Getting The Lead Out

Having a little bit of a stressful brush with health and safety at our house. Baby Pom had a high lead test at a routine physical and now I am hosting visits from the city health department and painting everything manically. Tip: If you buy an old house and have room to negotiate with the sellers.....stipulate that all painted surfaces be newly painted before the sale.

Must Tune In

I know that pain, stress and sickness has a mysterious ability to manifest in the body...even randomly, a little bizarrely. Yesterday, I suddenly got a searing shoulder pain which felt like somebody had walloped me with a sledgehammer.

I've been stressing about things:

•  the baby's high lead test results (old house renovation project bites back)
•  the heat we'd been having
•  my tyrannical to-do list
•  parenting my oldest who constantly tests my limits and my beliefs in my capabilities
•  asserting myself healthily in my marriage
• not painting as much as I'd like
• planning the rest of the summer stuff we mean to enjoy
• my need for connection with friends + my desperation for space and time alone
• keeping up on the summer reading program at the library
• the chaos of organizing and culling through our basement
• the baby's constant pain from teething all his molars at once
• my sister's high-risk pregnancy scares
• etc.

You know, that sort of thing. 

Anyhow...I had a little insomnia (a once in a lifetime thing for me) during the heat wave, and then the baby kept waking up and the big boys went through a week of waking a lot and then I stayed up late by myself to catch up projects and blow off steam.....and then suddenly....

POW. My shoulder went out. 

This morning on the way home from taking A to the train station I was a genuine mess. With a cup of coffee in my system, only two hours after waking up, I was nauseous, impossibly grouchy, aching and so tired I was falling asleep at the wheel on the 10 minute drive back to the house. It turned out the kids dentist appointment was actually tomorrow and the whole day had no commitments. In the driveway, I sat there with my head on the steering wheel and I had an epiphany. I needed rest and space and recuperation and I needed it now. Pretty genius, eh? I know it sounds obvious but it seemed like a real breakthrough in the moment. :)

I set the boys up with a nest of pillows and blankets and a steady stream of gentle Kipper The Dog programming on the floor next to my bed, closed the bedroom door behind all of us to reinforce the cocooning plan and curled up to nurse Pom and myself to sleep. 

I woke up in the afternoon. 

The soft British accents from the boys show in the background, Pom snoring next to me and the quilt all coiled around my jeans and a smile on my face.  I feel so much more crinkly and alive. I am damp wiping down all the floors where there might be paint chip dust, resolving to bathe the baby more regularly, scheduling follow-up blood testing, reading some boosting advice about personal boundaries and loving assertiveness, praying for my sister, scheduling dates with myself and with friends into the calendar, and making piles excess to give away and store. The world will be okay. I will be okay. Sometimes you just have to take a hint when God hits you in the shoulder with a sledgehammer because tapping you on the shoulder didn't seem to really get through. 

Note to Self:  "Must tune in."

The Bathroom Saga, Part Three

Oh man....time gets away. Here I am, finally...sharing what I hoped would be the third and final chapter of the story about the bathroom walls but which looks like it will actually be Bathroom Saga Chapter Three of....four? I hope just four. It will all eventually end. I believe in it.

One time I ripped down all that strange, vinyl wallpaper with the blue faux wood pattern and was left in the world of caked on old glue. Then I got inspired in this post and kismet happened and I found the-most-fabulous-wallpaper-glue-removing-spray-in-the-world. (Everyone who has old wallpaper to remove, run, don't walk to that link and order some from Amazon immediately! Chomp rocks and I'm not even sort of being paid to say that.)

So then, A pitched in and we sprayed and scraped and scraped and sprayed and swept up glue bits off the floor and washed it off our feet and daubed it off of various children and then one day we finished!Woohoo!!!There actually was a finite amount of glue on the wall and it didn't and couldn't go on forever. Hooray! After all the scraping and stripping and what-not there was a little spackle work to do and then some light sanding to wrap the whole thing up.

Tah Dah!!!!Naked walls!!!!

So very, very clean...except for a little random white paint at the top...odd, eh?

And so now the walls stand naked before us! Naked, boring walls never looked so good. Such a relief. So, now we have a manic, crazy week ahead of us and we won't get a chance to slap the two or three coats of soft tealy blue on the walls that I have all ready and waiting in a can. But I feel it...we're close.

A Locket Gift

I swear, I don't live in a novel. That said, I did, indeed find a beautiful old locket this morning, tucked into the floorboards of my attic.

I can't complain. Sometimes life hands you ridiculous doses of romance even if it does amount to an absurdly little thing. This is the sort of thing dreamy girls like me want to buy old houses for. I imagine scenarios like this but I don't think I know anyone personally that this sort of thing has happened to.

First there was the long curved bladed, etched filet knife, then the mother of pearl crucifix and now beautiful old locket. A locket for crying out loud! The only way it could get better was if the inside contained the grainy black and white photos of wartime lovers and the necklace was wrapped in a love note promising undying affection. The locket is completely empty save the tiny heart-shaped frames meant to hold photos in, but it is beautiful and it's not every necklace that comes with a story like this.

It feels like personal, lavish Divine Love in tangible form sometimes for these stunning little life gifts to appear. I have to say that I sure feel like I have been beamed upon. I know that may sound trite or hokus-pokus or even vain but I mean it in a truly grateful, honest way.

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