, wash anyone's hair, or, my personal favorite activity, MAKE anything today.

4:00 pm. Still cleaning, still drudging, now sort of ignoring some neighbors with whom I'm "friendly" but not friendly (you know? They're neighbors--you have to "like" them, but do you have to like them?), I watch my kiddo raking leaves and acting generally just adorable and seasonal and picturesque through my study window. I don't go out and spend half an hour snapping photos for posterity. Who am I kidding? Of COURSE I go out and snap a million photos! She's raking leaves!!!By 5:00 pm, it's game over for the day. I've got to jump in the shower, get dressed, get my teaching stuff together, and be in my classroom logged on and ready to lecture at 5:45. I don't have much left to clean in the study tomorrow, but I REALLY want to make tied tutus instead of cleaning, so if Matt wants to get an extra lot of date-night loving tonight (Romantic loving, gutter minds!), maybe he cleaned off my desk for me and swept and mopped the floor while I'm here at school? Maybe?

For This, Let Us be Truly Thankful

For the first time in our entire family's existence, we are:

1. Celebrating Thanksgiving.
2. Celebrating together, just us four.
3. Eating at home.

And thus Thanksgiving this year, like everything else in our lives of late, was a true adventure.

It wasn't as elaborate or as long-term as I'd originally planned, in light of our impromptu cross-country road trip, but the girls and I did make the much-desired thankful tree:

 A much-desired and enthusiastically-produced thankful tree, I should say:

Those no-spill paint cups that the girls are using? I've wanted them since the girls were born, I bought them while we were away on our trip, I LOVE them, and I'm going to tell you about them tomorrow.

Some years we eat Thanksgiving dinner with family, some years we go out to eat, one year we ate one of those Stouffer's family-sized lasagnas and then went to a sci-fi convention, but this year we cooked our own Thanksgiving feast. The menu consisted of:

Made-from-Scratch Yeast Rolls

 Honey Butter

Matt's Amazing Entire Turkey

 Including One Turkey Leg for Each Child

 Miso-Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Potatoes

 And, of Course, Two Kinds of Pie

Pie #1, obviously, was pumpkin, baked with my own fresh pumpkin puree. Pie #2 was, briefly, a pumpkin-brownie pie, until Matt opened the refrigerator door with too much emphasis and Pie #2 took a suicidal nose-dive onto the filthy kitchen floor. The little sous chefs and I were very sad, until Matt surprised us with a very non-traditional pumpkin-chocolate pie combination that was so insanely delicious that I'm going to ask him to make it again for me tomorrow so that we can write down the recipe and eat pumpkin-chocolate pie FOREVER!

I Did Mention the Entire Turkey, Yes?

Matt made the entire turkey, since I do not cook meat. I am dang grateful, however, that Matty and the kids have several weeks' worth of lunch meat in the freezer, and I do believe that tomorrow my suggestion that the carcass (ugh!) be boiled into turkey stock will be followed up upon by those who are willing to perform such kitchenly duties.

It was a happy, happy day. Some memories, such as the translation of Willow's thanksgiving leaf (which reads, by the way, "I am thankful that Gracie is purrsy"--ah, invented spelling!), may eventually fade--

-

--but other memories, happily, will be written into Life's Little Recipe Book to keep forever:

 So it's turkey carcass and pumpkin-chocolate pie tomorrow, but tonight, I think we may order pizza.