1 Mother 2 Another

Both girls this year have asked to paint
their rooms, and Brian and I agreed to give that concession to them
as a birthday gift.


Sure, we could shell out five hundred bucks per room to hire
someone to do all the hard work, but what would be the fun in that?
I remember re-decorating my room a few times as I was growing up,
and loved the DIY-ness of it every time. We were operating on a
negative budget, but my mom never made me feel like we were doing
it to save money: painting and moving furniture and sewing our own
curtains was part of the fun of it all.

So I was ready to do this with my girls.
I’ve painted my fair share of rooms, and am more
obsessive-compulsive than the average person, which means I take my
time and do it right, removing light switches and taping neat blue
lines all around the room.


Seriously, bring it on.


Cora and I spent all day yesterday moving furniture, removing
outlet covers, spackling holes, and taping the room. And when I say
“Cora and I spent all day” doing those things, I mean
that I spent all day doing those things while Cora helped a few
minutes, then whined, “Everyone’s telling me what to
do. I want to do what I want to do now. I’m bored.”


Good times.


After I picked Maddie up from school we were ready for a coat of
primer (I told you, I’m obsessive-compulsive and proud).
I’d warned Cora we needed to paint a coat of white before the
pink, and she was amenable to the idea. Cora and I put on our
painting clothes and she got enthusiastically to work.


Too enthusiastically.


Cora got a bit of paint on her hand and looked at me in alarm.
“It’s ok, honey,” I reassured her.
“You’re going to get paint on you. We’ll wash it
off at the end.” Five minutes later, Cora was practically
finger-painting on the wall.


And don’t get me started on the drippies.


Is it too much to ask for a five-year-old to wield a paint brush
with some sort of uniformity of stroke? She was happily slapping on
the paint helter-skelter and I was trying hard not to clean up the
fast-hardening drips all over the wall. I’m cool, I’m
cool, I’m cool, this is fun, this is fun, this is fun. These
were my mantras.


Maddie watched us at first and declared that she’d changed
her mind about painting her room; “It looks like way too much
work,” she said, and slunk off. Half an hour later she was
back, wanting to join in the fun.


Which she did, for about five minutes.


My oldest child became a bit concerned about the mess accruing on
her hands and arms and feet. She would attack a wall with
enthusiasm , which quickly waned in five minutes and she wandered
off to attack another, untouched wall. “Maddie, we have to
all stay together on one wall! We’ll finish faster that
way!” Cora shrieked. Maddie shrugged and went back to her
dilettante style of painting.


Of course, paint was spilled. Of course, it got ALL over the
bottoms of feet. And I’m reasonably certain that, despite my
best efforts and numerous layers of drop cloths, there’s
paint somewhere on the carpet. Tempers got short, dinner
didn’t get made, and clean-up was way more painful than I
remembered – just like always. I’m sure there were
moments when I actually WOULD have paid someone five hundred
dollars, right then and there, to finish the whole thing.


But the room is a bright clean white, and now we’ve got two
coats of pink to go and we’re good. Cora loved it and
that’s really the best I could hope for; in this
instant-access, total gratification society it’s sometimes
hard to show the girls that some things take work to make them come
true. I know Cora will be infinitely more satisfied when she goes
to sleep at night under her cotton-candy pink walls that she worked
hard for than she would have been if we’d just paid a guy
while we were on vacation and we came home – presto-chango!
– to a new room.


Though right now, as I pick primer out of my hair, that
doesn’t sound so bad.