How not to paint.

This is not a tutorial. This is not how Martha would paint her child's room.

Let me start this story by saying that predisone is sort of messing me up a bit. The poison ivy is no longer oozing and not as itchy. However, when my doctor mentioned that the side affects included difficulty sleeping I wasn't too worried, because people, I was tired. And while it took me a bit longer to fall asleep, it wasn't unbearable. What was unbearable was waking up at 3am and being *Up*. I laid there for a while. Wrote a snarky comment on TJIC's blog. Checked my email. Read a bit on the kindle iphone app. I think I finally fell back to sleep around 4:30. Then at 6:30 I was up and dealing with the dogs and kids and all the fun that goes along with getting everyone out of the house.

At some point in my day I realized that I was walking around only half engaged in my world. That is the only explanation I have for what happened when the children and I got home from school.

Internet, I invited my children, ages 7 and 10, to prime the walls of Rebecca's room with me. Lily was assigned the bottom portion of the wall, Rebecca the middle portion of the wall and I did the top. Did we tape the woodwork you ask? No. Too boring and time consuming- it's easier to just touch up the woodwork afterwards. Did we use a dropcloth? Nope. Did we wear gloves? That would be no.

The walls are primed. As is most of the floor. Except for the parts of the floor that got the white paint scratched off. So pretty much the room is a disaster, but a very manageable disaster. Mothers know a lot about manageable disasters. The best part about this project was how much fun we all had. The kids were blissed out to be allowed to do such an adult job and they worked hard, didn't bicker and did their best. We also chatted the entire time about this and that and a bit of nonsense too. They enjoyed the work, the kind of physical work that leaves you tired and satisfied.

When it became obvious that we had accomplished all that was going to be accomplished, I sent them to the tub to scrub the paint off of each other. I wish I had taken a picture of them before the bath. They were very, very pink.

Here are some pictures of the floor- including the part of the floor that I never painted because that's where the gigantic bed with drawers goes.


This is what the bathtub looked like after the kids scrubbed the paint off of themselves.

And here are Rebecca's legs after the bath.


Hope to post less disasterous photos tomorrow. Until then, please steroid gods let me sleep.