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By rebecca, April 16, 2012 2:19 pm

The two bigger kids were playing in one of the upstairs bedrooms, the one that used to be “Claire’s room,” but now houses all of the toys. Baby Mary and I were chatting with my grandmother in the living room of the house that she has lived in for 55 years or so and the house that she still manages to keep in pristine condition all by herself at 80+ years of age. Unfortunately the impeccable housekeeping trait seems to have skipped a couple generations and been replaced with compulsive web surfing instead. Genetics, why hath you forsaken me?!

So there we were chatting it up when I heard the first scream. Kids scream, right? That’s what they do. So I ignored it. The second scream caught my attention, but I still kept talking. But that third scream. There was no mistaking the urgency and the pain in that third scream.

I sprinted up the stairs, baby in arms, and found Colum kneeling in front of the sofa bed, screaming and screaming. I plopped Mary on the floor and raced over to find his middle fingertip caught in the hinge. It seemed like both lifting the bed up or folding it back down would just squeeze his finger even worse.

In no time at all my grandmother was squeezing hand soap onto the hinge and I rubbed it all around his finger. Still, he screamed. I tried to pry the hinges further apart with my own fingers, I tried to ease his finger down and out and nothing was working. I started to flirt with the idea of losing it because what on earth do we do?! I am his mother, how can I not just make this better?!

Just then, his finger slid out. Thank goodness for over 80 years of wisdom and liquid hand soap. Thank goodness.

Between tears and ice and nursing hungry, screaming babies we found out that he was just trying to unfold the bed. His finger was bruised and a bit swollen, but he’ll be fine. And he’ll never, ever do that again.

But, holy shit. I forgot that as kids get older they just find more new and exciting ways to hurt themselves and scare the crap out of their parents. *blinking* It’s never going to end, is it?

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By rebecca, April 12, 2012 2:10 pm

This post is sponsored by Cottonelle, where they respect the roll.

Happy second anniversary of home ownership to us!

Two years ago we quickly snapped up a power-of-sale, fixer up on a major street in a neighbourhood we love. We quickly put in a kitchen, pulled up two layers of vinyl tiles on the second floor and refinished the original hardwood underneath, replaced both the furnace and the water heater, built a fence, opened up a doorway, installed central air, painted and weeded. Then we ran out of steam. Steam and money.

There is still so much to do. Let’s just focus on the bathrooms for now. We have three bathrooms. Nice, right? That’s two more than many three-bedroom semis in this city come with. I can see the envy in people’s eyes when I casually drop the number of bathrooms we have. “I might have to look into a cleaning lady,” I’ll say. “It’s just too hard trying to clean SO many bathrooms.” “Toilet training is a breeze when you have a bathroom on every floor!” They’re probably picturing a nice ensuite off the master bedroom, a standard four-piece for the kids and a little powder room downstairs. That’s not the case.

Our main bathroom is on the second floor, near the bedrooms. It is one of the smallest bathrooms ever made, for one.  It was also beyond scuzzy when we first bought the house. But we had time and budget constraints and having a house with a kitchen was priority number one. So we decided to just cover the old tiles with panels that could be glued to the walls, use peel and stick tiles on the floor, slap on a fresh coat of paint and give the rest a good scrubbing. We finished it up with a new shower head, shower curtain and assorted fixtures. It looked pretty good — until the wall panels started peeling off. Now they just sort of sag inward toward the tub. The kids can bathe up there, but we can’t get the walls wet until we find the time and money to redo them.

That brings me to the basement — quite literally, in fact — because that’s where I have to go to shower. As long as you remember to duck en route to the tub, you can usually avoid smashing your head on the heating duct. Also, if you first wet one side of the shower curtain, you can get it to stick to the wall and minimize the pool of water that will drip onto the floor from the leaky shower head. We’re working on the ant infestation down there and I, for one, think the four different tile patterns are charming. Irene loves the pink toilet too.

I used to shower on the main floor because that bathroom is by far the most functional of the three. It’s not stylish by any stretch of the imagination, but the tiles match and the room is basically in good repair. It’s in an addition on the back of the house, just past the kitchen and next to the laundry machines. So what if you have to step over a pile of kiddie shoes, bags and jackets? At least the clothes you didn’t take out of the dryer are right there! It wasn’t bad at all … until the fall. It turns out that addition is the crappiest structure ever built. It’s basically drywall thrown up on top of an old porch with little to no insulation. It’s FREEZING back there in the winter. On really cold days I have to bring the kids’ coats into the kitchen to warm up before going out. I have to wear a scarf to do laundry.

But it’s spring! The bathroom was looking a little dumpy after the off season, so what better time for a BATHROOM MAKEOVER! You know how crafty I am.  Remember that time I bought a sewing machine and still have only sewed one thing once? I can’t really do any worse than that, right?

Here’s what I was dealing with:

It gets worse:

Wait, there’s more:

My work was cut out for me.

I cleared out the junk, hung up a “Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much,” plaque that was lying around and gave it a half-assed cleaning. VOILA!

That’s right, my friends, no more unsightly toilet paper hanging around. All right, it’s less that toilet paper is unsightly and more that this extra toilet paper roll cover by Cottonelle is actually really cute. More than anything, my bathroom needed a splash of colour and this was so easy. Oh, and of course I used a filter on my “after” shot. We all know my makeover skills need all the help they can get.

And the best part?

There’s one for all three of my bathrooms. Try not to be too jealous.

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By rebecca, April 10, 2012 2:03 pm

There’s a rule that if you are going to hand out birthday party invitations at school, then you have to invite everybody in the class. I just today found out about this rule.

I sent Colum to school with a handful of invitations for a few favourite classmates and a mom friend told me about it in the school yard. Maybe I’d heard/read something about it before? Like last year maybe? In any case, I didn’t know.

It will be okay because I already sent a note to school last week and asked if his kindergarten teacher could discreetly put the invites in the kids’ bags and she said sure. I also told Colum that his teacher would give them out and he shouldn’t say anything because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We don’t want anyone to feel left out. But we simply cannot accomodate everybody. I thought I was being extra considerate.

I don’t understand what else parents are supposed to do. I can invite the kids we see outside of school, sure. I can invite the kids whose parents I already know and like. But those aren’t necessarily going to be the same people my children want to invite. If a child goes to daycare or is bussed in, then they don’t get birthday party invitations? Not unless we invite all 20 children?!

I was so happy for Colum when he was invited to a couple birthday parties over the past year. I was excited that a couple kids liked him enough to want them at their parties. He had friends and I was careful to make sure those people were also among the few to be invited to our party. And now I feel cheated.

I feel worse than cheated. I feel foolish and there’s a lump in my throat as I write this. Those party invitations which we were not expecting in the first place were not special overtures toward friendship. We rearranged our family’s weekend schedule to accomodate those parties and the birthday kid, perhaps, didn’t even particularly want us there. Those invites were nothing but an obligatory duty set forth by some meddling administration.

And now, when Colum’s classmates receive their invitations, will they also imagine that everyone was invited? They (or their parents, rather) won’t realize that we only invited seven children. They’ll probably assume we aren’t expecting, indeed don’t even want, everyone to attend.

And to what end? So everybody feels included and nothing is special. Of course, people will continue to have parties and they will continue to invite only a select few people. As the kids get older, they will know. It doesn’t matter if invitations are handed out inside or outside of school. They will know. Not everybody is going to be friends with everybody, that’s just life. There’s no school policy that can change that.

Am I missing something? Do policies like these really help anyone at all?