I should be sanding right now...

...but three little girls kept me extremely busy today. Molly is teething, and she spends all day howling and sobbing. It's a gas. Lucy is not teething, but is asking me all sorts of weird questions and they're seriously taking up a TON of time. Claire is nursing, and that also takes up a large part of my free time. I wish she could hang on better - if she were like a little monkey baby, she could just nurse while I went about my business. That would be fab. I must say, though, I am just loving nursing her. She's totally got it down and now she's getting all chunky and sizeable. She's like a nice big teddy bear next to me. (Except teddy bears aren't fixated on boobs. Not reputable teddy bears, anyway...)

I was going to get moving on the kitchen and finish sanding the ceiling, but I'm kind of over my energy burst for the day, and Andrew isn't here to motivate me. So I blog.

The home improvements continue at a rapid pace around here. Let's see. What's on the list for the near future?

• Sand kitchen ceiling, prime and paint.
• Paint kitchen walls
• Refinish kitchen cabinets
• Refinish built-in china cabinet
• New kitchen hardware, outlet and switchplate covers. (We just ordered a switchplate cover for Command Central in the front breezeway. It has six switches and we still aren't sure what they all do. We just hit all of them until something changes. When I went to order the massive cover, I learned that it's called a "Six gang stainless steel rocker plate." Huh?)
• Move washer and dryer. Andrew has decided that he's not only going to drag them to their new location himself, but he's going to install a 220 volt outlet and the plumbing needed as well. Yeah.
• Scrape living/dining ceiling.
• Fill, sand, prime and paint living/dining
• Paint living/dining
• Finish front flower beds
• Refinish ceiling fans throughout house
• Tear out weird-looking built in desk/secretary thing that I keep running  into.
• Switch shower heads around.

And then there are all the other things we're planning. It's just a laugh a minute around here.

Speaking of laughing, here's a doozy for you. I cannot get the hot water to work in the master bathroom. Everyone seems to be able to do it but me. That bathroom totally has it out for me. Every shower I've taken in there has been cold. When I take someone in to prove I'm not crazy, the hot water just pops right on, confirming my insanity. I don't know what to do about it anymore, but I do know that if I drag Andrew in there one more time, he's not going to help me scrape the living room ceiling. So I suffer.


So Lucy and the weird questions. Here's a small example:

We were riding in the car yesterday and I mentioned that I was going to sign her up for soccer. Being a first-born female, this sets off all sorts of worry and anxiety for her. "Well, will there be kids there? Will they be four like me? Do I have to run? Is my coach a girl? How many people are on my team? Do I have to talk to boys? What if my shorts don't fit? When is it?"

I wisely choose to ignore everything but the last question. "It's in the fall, about 6 weeks from now. It'll be once a week or so, I think."

Silence. I'm imagining the terror she must be in, thinking about this new thing she's about to begin. I look in the rearview mirror and she's looking out the window, chewing on her lip, just like her mama does in times of stress. My poor baby. I continue to wait for some sort of reponse.

Finally, it comes. "Hey mommy? Do black people have black blood?"

Clearly, she's not losing sleep over soccer.


Well, goodness gracious. It's 9:30 and I'm ready to call it a night. Claire is actually asleep in her crib (and has been doing GREAT with that whole business, might I add.) so I think I'm going to finish the last two episodes of The Tudors (how about that King Henry? Live. Wire.) and hit the hay!