Nesting

I've been nesting like crazy lately. Or thinking about it, anyway. (And no, I am not pregnant. I promise.) It seems like everyone who comes over wants to decorate my house -- which is at once a kind and complimentary impulse, but also sort of presumptuous and annoying. It's MY house. I want to do it. And I'm slow, I know; I'm sure that annoys all these compulsive decorators. We will have been in this house for two years by August (or was it July when we moved in?) -- though of course I was hugely pregnant when we first got here, and then I had a squalling newborn (plus the other three, who are still pretty good at squalling, themselves). Add in church responsibilities that further strip away any energy, creative or otherwise, I may have and not much is left to contemplate the overwhelming task of personalizing my home. Plus I'm a perfectionist. I agonize over even the decisions I'm 99% sure about because I want everything to be just right, and actually making and executing the decision eliminates all other options which might have been better (if I'd just thought about it a teeeeeensy bit more).

I am beginning to make progress, though! I finally replaced the ancient room darkening roller shades in the parlor and living room with light filtering honeycomb shades. I should have taken a before shot, but I didn't and all I can find in my archives is this evening shot from Christmas:


Before: Crappy vinyl roller shades (which kept falling on my head any time I tried to raise or lower them, so we mostly just kept them down all the time) used to cover these windows. You can see the one shade pulled down to the right of the tree. Please also note the ill-fitting curtains, which came with the house, because I will talk about those in a minute.


After: It's not exactly a fair comparison, because I took this shot during the day with gorgeous natural light shining through while the other was taken at night with just the ceiling fixture to illuminate the room (well, and the tree). But still, this is better, right? My two months' contemplation of these specific blinds (and who knows how long before I arrived at the idea of these) plus measuring and remeasuring seven times before ordering -- I think I did well.

(Plug: I first tried to purchase honeycomb shades from a local home interiors store; based on the size of the windows -- and yes, they are huge -- they quoted me an OBSCENE price. Obscene, I tell you!! I ended up buying mine from ShadesShuttersBlinds.com for 80% less. We did have to install them ourselves, but with the help of DH's uncle that was no problem at all.)

My next task in the parlor is to find drapes. DH likes the burgundy and gold color scheme of the old curtains (which our once-a-week housekeeper decided to hang up in my bedroom after I took them down from the parlor -- see what I mean?) but I feel kind of meh about burgundy. I thought a lovely dark peacock teal would be nice -- it would complement the gold of the antique chair and draw out the colors of the icy greenish / bluish carpet and the green sofa. Plus, though you can't see it from the photos, the wall color isn't flat -- it has flecks of bluish grey scattered around. Peacocky curtains might highlight that and bring more depth and texture to the room (do I sound as if I watch too much HGTV? I do). The drapes I linked to above are a good color, but don't want anything that plain -- maybe with gold embroidery or something. I haven't found the right thing yet. And like I said, DH isn't totally on board with dark teal, so I suppose we're still open to suggestions. (I don't mind help in the form of suggestions, as long as you don't go ahead and decorate it for me!)

Next up is the kitchen. It should have been the first thing I took care of, since the lack of privacy there is our most glaring problem. We have this beautiful big window (or series of windows) that looks onto the back yard where we love to watch birds and where I can see the girls as they play on the grass or in the driveway:



Of course, the thing I love about the window -- the big view -- is also the problem. At night, the entire neighborhood views us:



(The mom of one of Uno's friends, the first time she came over, said it wouldn't bother her so much that people can see us eating dinner; she'd worry more about walking past the window late at night and seeing a masked face peering in right there at the glass. *Shudder!* Obviously she watches too many spooky movies.)

The window has a row of shutters on the top, which DH loves and I hate. He insists that we have to keep them. I might like them better if we could find matching shutters to put on all the windows, but they're stained a very specific color (the same color as all the kitchen trim and cabinetry) and I don't know if I could match it.

DH thinks we ought to just slap a café curtain over the bottom two rows of windows and call it a day, but I hate that idea: The view is already chopped up by the individual window frames; the shutters make it worse; I don't want to further accentuate the broken-up-ness with curtains half (okay, a third of the) way down.

So I guess the conclusion I've come to (and have retreated from and come back to several times over) is that I just need full-length curtains that I can easily slide all the way over during the day and all the way closed at night. Stupid or fabulous? I don't know. I might order these JCP Chris Madden Grommet-Top panels because they're washable and cheap. I guess I'd get them in white, which seems like a very bad idea in a kitchen and with kids but I don't know what other color would look right. Maybe I should look for a print instead? :-P

Blah.

Totally open to suggestions on that one, folks.

I'm also obsessively thinking about the girls' rooms, but I'll save that for another day. I do have one question that applies to their rooms and a few others in the house, though: Most of the rooms are painted (kind of sloppily) with wallpaper underneath (also sloppy -- it bunches and bubbles in spots). If I were going to repaint those rooms, I ought to strip everything down to the plaster first, right? But how do you peel wallpaper off from beneath a layer of paint? And, given the age of the house (109 this year, I think), how do I protect myself / my family from all the lead paint / dust I'm sure that project would kick up? To avoid lead poisoning, should I just ignore the wallpaper and keep on painting over all the old layers?

So much to think about. I'll stop boring you with my nesting for today (but please leave me a comment if you have any help or suggestions to my design dilemmas!).


~RCH~

Send in the clowns

Uno wants to go to circus camp.

Several months ago the girls all watched Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, a not-so-bad-as-kid-flicks-go sort of movie whose protagonist has to endure a few months of First World Problems (she doesn't get to go to California with her parents, and her two BFFs leave her for Borneo and circus camp, respectively). (Seriously, Borneo? Circus camp? Who are these people?) I didn't think the movie had left any lasting marks on their psyches, until yesterday when Uno sat down and started googling.

I always thought sleep-away summer camps were a myth, or only for the likes of Hayley Mills (and Hayley Mills!). Unless you count church camp (which I don't; stupid church camp) (it's just VBS with extra mosquitoes and leeches!), I didn't know anyone growing up who had been to one. But now I think maybe it's a regional thing; plenty of my on-line friends from the East coast went to actual camps with fake Indian names (though oddly, none of them met any long-lost siblings). And they're not all rich, either (that I know of), so it doesn't appear just to be a chi-chi people thing. Go figure.

So yeah, circus camp: Uno's googling didn't turn up any near us, but there is one very near my sister in the ATL. "Don't get your hopes up," I told her. "I'm not sending you this year." But I think I'll tuck that information away in my brain, and the next time I'm tempted to sell her to the gypsies maybe I'll consider the circus instead. ;-)


~RCH~

Party on, man

The morning news meteorologist let me know that Spring officially begins tomorrow (tonight) at 12:14 am, making this the final day of winter. He also said our high for today will be around 81F. What a crazy year for weather.

Saturday was St. Patrick's Day -- a fact I nearly forgot because we had so much else going on (more on that in a minute). But I did manage to get everyone dressed in a little bit of green, even if only a tiny hair bow. Tres (who apparently didn't remember the holiday from years past) was concerned / confused about why "Sir Patrick" wanted to pinch people who don't like green; eventually she came to the conclusion that evil leprechauns make him do it, so oh well. We'll all just wear the green and try not to worry about it too much. There must be a lot of things in life that seem, to a 4yo, equal parts arbitrary and vaguely menacing -- but you just have to soldier on through them (or "shoulder on through," if you're Tres) with Mom and Dad by your side.

Speaking of soldiering, I had one of my occasional bouts of premeditated lunacy on Saturday: I hosted a kids' party. For no good reason. No birthday, no milestone, no nothing. I've done this before.

*SIGH!*

Here's the problem: Uno and Dos both have lots of friends at school whom they would like to invite over to play. In theory, that sounds fine to me; what's one more kid running around? But in practice, since none of their friends live within walking distance of our house, that involves logistical planning with other kids' moms -- a task which makes my heart shrivel into a tight little fist of anxiety. I don't know why, but it does; let's just agree that I'm broken and move on. So a few times every week, Uno and/or Dos will beg to have this friend over or that friend come play. Uno will often offer to make the arrangements herself (though I know I'll still have to confirm it with the other mom, so I might as well do it all myself). I always put them off. "Not today, but maybe soon. I don't know. We'll think about it." The girls are not fooled; they know I have no intention of following up on anything. I feel increasingly harried and guilty; they feel increasingly frustrated and resentful; finally the dam bursts and I say something stupid like, "Fine, we'll throw a party! You can each invite X number of people."

Let's see, which might be more stressful and out of my comfort zone, a one-on-one playdate or a party of 10 excitable, squeally kids...? ::FOREHEAD SMACK:: (But at least with a party, you can send paper invitations with the only RSVP option an email address!)

So we had a party. Three of Uno's friends and one of Dos's (the other two couldn't make it) came over Saturday evening and we all made Shrinky-Dinks (technically Grafix Shrink Film; I have come to like that brand better) and ate pizza and "watched a movie" (which is code for "went upstairs to the girls' rooms instead to play loud / wild / messy games of Hide & Seek"). I think everyone had fun. I hope so, because I'm not hosting another party again for a long time.

Ugh. I don't know why I do these things to myself, but I have definitely recognized a pattern in my life of making grand gestures to overcome trivial anxieties:

As a teenager, I simultaneously craved and feared the looming independence of college. I wanted to get away from the town I'd lived in nearly all my life, so what did I do? Apply to a school a few hours away, or maybe in a neighboring state? Nope. I applied to just one place: A liberal arts college for women 2,000 miles away in a state I'd never visited and where I knew not a single soul. And then I got accepted, so I went. It scared the crap out of me -- I don't know if I could possibly get more out of my comfort zone than that! -- but I soldiered on through (and had an amazing experience).

After college, I moved back home to live with family (first my parents, and then my sister and her family) while I figured out the next steps of my life. Ultimately, I decided I needed to strike out on my own. I had a great job at the time; I could have simply found my own apartment in the same or a nearby town and continued living the good life -- but no. I quit my job, loaded up all my worldly belongings and moved to a large Midwestern city to live with my BFF (so at least I knew someone that time!) (and that turned out wonderfully, too).

I am a timid little mouse whose life is punctuated by erratic bursts of derring-do. (Perhaps it doesn't take a lot of daring for most people to host a children's party, but for me it counts!) I wish I could be more consistently ... uh, normal, LOL -- for my kids' sake, at least -- rather than someone who slides from one extreme to the other, but I yam what I yam. I always have been.

Oh well. My girls will need something to talk to their therapists about when they get older. ;-)


~RCH~

Hey, remember me?

To celebrate Daylight Savings Time (and because I stayed home sick from church today, woo-hoo-hoo-wah-ah-ah), I thought I might try to catch up on my blog. (And speaking of church, I think if I ever get fired as Primary President I'll have waaaay more mental energy for writing. So if you've missed me, you could think up some spectacular scandal and pass it on to my ecclesiastical leaders...!) (Not that I don't love it; I do. The kids are fantastic and it provides me with a creative outlet. But it doesn't leave me with much left for anything else.) Anyway, here I am again.

Tornado

As I'm sure you all know, an EF-4 tornado hit our town ~a week and a half ago. I had seen weather reports the evening before indicating that we might have severe weather during the night, so I made sure the NOAA weather radio was plugged in and had fresh backup batteries. My cell phone usually powers down at night, but I made sure to keep it turned on and plugged into its charger. I woke up at 3am to use the bathroom and turned on the tv to check the local station when I got back. The storms hadn't gotten to us yet, but they looked bad so I stayed awake. At 4am, DH (who was working overnight) called me to make sure I was up and aware and had what I needed. Thirty minutes later, our Tornado Watch turned into a screeching Warning (thanks, NOAA!) so I roused the four sleeping girls, made sure everyone had shoes on, and we went down to the basement to wait it out. Uno had her tornado kit handy -- a duffle bag full of DVDs and a portable player -- so the girls were more excited than scared this time.

Frankly, I was annoyed. 4:30am on a school day is not the ideal time to have a tornado drill -- and that's what most of them are: Drills. Nothing ever happens. (Well, I guess there was that whole tree falling on our porch incident last year, but the local meteorologists said afterward that storm only had strong straight winds, nothing tornadic.) I expected that we'd get some pounding rain or hail, a lot of dramatic bluster, and then the whole thing would be over and I'd be unable to get the girls back to sleep before they had to get up at 7am to get ready for school.

We sat through a few rounds of the sirens, waiting for our Tornado Warning to expire. The power flickered once, but remained on. The girls alternately argued over which movie to watch and pretended to be camping.

DH called me at about five minutes to 5am, right after the sirens quit. "RCH, are you guys okay? The entire back of the hospital is GONE. There used to be a wall there and now there isn't -- the roof, the wall, they're gone. I'm all right. I've got to go."

We were fine at home. At our end of town, less than two miles away from DH, you could hardly tell it had stormed. The ground was wet, but not a bush or branch or leaf looked out of place. We had no damage at all.

I sent the girls back to bed and settled in to watch the news coverage. None of the news people had made it to the scene yet, but reports were coming in of incredible damage from the commercial district around Walmart, through residential neighborhoods behind it, and up to the hospital. DH's uncle posted on Facebook that his good friend (and the realtor who had helped us buy our house) was trapped under the rubble of what used to be her home. The CBS affiliate (which broadcasts from a neighboring state; our most local station is ABC) reported fairly early, before anyone else would confirm the news, that there were fatalities. One, then three....

I hoped at first, when it was still dark, that people were exaggerating. Midwest storms are amazing and powerful and even incidental damage can seem bigger than it may actually have been in hindsight (see: tree limb on porch). DH and his uncle (no offense) like to tell a good story; maybe it wasn't really so bad.

The sun began to come up. The news anchors reported that our town's schools would be closed for the day. An hour or so later, they announced school would be closed for the rest of the week. News trucks arrived on scene and broadcast the destruction: Whole buildings, houses, neighborhoods gone. By the end of the day, the coroner had confirmed six fatalities (a couple days ago the number rose to seven as one more person succumbed to injuries sustained from the tornado). DH, whose 12-hour shift was scheduled to end at 8am, stayed until noon as people were brought in, evaluated, and distributed by ambulance or air to other regional hospitals. (The patients who had been in the hospital at the time had all been moved into interior hallways right before it hit; nobody at the hospital was injured.)

I haven't taken any pictures of the tornado damage. The roads to those areas are blocked off except to the families who lived there, clean up crews, and volunteers; no looky-loos allowed! But a quick Google image search turns up these:


This house belonged to friends of DH (the husband of the woman in the front was his high school golf coach; their son was his classmate). E&P, this is where we went swimming last summer.



This was our realtor's house. It's a miracle she's alive, but she made it out of the rubble with only bruises. Some of her personal belongings were found later in the parking lot of a Catholic school more than 60 miles away.



An aerial view of one neighborhood. Note the trees along the middle right edge of the photo; they are FLATTENED.



If you can't laugh, you'll cry (though I think many people have done both). Painted on the side of a tornado-ravaged house (next to a random prosthetic leg): "For Sale — Fixer Upper." (I couldn't find a big enough picture of it, but after painting that, the woman wrote, "Big Blow-Out Sale!" Har-har.


It has been an emotional week for the town since the tornado (what's the opposite of hyperbole? Hypobole?). We have seen lots of stories of loss and destruction (both here and elsewhere in the Midwest) on the one hand, but also so many incidents of kindness and generosity and human good. People from around the region and around the country have stepped in to help the families affected by the disaster. I think the whole town has felt the power of the collective prayers. It has been amazing and so heartening to see.


And now for some random musings that are not about tornadoes.


I Love This Commercial

How's this for something soothing after all the storm talk? I love all the Sherwin-Williams paint chip commercials; the colors are so bright and the animation so charming. They make me happy. :-)




The Love Song of RCH Prufrock

Browsing my bookshelf a couple months ago, I came across T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems. I haven't looked at or thought about those words in a very long time. I felt almost giddy; it was like running into an old friend (which those of you who love books, and maybe more especially poetry, will understand). I've always loved -- and probably over-identified with -- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but when I read through this stanza I grabbed DH and said, "There, see? This is why I'm not a great communicator. Small talk, big talk, whatever; it's too much. Right here. This is the key to understanding me." (Or really probably any neurotic introvert.)

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
    Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
    That is not it, at all.'

And DH, who may know a lot about birds (and sports and science and medicine and the lyrics to The Facts of Life and other '80s sitcom themes) but lacks confidence in his literary interpretation skills, handed the book back to me and said, "I will never understand women."

Oh well. Serves him right for any of the sports metaphors he's ever used.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Words Cuatro Can Say

The baby is 16 months old and slowly accumulating some words:

Bye-bye
Dad
Mom
[Dos]
[Uno]
Teeth (a forceful and heavily aspirated Teee to indicate she wants to brush her teeth)
Woof
Meow
Uh-oh
Cute
Thank you (pronounced adorably as Gankooo)
More-more-more (so greedy! I need to teach her Please)
Poor-poor (to indicate sadness, since we say "Poor, poor Cuatro!" when she's hurt or otherwise ornery)

There are probably more, but that's all I can think of -- and now it is nearly midnight (though it doesn't feel like it, stupid Daylight Savings Time!). I began blogging this morning; I should probably quit while I'm ahead and hit the Publish button or I'll never do it and my post will linger in draft form for a few months before I decide it's such old news it isn't worth printing.

I will try to be more consistent in my blogging from here on out -- though seriously, it'll be an uphill battle until I'm "fired" from my church responsibilities, so get on those salacious rumors! Stat! ;-)


~RCH~

Hey Nonny

I haven't given up blogging, but obviously I haven't been writing as much in the last year (with the exception of August, LOL). My life feels exhausting, so at the end of most days I'm too worn out to rehash it all! And then, of course, I get stuck after big events: We went to Utah the last weekend in October -- which included Cuatro's first birthday and the awesomeness that is Halloween in a neighborhood full of young families -- so I'm reluctant to blog about anything else before I've told those tales and posted those pictures. And since I haven't yet, nothing else gets written. D'oh.

But sigh not so! I had a pleasant kick in the pants this week from one of the girls at the blog Hey Nonny. She asked if I would submit a guest post for this week's Friday Feature, and I felt too flattered to refuse her. Please head over there to check it out; I hope you'll enjoy what I wrote. :-)


~RCH~

Happy Birthday to Tres

This week we celebrated a milestone: Tres's fourth birthday, and the first magic (aka golden) birthday in our family, defined as the year one's age coincides with the date she was born. Uno will have hers at 13; Dos will have hers at 26; Cuatro has to wait until she turns 29. (DH and I had ours at ages 3 and 7, respectively, but I guess we didn't know how cool it was at the time. I actually spent most of my 7th birthday stuck in the middle of the desert somewhere between Portland and Boise next to our broken down 15-passenger van. As I recall, it was neither magical nor golden. But I digress.)

Because it was her once-in-a-lifetime magic birthday, I wanted to give her something special -- but I didn't know what. Something lovely and meaningful and important, but something a newly minted 4yo would be excited about. Also something not too pricey, LOL. (In a family of this size, we have to consider precedent!) I actually finagled an afternoon by myself and wandered Toys R Us for a couple hours (this after trolling the web every nap time for days in a row), but nothing felt like the right thing. The giant, elaborately decorated solid wood doll house would have been nice, but the $300 price tag was out of my league. Dress-ups might have been cool -- and you'd think I could have found some good ones, given that her birthday falls in the month of Halloween -- but everything they had looked flimsy and cheap (while simultaneously not being as cheap as you'd hope). In the end, I came home slightly unsatisfied with a plastic Dora the Explorer castle plus a few extra figurines to go with it. Not grandiose, not important, not something so special she'll remember it for years to come....

Of course, one of the things I've always loved about Tres, ever since she could talk, is her vocal and exaggerated gratitude. Every present she opened -- the Dora castle, the off-brand princess Barbies from her sisters, clothes from DH's uncles, an art kit from SIL -- she declared the best ever, her most favoritest thing in the whole wide world, a real life dream come true! "Oh, how did you know?" she'd ask while clasping the gift to her chest. "I love it with all my heart! This is the best birthday I ever had!" And because of some family drama that the girls (except for maybe eavesdroppy Uno) know nothing about, we got to have several birthday celebrations over the course of three days (certain people refuse to be in the same place with other certain people, and some otherwise uninvolved people feel compelled to pick sides and meanwhile I'm just trying to be Switzerland and let innocent little Tres share her day with all the people and it's just a big fat mess). The upshot of which is that just about everybody came away thinking that their gift was her favorite because they didn't hear her say it about every other gift. But really it's true; she loves each of them the most, like a mom loves her kids: Not the most in a ranking from one to whatever, but the most in terms of capacity. It would be impossible for her to love them each even a smidgen more than she does because her heart is full to the point of exploding.

Kaboom. :-)

We topped off the days of celebration with a series of photo shoots, which does fit the meaningful bill a little more than a plastic castle. Usually my girls hate when I try to take their pictures, but Tres allowed me to do it (and even asked if she could do it again after our first session!) because it meant she could wear lipstick (aka chapstick or clear gloss). The photo up top and these below are a few of my favorites (the pics of her in the pink fairy dress and the white dress were taken a few days before her birthday; the ones of her in blue were taken the day after).










And one of all my girls, just for fun:




~RCH~

Grrrrrr

We're heading to my hometown next month for a quick visit, and on the agenda is a family portrait. I feel very self-conscious of my post-4-babies body and don't really want to be immortalized with my belly still looking pregnant, a year after the last delivery (which it currently does). I tried googling fashion tips this afternoon, and came across an article that promised Five Outfits to Disguise A Food Baby!

Except that it came illustrated with images like this:



Seriously? Seriously. I don't think that woman even has a stomach, let alone an ounce of fat. Grrrrrr.

And waaaaah.

Anybody have any real advice? I don't know what to call my body type; I don't think I'm pear shaped because it's not my entire bottom half that's big (I don't think), just my stomach. That would make me an apple, I guess, but then most apples are presumed to have a big chest and I, sadly, do not. It really is just this enormous 6mo-pregnant-looking belly I want to hide.

Ugh, it's all so depressing. And depressing that I care. But I do. :-P


~RCH~