October 29, 2004

I was mentioning to a good friend of mine yesterday that I was ready to embark on painting my upstairs hallway. She stopped me midsentence.

"Kris, do you REMEMBER what happened the last time that you painted in your house?"

I finally picked a tagline for my blog.

I was mentioning to a good friend of mine yesterday that I was ready to embark on painting my upstairs hallway. She stopped me midsentence.

"Kris, do you REMEMBER what happened the last time that you painted in your house?"

Alright, I admit it...I probably wouldn't even qualify for 'Trading Spaces'. My painting ability level falls somewhere along the spectrum of preschool to kindergarten. Even worse, my memory for these fiascos is short-lived. Like the experience of giving birth, I quickly tuck away what I don't want to remember and replace those memories with the happy ones. This is why I can be heard telling pregnant women who are worrying about giving birth that it is the most beautiful thing that they will ever experience. I conveniently forgot the two days of labor, pitocin and eventual c-section after my first and was pregnant again 7 months later. During the birth of my daughter, my husband swears that I cried that I was never going through this again....a distant memory until of course, I was giving birth to my third child. Honestly, the pain of childbirth didn't even occur to me until the end of my fourth pregnancy when I was talking with a friend who had just given birth.

Either I have early onset Alzheimers or I'm just good at compartmentalizing these memories...but I digress.

The last time I decided to paint was in the middle of this summer. I took on the task of my entryway,living room and kitchen because all of these rooms connect. There was really no way that I could just paint one room. I conveniently had forgotten how long it took me to paint my family room and assumed I could get the job done in a weekend. I of course, failed to take into consideration that with 4 children, a dog and three cats I may need more time. It took me 2 weeks to even get the right shade of yellow. I went through 3 different shades and over $150 before settling on a final color. While the baby was napping I managed to get one whole wall done. When he woke up, I walked away from the ladder, paint and rollers and returned to the world of mothering. My oldest child had a friend come over a little later, and I completely forgot about the painting of the walls.....until I walked through the living room and knocked over the ladder, spilling dark yellow high gloss latex paint all over the white carpeting.

I put the kids to work running to the bathroom to grab buckets of water to soak the carpet with. In the meantime, I had run to the garage and grabbed our shopvac. I began furiously vacuuming up the paint and water praying that I would be able to get it all out of the carpet.

I looked up when Alex (age 5) began to cry and my oldest child Andrew (age 9) and his friend started yelling at me. Alex was covered in yellow droplets of paint. I turned around to realize that the shopvac was spewing the paint and water mixture out through the ventilation system. Now my fabric sofas were also covered in a fine yellow mist. In a panic, I called Thomas, who showed up from work within a half an hour with a rented steam cleaner. Somewhere in the middle of this, my friend showed up to pick up her son "Your life is like a cartoon", she said.

Amazingly, we managed to get the paint out of the carpet and the furniture.

"You know, my son STILL talks about that," she continued to remind me as I talked about the painting I had left to do. And so with much fanfare, I present the tagline of my blog: "Loony Toons". Those who know me well understand that this fits in more ways than one. Very Happy

Well, off to paint that hallway. What could possibly go wrong.