Happy Birthday To Me

Hey--it's Dolly Mama's birthday today! Go get yourself some balloons and streamers and a piece of cake and have a blast!

As for me, we pretty much celebrated around here yesterday, since the hubby was home and he's not today. Since I had been kind of down in the doldrums, I asked the hubster if he'd mind helping (read: doing every bit of the heavy work) moving our bedroom to a different room. It's a move we've been considering for a few weeks, and I got to thinking that a change would do me good. So, sure! says he. We can do that. So, we start by taking the bed out of the guest room and picking up about a million little toys, sippy cups, pieces of paper, books, and other assorted crapola. Then we started thinking, "Hey--you know, it would be kind of nice if we rented a carpet cleaner and got all the carpets nice and fresh before we do all this switcheroo...."

Next thing you know, our "simple" room switch had turned into renting a steam cleaner to clean 5 rooms of carpet, PLUS buying paint to simply spiff up our new room!

The carpet cleaning meant that we had to pick up 4 rooms worth of similar stuff (filling about one large laundry basket per room), then vacuum on my hands and knees with a teeny weeny wet-dry van because our good vac is at the repair place an hour away, *then* finally get to the point where I could actually do the cleaning. And then I found out that any of the actually stain spots weren't going to come clean simply by running the steam cleaner over it. So I got to clean all those on my hands and knees too!

The painting project was one for the books. Let's just say that the paint I picked, "Sunshine" was, um, a little bit of a BRIGHTER yellow than we had anticipated. Think of the brightest daffodil or sunflower you have ever seen. Or, as my husband says, just think of a school bus. And, then you're right in the neighborhood of how bright this yellow paint is.

I knew I was choosing a brighter yellow than what we had originally had, but I didn't know that the new yellow would make the old yellow seem like white in comparison!

Sadly, now the room's cool, calm feeling that it had that made me want to move in there, has now been replaced with electric yellow, which most definitely cannot remain. So, if any of you are great masters of fixing painting foibles, let me know where I should go from here. I still want yellow, but I want a lighter yellow. Do I just get a light yellow and go over it? Can I mix in some white and make it work? Faux paint over what I already have and somehow turn it into one of those genius mistakes?

Other than that we had a nice birthday dinner and my favorite kind of cake, the kids sang to me multiple times (even the littlest one can now sing the birthday sing very well), I got gifted with back rubs and hugs and kisses, and promises of shopping trips to buy new clothes. Then I got to sleep in my new bright and sunny room and inhale paint fumes all night long. Now I get to go through about 5-6 laundry baskets full of junk, and try to get it all dealt with before Monday when The In-Laws Arrive........

Should be fun!