Check Your Paint!

Oh, dear reader, today was a sad sad day for interior painting. I went from being so excited to finally finish my project to having my heart sink in minutes. Let's rewind a couple of months to better understand what happened.

One sunny Saturday morning we decided to go to Lowe's to pick up some paint for Vanessa's room. Since I had decided to paint the walls white and add silver swirls, it was a fairly easy task. While we were there and already buying paint, we decided to pick out and purchase colors for the dining and living rooms also. We went with a deep red for the dining room and a soft brown for the living room. We knew we wouldn't get around to painting right away, but we decided to go ahead and buy all of the paint at once anyway. We picked our color samples, picked our paint type and brought them all up the the counter to have them prepared. He mixed it up, dabbed the tops of the cans for us to inspect and tried to send us on our way. Wait. The color on one of the brown cans didn't look right. Jeremy and I talked about it for a second and decided it wasn't right. Back to the counter we went. This time there was a younger guy who tried telling me yes, it was the correct color. I think he may have been color blind, not sure. The man who mixed the paint came to see and agreed, the color was not right. He then checked the machine and proceeded to explain to us that there was no black paint in the spot where there should have been, therefore no black went into our brown and that's why it looked tan instead of brown. Okay, fix it please. We're getting hungry. He asked if it would be okay to fix the same can we already have. Fine with us. He added the black, shook it in, dabbed the top and sent us on our way. This time we made it out to the car with the paint. In the sun you could really tell that the color was still not right. This time I stayed outside while Jeremy walked back in and dealt with the problem. The man was very apologetic and mixed an entirely new can. FINALLY, we were satisfied and able to leave Lowe's.

Now, let's move along to present day. We're home from vacation, all 4 kids are around the house again, we're in the heart of summer vacation and I decide it's time to pop the top off of the can of paint for the dining room....Tabetian Red, beautiful. I started on Monday and was able to get everything taped and the trim all finished (with help from Vanessa). I let it dry overnight and on Tuesday, I did one coat on the walls and let it dry overnight. Today I did the second coat. I called Vanessa down to admire it with me and was so happy with it. It looked lighter red than I imagined, but I could deal with it. Hmmm, the more I looked at it and watched it dry, the lighter it looked. Ok, don't freak, Jeremy will be home in a bit and he'll tell me it's the exact color we picked out. You know the color difference between a drop of blood and a pool of blood? That was the difference I was thinking it looked like. But it had been a couple of months since I saw the paint sample (the dab on the lid was picked off by one of the kids in the meantime) so maybe I wasn't remembering correctly. Jeremy walked in and gave me a verbal pat on the back by telling me what a good job I did, especially on the trim at the top. I didn't mention the color difference that I thought I was seeing. Then came the question.....................,"Isn't it a little light?" Shoot! He noticed too and that's not good because that means neither of us are completely satisfied with the color. The more we looked, the more we decided we just didn't pick the right color. We especially don't like the color of the room against the darker cherry wood of the dining room table and chairs. Well, what to do, what to do. We live with it. We know that eventually we'll paint it the color we want, but right now we'll just live with it.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted assurance that the fault was ours for picking that color. So I dug around and finally found the card color sample from Lowe's. AHA!!!!! Let me just type this in the nicest way possible, although it is NOT what I was thinking or what came out of my mouth. THEY GAVE US THE WRONG FREAKING COLOR!!!!!!!!! My heart sank. I think I had every negative feeling you can think of wash over me. It has to be repainted. It just has to. If we don't repaint it, I'm going to notice it every time I'm in there or even walk past it and be disgusted. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, I just did in that room was for nothing. We don't know why we didn't see it yesterday with only one coat on. It honestly looked darker then, for some reason. Maybe it was because the Spiced Vinegar already painted on the walls was showing through a little, I don't know. All I know is that we didn't realize that this color was all wrong until everything was dry and two coats were on. Damn.

We then talked about it and remembered all of the problems that we had with the brown all that time ago. I'm sure it's what also went wrong with the red. We were thinking that we got so involved with trying to get the brown right that we didn't even notice the red. Our fault, Lowe's fault, whatever. Jeremy is planning on bringing our empty can in and talking to them tomorrow. And you already know what I'll be doing. Taping : (

Poor Mr.P

While we were on vacation, there was one evening when Mr.P got attacked by a ton of chiggers. I don't know what we were thinking by not spraying him down before he played outside. It was a heavily wooded area and it was raining off and on, so it was pretty moist out. When we got back to my parents' house and he took his clothes off for his shower, I felt so bad! He had bites ALL OVER him, especially around the waist and groin area. I made sure to diligently apply Ivarest on them for the next several days.

A few days after we returned home, I went to the pool with a couple of friends. For whatever reason, we got on the subject of chiggers and I told them what had happened with Mr.P. My friend, Brandon, asked if we put clear fingernail polish on the bites. I gave him a blank look. He then explained to me that they inbed themselves and they either need to be suffocated or burned out. They do? We checked Mr.P's bites and they were still pretty red. When we walked in the house from the pool, I immediately got to work with the fingernail polish. By the next day and a half or so, the redness was gone in almost all of them and you couldn't even tell that there had been bites. Thank you, Brandon!!

Unfortunately, a few days later, Mr.P kept complaining that his stomach hurt on the outside whenever we would tickle him or even if someone brushed by. We checked it out and found one bite that was REALLY infected : ( There was a hard spot underneath and the area was very noticeably raised. Jeremy explained to him that he was going to have to take care of it. Within twenty minutes or so, Camri and I went racing up the stairs from watching tv in the media room because we could hear Mr.P screaming. I walked in the bathroom to find him biting down on a leather belt while Jeremy was pushing and squeezing the infected area. Mr.P has a pretty high pain tolerance and I've never heard him scream and cry like that. My poor baby boy!! All I could do is sit next to him and have him squeeze my hands while I tried to soothe him. Luckily, Daddy finished within a minute or two. (two very very long minutes for Mr.P, I'm sure) He cleaned it up, applied some ointment, and slapped on a band-aid. Poor Mr.P walked around sobbing for a long while after though. Not even a popsicle helped.

That was a couple of days ago. Today it looks pretty good. Jeremy said there was a ton of gunk built up in there that needed to come out, so even though it was agonizing, I'm glad he took care of it.

As for me, lessons learned: #1 - I can't forget to use the bug spray. I can't forget to use the bug spray. I can't forget to use the bug spray. #2 - Chiggers are not as polite as mosquitoes, who get their fill and move on. Chiggers try to set up shop and need to be rubbed out. Got it.

Here's a picture of Vanessa helping me shake out the dirty laundry in the front yard before it went into the washer. We were laughing and so grossed out having to do this. Also, my new neighbor pulled up (whom we haven't met yet) and Vanessa joked about greeting them with a, "Oh hi! Nice to meet you! We're just hanging out in the front yard shaking the fly eggs out of our dirty laundry."

Fly, fly AWAY!!!

If you're a bit squeamish, you may want to stop reading at this point. What you are about to read is a true story that happened to us within a few days of being back from vacation. If you're still reading, consider yourself warned. This is pretty disgusting!

Bursting through the door at the end of a 10 hour drive felt just as you'd imagine.....wonderful! The house felt cool and it was so nice to be home, back to our own house and sleeping in our own beds again. We returned home on Saturday and spent Sunday just being lazy. Jeremy was on his last day of vacation and so was I. This meant that no matter how filthy the kitchen got, no matter how much milk we needed for breakfast in the morning, no matter how many pairs of flip flops I had to step over to get from the media room to the kitchen, I was not cleaning, going to the store, or picking up anything around the house. This meant free reign for the kids. By Monday morning, our clean house definitely looked lived-in. Without my constant reminders (gentle and sometimes not so gentle) my kids, namely Vanessa, Sabrina, and Mr.P, can tear through this house with the relentless fury of an F5 tornado. There was definitely work to be done by the time I woke on Monday morning.

Luckily, I was still buzzing from my vacation high when I got to work on Monday morning. There was lots of laundry to be done because my sweet husband mixed the dirty clothes that we had acquired the last couple of days in Topeka with the clean clothes that my mom had generously laundered for us mid-trip. He knows I'm always looking for more laundry to do. Isn't he wonderful?! So giving. (That's called sarcasm. I offer it daily as a free service.) There were dishes to be done, lots of dishes. Why use one cup twice in the same day? That's my kids' philosophy. Anyway, you get the picture. It was clean up time and I was on it.

As I glanced in the pantry, the full boxes on the floor reminded me that Tuesday is recycle day and I better get our recycled goods out to the curb. I picked up both boxes, one for paper and the other for cardboard, and noticed these small brown pellet-looking things on the floor. Hmmm....interesting. Someone maybe dropped some brown rice? No, these were too big for them to be rice. They actually looked like rolly pollies (sp) if rolly pollies didn't have legs so that they were completely round and just as long, except these were brown. They even had the little lines on them that rolly pollies have. (I posted a picture. If you'd like to see it bigger, just click on it.) Weird. Out comes the vaccuum, but first Jeremy is called upon to investigate. "Oh, there were some of those in the washer yesterday when I did a load of laundry. If you squeeze them they pop," he says nonchalantly as he's showing me with a paper towel. Sick! But okay, if you're not worried then I'm not worried either. Whoosh!! Up the vaccuum they go. As I'm vaccuuming all of the downstairs floors, I did notice a couple more here and there, but didn't think anything about them except that it was still kind of weird. By Monday night, the house was tidy and off to bed we went. If only we had known what was lurking in the dark.

Sometime on Tuesday morning Sabrina and Mr.P called me to the kitchen. I hadn't been downstairs yet and was dragging my feet a bit to get down there. "Hurry Mommy! You have to see this!!" So eventually I make it to the kitchen and find them pointing to Bentley's food dish. Buzzing all around the edge of the dish were what looked like 20 or 30 flies. What the heck?!! I know for a fact that no door had been left open. There hadn't been a beep all morning. Bentley wasn't even in the house yet. At this point I hadn't made the connection of those brown things from earlier. I grabbed a flyswatter and we began to count. By the time we got done with the flies on the dish, more were noticed around the windows in the living room. By the time we got done with the living room windows, more were noticed in the kitchen windows. By the time we got done with the kitchen windows, more were noticed in the dining room windows. When we thought we had killed them all, I called Jeremy to let him know. I needed someone to share my disgust. By the time we went to bed, there were maybe 1 or 2 that had escaped death, but I vowed I would get them in the morning. What a nightmare day that was, but alas, it wasn't over.

On Wednesday morning we all slept in. Mr.P woke me up just in time to receive a text from a friend who I had planned to meet at the pool. I had half an hour, so I jumped in the shower and then Mr.P and I shimmied into our bathing suits and took off for the pool. By the time I got home, the rest of the kids were awake and I was ready to clean up the fly mess from the previous day. I wanted to mop the floors because even though we couldn't see the stains left from a million fly carcasses, I knew they were there. Gross. First, I checked the windows. NOOOOO!!!! More flies!! This time I was pulling out the big guns. I called Jeremy to find out where the bug spray was. I oversprayed every window in the kitchen, family and dining rooms and watched while the flies dropped. Mr.P and Sabrina were a little more humane. They each swatted to their hearts content since the flies were now moving slow enough for them to get a good aim. I, on the other hand, was content to watch them writhe around and suffer in prolonged agony until they were relieved by the cold hand of death. Yeah, I'm still a little bitter.

By the end of this disgusting ordeal, just over 200 flies had met their maker in our lovely home, now tarnished by the memory of the Great Fly Invasion 2010. Since then, every nook and cranny of this house, every little thing that can hold still has been suctioned, washed, cleaned, and dusted off. And we still have no idea how it all got started.

The birthday girl!! 15 years : )


Can't believe I got such a good picture of one of the bees. Yay me!!


Some of the pretty flowers I loved looking at.

One of the bluebirds bringing home the bacon.

I got to meet my beautiful nephew for the first time!!!

It's Hot In Toe-Peek-Uh

Well, it is now, but it wasn't when we visited last week. The weather was beautiful for us. Well, what I consider beautiful, anyway. I had hoped for overcast skies and cool evenings, and that's just what I got. I'm a huge fan of warm weather, but I just needed a little break from this TX heat! And our little vacation to Topeka was just perfect.

As usual, there were so many people we wanted to visit and so many that wanted to visit with us that we ran out of time. It happens every year, but that's fine with us. It gives us more of a reason to visit again and again.

This year was a little different as far as visits go. My sister decided to make a quick trip to Kansas City over Memorial Day weekend and invited Camri and Vanessa to tag along. She dropped them off at my parents' house in Topeka on her way. By the time we saw Camri again, it was the first of July!! She was so excited to visit, she asked if she could stay until we drove there on our vacation. Of course, we were fine with that since she was staying with my parents. That's the longest we've ever been away from her! We even missed sharing her birthday with her in late June. She loved every minute of it, though. She really enjoyed staying with my parents. Who wouldn't?! Now Miss Vanessa had a different schedule. She came home at the end of Memorial Day weekend and brought a good friend along. The friend stayed with us for 2 weeks (2 FUN FILLED WEEKS!!) and then Jeremy met her parents halfway (somewhere in OK) to exchange the kids. Vanessa wound up going back with them, so she was also in Topeka for a couple of weeks before we got there. My independent little girls! By the time we got to Topeka, we were DEFINITELY missing our babies!!

Our time in Topeka was so much fun : ) We spent some much needed time visiting family, visited a Wizard of Oz museum (which I've never been to), visited the Cosmosphere (which was a ton of fun), visited friends and just visited until we were almost visited out. lol I'll tell you what though. Nothing we did (or will ever do) was as fun and relaxing as just sitting on my parents' deck taking everything in. I could sit and watch a pair of bluebirds bring food to their babies all day long. I LOVE watching big fat bumblebees bounce from flower to beautiful flower in my daddy's little piece of heaven that he's turned the backyard into. Watching the kids catch fireflies and place them in a jar just makes me smile. And getting to sit (face to face!) and chat about nothing with my parents is priceless. I love being somewhere the kids should be having the time of their lives at and hearing them say, "I want to go back to Grammi and Papa's house." They love it there and so do I. It's warm. It's happy. It's so full of love and I'm so blessed and thank God every day for 2 of the most wonderful parents ever.