Surrender, Dorothy

It's Time to Admit I Make My Five-Year-Old Use Sippy Cups on the Carpet

It's my fault. The carpet is so light-colored and only three years old. I caress it sometimes. Last year, we asked for a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas. So we could keep it cleaner, stare proudly at its stain-resistant fibers. After living with the disgusting Berber at This Old House for six years, new carpet has felt like living in a wall-to-wall dreamland.

So maybe I won't let anyone use the door to the back deck that's located randomly in the living room. BECAUSE THEY MIGHT TRACK ON THE CARPET.

And maybe I make every child remove their shoes within five nanoseconds of entering my house. BECAUSE THEY MIGHT TRACK ON THE CARPET.

And maybe I have been making my five-year-old daughter use travel coffee cups, water bottles and maybe, maybe even two leftover sippy cups when she dines in the living room. BECAUSE SHE  MIGHT SPILL ON THE CARPET.

And then, then! Just as I was chastising myself for being ridiculous, I let her eat french toast sticks and syrup in the living room.

Wait for it.

She pushed back her TV tray. It tipped over in slow motion. My feet were stuck as though rooted in sand. A tiny, ceramic bowl containing Mrs. Butterworth somersaulted gracefully through the air, spraying thick and sticky brown syrup in a four-foot swath across my sweet plush. All the sippy cups were for naught.

She stained the goddamn carpet.

The Transformation of Chateau Travolta: Linen Closet Edition

We just can't stop messing with the closets.

This time I remembered to take a before photo.

It wasn't horrible, but the shelves were so deep we hadn't seen some of the items on the top shelf in two years and kept buying the same cleaning products over and over again.

 

A hodge-podge of extra supplies and who-knows-what.

I can't believe all this stuff was on the top and bottom shelves. Doesn't that seem impossible? But it was.

 

I put the towels in the piles they would go back into the shelves so I could, like, measure them and stuff.

Here's what the closet looked like with the shelves pulled out.

 

The shelves were two of these deep each. No wonder we couldn't ever reach anything.

 

Somebody Little reapportioned the boards for mixed media projects that I've assured her she can sell for great profit.

 

This time we used a different brand of shelves, but it was the same basic idea: Buy them as long as you can and cut them with bolt cutters down to size. This shelving is expensive (at least to me), and it's cheaper if you buy it longer and cut it down than buy the right size.

The stripes on the wall (which we still totally installed over without painting) represent the old shelves. I actually measured the piles of towels and stuff so the shelves would be based on what we were going to put on them rather than the other way around. We ended up with one fewer shelf as a result.

Beloved's idea to install mini shelves on the sides (note the feather duster at convenient Little Angel level) worked out great because the new shelves were at least five inches shallower than the old ones.

 

I did manage to get everything back into the closet without eliminating anything, even though the shelves are so much shallower. We weren't actually using the back five or so inches of each shelf because it was too hard to reach.

I can't figure out why every closet in our house is so deep. You can kind of see what I'm talking about from this photo. That white drawer thing is about two feet deep. I could stand inside this closet and brace myself against the back wall with my leg half-extended.

It'll be a lot easier now to tell the babysitter or the grandparents that all of the little angel's medicines are "in the linen closet on the second shelf on the door" rather than "buried eighteen bottles deep and maybe lost forever." Also, that rod at the top was my idea. I found it in the back of the old closet. I used it to hang the most frequently used cleaning products, and yes, I am fucking proud of that idea. Ahem.

 

We decided to celebrate by inviting over the neighbor girl and painting their faces with what was supposed to be glow-in-the-dark face paint. Those face-paint people are LYING LIARS FROM LIARSVILLE. It so doesn't glow. I even shown flashlights in their faces for a while to charge it up.

 

A young fairy off to save the world from evildoers.

 

This outfit was totally styled by the little angel herself, including the wings and the Home Depot apron. And the matching socks.

And so, another Sunday wrapped up at Chateau Travolta. Only 1,000 home improvement projects left to go.

The Tranformation of Chateau Travolta: Garden Edition

Our garden started off small.

This photo was taken circa May-ish.

As was this one.

They started to grow.

In and out of two weeks, and over a year.

And the vines took over the bedroom.

We had some nice blanketflowers.

They were very pretty. I don't remember these growing up.

The coneflowers and those yellow things grew really tall.

So tall, that in some cases we had to hog-tie them.

This butterfly reminds me of my grandfather's metal sculpture.

Also, its baby. We bought both at the Ren Fest, believe it or not.

Ma's autumn sedum finally bloomed.

And the vines and the Brown-eyed Susans, they bloomed.

There were chili peppers.

And mums and purple things.

And different sorts of perennial purple things.

And crazy herbs that we did not eat, because we thought they would be much shorter.

And strange, flowering kales.

And we planted tulips, while wearing tutus. And we almost paid it all no attention, because we were having so much fun.

But Chateau Travolta is different than This Old House in that we are not trying to kill things, we are trying to grow things.

And that makes all the difference.

See you in spring.

The Transformation of Chateau Travolata: Second Closet Edition

I wrote recently on BlogHer about how I have a problem when it comes to organization. I ADMIT IT.

You may recall when Beloved and I redid our closet.  After fighting for two years with the little angel's closet, this weekend I finally smiled sweetly at Beloved and said, "Babe, she needs some shelves."

And, in grand Arens tradition, we gutted it and started over.

And, as usual, I forgot to take a proper before photo.

Here it is empty.

 

See that strip of dark? That was where the only shelf used to reside. There was also one clothes rack up there, way too high for my girl to reach. Thus resulting in MANY, MANY MORNING ARGUMENTS. Problem? She couldn't reach her clothes.

Here is the issue.

 

This shit? Was in her closet.

Also this. Most of those shoes are inherited from the neighbor and don't fit.

Also, all of this. Actually, too, most of her clothes are in the dresser, because she can't reach anything.

We started with a simple crossbeam and the load-bearing strut thingies that you buy at any hardware store.

 

The little angel was busy watching The Wizard of Oz for the third time in 24 hours, but at least she left the power tools alone. Also? I don't know who taught her to always stand like that for pictures. She may have heisted my Star magazine when I wasn't looking.

We decided to go with two shelves, two rods, two baskets, a row of hooks for purses and belts and two shoe racks.

See all those holes? Despite my recent free class, I still managed to jack up that basket support. Thank God for Beloved, who is still the reigning Arens Family Champion when it comes to installing shit.

 

The little angel, now sporting yet another dress-up outfit, was thrilled to have a shoe rack JUST LIKE MOMMY'S.

 

Someone is quite pleased with her new closet.

I did manage to install that line of hooks myself. It is my only claim to hardware-store fame.

Ah, sweet bliss. It is finally walk-in.

All of the used flip flops look lovely. We actually bought the pink ones in the upper left, the second pair of tennies, the first two pairs in the third row and the fake crocs.

And the crowd goes wild. Anther organization nightmare conquered. It was a good day for Team Arens.
Also, looking at these photos has made me realize how much blogging has changed my life. The belts, the Miffy, all from reviews. Along with probably half the stuff on her walls that I can't show you because they have her name on them. IT IS SOMETIMES WEIRD.

The Transformation of Chateau Travolta: Garage Edition

I was talking to some neighbors last weekend when we did the garage sale. So many people have commented to us in the past two years about the pirates who lived here before we did, how they didn't wave, how they didn't smile. How they didn't have sailboats to play with the others on the lake.

They also apparently had poor taste in garages.

Beloved surveys the ugly weird homemade shelving unit with disdain.

On Sunday, we applied crowbars in the way only the Arens family knows how to apply crowbars.

We had lots of practice on This Old House.

43,000 nails pounded down later, my back HURT.

Beloved had a vision for this wall of the garage, and it involved shelves up to the ceiling, some of which can't be seen in this photo.  He also designed the Arens Patented Garage Ball Holding System, which you'll see in the lower middle of this photo, cleverly disguised as an upside-down yard soccer goal.

That main is a genius, I tell you.

I had a favorite part of this new garage wall.

We picked this sign up on our honeymoon, which began June 17, 2001. It's been languishing in two basements for eight years.

Beloved installed this handy bike-holding system for two of our four bikes last fall. They look pretty cool, and they're totally easy to use -- on pulleys.

Beloved's tip to our pathetic baseball team and his livelihood, the bastards.

Someone didn't want to get her hands dirty.

Ah, well. Childhood really isn't about working, now, is it?

Yard Sale World Domination

So, on Saturday, we had ourselves a yard sale.  It turned out the yard sale was moderately successful, but Somebody Little pulled off one hell of a lemonade stand.

The little angel works on her sign.

She adds extra pizzaz while digesting a totally healthy dinner of hot dogs, green beans and chocolate pudding.

Before, #1.

Before, #2

Beloved's electronics table.

That would be my original Santa Pub Crawl elf suit on that chair. Yes, yes.

7 a.m. on Saturday. Someone is ready to rock.

The little angel inherited a painted-faced helper around 10 a.m., and the money they made was deposited directly into SOMEONE's piggy bank. She totally cleaned up, yo.

We made $115.  I put four loads of crap in my trunk after the garage sale ended and drove directly to Goodwill. There was no way in hell that shit was going back in my garage. No way.

And that's how we roll.

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Winner of Dustbuster contest and Father's Day review and Black & Decker edger and trimmer review at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Suburban World Domination, Step 14

We're having a yard sale on Saturday.

I've never held a yard sale in my adult life, though I remember the masking tape and card tables from my youth. Ma was a professional when it came to garage sales, marking things in her notebook with the care of a third-party auditor. We'd plan for weeks, it seemed. And like so many things that I remember as being grand productions in my youth, this seems shockingly benign as an adult. I wonder if the little angel thinks this is as big a deal as I used to think they were. I know Cagey is probably shaking with excitement to know I'm losing my yard sale virginity.

True, we've spent the last week or so hauling things up from the basement and cleaning them off. Tonight I need to hose about three years of basement storage off a set of three Ikea CD holders I've been trying to unload on Craig's List on and off for years. I had to soak parts of what The Editor Across the Aisle used to refer to as my "poverty fan," -- an exhaust fan that goes in your window and pushes the hot air out.  Now that our house isn't so leaky and our air conditioning functions, it's not really necessary. But you know what? Poverty fans work. I have a traditional poverty fan and an extra-fancy, one-touch poverty fan.

We've got other stuff. Baby blow-up bathtubs and buckets of summer plastic toys, cat beds and picnic baskets, a desk, flower pots, digital cameras and assorted electronic whatzits, and the coolest chair ever that Beloved absolutely hates and doesn't go with anything in my house:

Hello, 1989, how I loved you.

The little angel plans to do her part. She's selling lemonade. She's tremendously excited about her lemonade sales and has her little capitalist heart set on making enough for a toy.  We have our hearts set on making a good start on Operation Better Lawnmower.  Film on Monday. Wish us luck.

Bonding Over Autumn Joy Sedum

Ma had a garden all my life. I remember there were vegetables for a while. She used to hand Blondie and me huge bowls of peas to shell and strawberries to, um, shuck? Uncork?  Then, after a while, she gave up on the vegetables and went back to just flowers. Because she's had some rotator cuff problems, Ma is scaling back this year, much to the benefit of Blondie and me: We got her autumn joy sedum.

Blondie has always been more into gardening than I have, but last year I ripped out a bunch of uglies from Chateau Travolta's flowerbeds and hauled myself to a nursery with a book of prairie flowers given to me by FweetieB. I was DETERMINED to find something I could not kill. I even considered planting goldenrod until Ma said she was allergic. After my massive seed experiment (100 peat pots that sat in my window for a month, then died from overwatering), I left the nursery that day with cleome (oops, an annual), black-eyed susans and purple coneflowers. Last year, they grew shockingly tall. And then fell over. And since I didn't know what to do, I left them like that for weeks, leaning like drunks. Finally, someone told me to stake them, and boy, they looked better standing up.

This year, I've been clucking around them like a new mother as all the black-eyed susans and coneflowers CAME BACK! MY LOVELIES!  And so Rita became sucked into the Ma/Blondie gardening vortex. And I asked for the autumn sedum.

This past weekend, Beloved and I moved a lot of river rock. We had this odd triangle-shaped patch of it in the front yard and some random piles of it by the garage door. I decided to move the river rock by the garage door so I had a place for Ma's autumn sedum.  I got out the wheelbarrow and the large, flat shovel and found myself having flashbacks to the time I moved 14 tons of Kansas river rock to completely surround This Old House. Oy. I think it was This Old House that really turned me off gardening. Between the rampant daylilies, the wild strawberries and just THE WEEDS GOOD GOD THE WEEDS, gardening felt more like the prince's battle to free Sleeping Beauty from a hundred years of vine growth than something relaxing or fulfilling. Chateau Travolta isn't as much of a challenge. It has some crab grass and dandelions from eight months of standing empty, but really there's nothing odd growing there that shouldn't be.

This summer, we're attempting to create "landscaping." By ourselves. While Beloved pulled 2-foot-long metal spikes out of the rotting railroad ties around the front and side of the house, I moved that river rock, planted a whole bunch of perennial goodness I've been told will return AND withstand the hot Midwestern summers and mulched my ass off. The little angel refrained from helping with this part, but she did get involved with the window boxes, containers and our new sunflower patch in the back by the fence.  Then I sat on the back deck with a glass of wine and texted Blondie all my photos of my plant babies. And she texted back hers. And we talked about the Kentucky Derby and I thought how incredibly cool it is that we have both planted Ma's flowers, that we'd both arrived at this gardening thing around the same time. It makes me feel closer to my mom and my sister somehow.

The little angel is slightly apprehensive about this high/low thing her mother is attempting.

 

The rear pot is full of marigold seeds, which have produced itsy, bitsy, teensy marigolds.

 

Two more pots of marigold seeds, along with zinnias, which last year I thought were a new kind of marigolds, and some other unidentified-but-cool-looking stuff.

 

In Year 1, I tried impatiens in these boxes. FAIL! Then I tried marigolds last year -- they fell over. Since these boxes are so shallow, this year I tried vines.

 

Ma got me that azalea bush. I'm not sure if it should have been planted, but it seemed to want to be planted. So I planted it. I have no idea what those bulb-looking things are -- they've never bloomed before.

 

This is the new-and-improved flower bed. It's about three feet wider than it used to be, and thanks to Beloved, now edged. The autumn sedum are in the back along the house, and this year I added blanket flowers.

Here are some photos of what I planted in bloom in someone else's garden.

Autumn joy sedum Source

Purple coneflowers Source

Black-eyed susans Source

Blanket flowers Source

Thing #19 -- I'm Obsessed with Vacuuming

And, I had to look up the spelling of the word "vacuum."

For some reason, I can ignore dust. I can even ignore a dirty wood or linoleum floor.  But my carpet, damn it, my carpet has to be meticulously maintained at least once a week, sometimes twice. 

When I lived with my parents, I used to voluntarily vacuum almost once a day. We got a HEPA filter vacuum as a Christmas gift two years ago, and it changed my life. This vacuum is so intense it makes the carpet stand up and salute -- it actually looks NEWER after its vacuumed.  Ah, bliss.

I clean my house once a week, and by that I mean cleaning the bathrooms, dusting and vacuuming.  Beloved does the hard floors, as he is aware of both my hatred for this task and my ineptitude at doing it correctly. We both clean the kitchen, though the kitchen is so ugly it's not as much fun to clean. My aptitude for cleaning exists in direct relation to the age or condition of the object being cleaned. If it's new and/or shiny, pretty or mine, it gets special attention. If it's the '80s walnut baseboards that I know will soon be ripped off the kitchen wall, eh, screw it.

We had a cleaning service right after my daughter was born, but we got rid of it during our own economic depression a few years ago. Even after it appeared we could probably afford to bring it back, we decided against it. It just made no sense to have downsized our car to save money only to hand it to someone else for domestic services we could probably handle on our own.  Throw in the budding progeny who's old enough to handle cleaning products and it would be ridiculous.  I mean, we can just make her clean the house for free, right?  (I'm joking. She's got no standards. I mean, she uses WATER to clean the shower door.)

Bella the Cat is black and white and is going through her it's-spring-and-I-must-be-FREE shedding ritual. I bought this knock-off Ferminator brush and have been pulling clumps the size of small mice off her back almost daily for the past week. Despite my efforts, my lovely sand-colored carpet has murky spots caused by very tiny, not-quite-clumps of black and white fur.  I know it's not practical to vacuum every day. I know it's not practical to have a long-haired, black-and-white, 14-pound beast of a cat when you are obsessed with your light-colored carpet.  Yet here I stand, wielding my HEPA. Fear not, lovely carpet. I WILL SAVE YOU.

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Companies caught doing good:  Purchase vintage Tide t-shirts and the proceeds go to their Loads of Hope program, which benefits families after a natural disaster by providing them with, natch, clean clothes. The program started after Hurricane Katrina. Make sense to me -- good brand match and good charitable work. Tide gets a star, even though I still don't use their laundry detergent.

The Pain and Agony of a Broken Scale

I have something to admit.  For the past week or so, I've thought I was seven pounds lighter than I really am. 

I admit when I saw that number that hasn't surfaced since college and a time of extreme restraint and veganism and working out an hour and a half seven days a week, I was shocked.  I didn't feel any skinnier than usual.  My clothes weren't hanging off me the way I thought they would if I actually lost seven pounds.  But I wanted to believe. I knew in my heart of hearts the scale was probably tipped or something, but when it happened three days in a row, I started to get hopeful. I thought maybe Hip Hop Abs was a miracle workout or something.  (The infomercial people said so.)

Anyway, today I stumbled into the little angel's bathroom to empty her overnight toilet (okay, it's a potty chair, but she's currently afraid of the dark, so shut up).  I didn't have my glasses on, but I thought, let's just see.  I hopped on the scale but couldn't see the numbers, so I bent over.  Bending over with no vision made me lose my balance, and I fell off the scale.  It said "Error" and reset itself.  I got back on.

Seven pounds miraculously reappeared.  Damn. I KNEW IT.

So now something psychological is going on.  I knew damn well before I hadn't really suddenly lost seven pounds, but the number made me feel sprightly and young again.  Now I feel old and matronly and bloated and mildly depressed. All because of a scale. And my recovering anorexic knows this is dangerous thinking and based in no reality at all, but old habits are hard to break.  I'm exactly the same as I was before.  Not better, but certainly not worse.  Not a big deal.  Everything's fine. 

But that week that I thought I was seven pounds lighter?  I felt like a million bucks.