acting like a child

Vacation is the perfect time to act like a child - only in a wide-eyed, life-is-an-adventure kind of way. Not with temper tantrums or pouting.

In our defense - here are all the things that went wrong (on the way to the campsite.) We found ants in the camper because chore boy didn’t vacuum it out very well from the last trip. There is a random dead mouse smell for the same reason above. One boy busted a two-gallon water cooler and spilled 2/3 of the contents on the camper carpet, so we spent an hour in the Fleet Farm parking lot sopping it up with our beach towels. Our resident bloodhound smelled transmission fluid. We drove 100 miles without air conditioning in 94-degree weather because there may have been a loose wire on the alternator. And we very nearly avoided salmonella poisoning from thawed chicken breasts when we had to shut off the fridge due to the issue above.

Truth be told, in a few of these instances, we probably didn’t act like adults. Okay, in most of them. Packing four kids (okay... six) in a camper to drive 11 hours is stressful enough, but when things go wrong (which they just will), we lose our cool.

Thankfully none of the boys seem to have picked up on our low stress tolerance and are able to endure much more than we can. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches four days in a row? No problem. Listening to your older brother beat box incessantly. A little bit of a problem. But, the heat? That was a problem. Perhaps they were worn out by the sauna we were driving or their father's recollections of summers without air conditioning weren’t well received. Either way, you never saw eight eyes light up so fast when they learned we were meeting up with Grandma and Grandpa so they could ride in their air-conditioned camper the final 20 miles to the campground. All four of them were ready to ditch us.

The good news is that (tantrums aside), vacations are intended to allow you to act like a child.

You can sleep in a sleeping bag - even if you’re freezing cold or boiling hot. You can wear flip flops until someone peels off half a toe nail. You can collect rocks and steal ziplock bags from Mom to house your collection. You can go to bed late and get up early. You can hang out with your cousins and snag snacks off Grandma and Grandpa. You can go airborne on your bike. You can try to catch fireflies.

And you can do it all over tomorrow - or as long as the vacation lasts.

It’s nice to have respites like this in our too-serious, too-stressful adult lives, where we can act like kids (in more ways than one.) Besides, as one of the not-so-young-adults perceptively realized - you remember all the times when things go wrong anyway.

That’s the stuff camping trips are made of - flat tires, no air conditioning, gobbling down all-you-can-eat pizza while the camper is being fixed, enduring sunburns and gross showers and maybe even a burnt marshmallow or two. Hopefully, our children will remember things like spilled water and not that Mom and Dad had a “discussion” in the parking lot.

God grant them selective memories.

bathroom progress

Who would have thought it would take me nearly nine months to get this project finished? Nothing moves fast around here, unless it's boys chasing boys when they're fighting.

Tiling is tedious work, especially when you take a wall down because you forgot you wanted to put cubbies in the shower.

Then I decided I didn't want to put the tiles all the way to the ceiling, so I had to mud the walls above to smooth them out to match the sheetrock.

And I had planned to put the tile all the way around the edge of the wall, but ended up deciding it would look funny, so I had to put a sheetrock corner in. First time I'd ever tried that. Wasn't too bad. Just made a mental note to put more mud behind the paper/mental corner next time so there wasn't any air bubbles. Also using at least a 5" putty knife is key, proving once again that bigger actually is better.

I'm pretty happy with my solution for not being able to use the granite backsplash. I used extra pieces of slate from the flooring and the tile design in the shower. The stones were a first for me - but they went up just as easily as the lady from The Tile Shop said they would. Rough up the back sides with a file and stick them in mortar. Easy as that. I cheaped out and made the outlet covers myself. It took me a full day to do all four. Not exactly time well spent, but it didn't cost any extra money. Same goes for the edge tiles - I spent a lot of time sanding the edges to round them down.

The grout in the shower was another case altogether. Apparently I used too much water or too wet of a sponge when I wiped the tiles down after applying the grout. The color ended up looking almost like a pasty white, definitely not the beige I was going for like on the backsplash.

Here's where asking a lot of questions comes in very handy, as does being fully ready to admit that something went wrong when you go back to the home improvement store with all your questions. Turns out there is a cool product called Grout Renew that actually paints the grout with a sealer and covers up the too-light color that I created. And even better, I was able to choose a different color that was closer to the actual color of the tile for a more uniform look. I used a small paintbrush to paint it on, but it wasn't an quick process.

I could only paint small sections at a time, so that I could wipe off areas that I put too much on before it dried. It will stick to tile and it will be very difficult to get off. It looks just like the grout was that color to begin with and keeps the texture of the grout intact. Would definitely use it again, but hopefully next time I'll not remove all the coloring out in the first place.

The only other thing I'm not sure about it how well slate will hold up in a shower, but I sealed it at least six times just in case. I'm not thrilled with the sanded caulking that is supposed to "match" the grout. Mainly because it doesn't match - it's much lighter and took FOREVER to dry.

Update: Two years later and there is still a couple spots where I got the Grout Renew on the slate and it hasn't come off, in spite of multiple showers every day, so I'm fairly certain it will hold up as advertised. Also, the slate still seems to be waterproof - in other words, water still beads up on it and doesn't soak in. I don't think that would be the case if it were a slate floor in a shower, but on a vertical surface the sealer seems to be holding up fine. I read somewhere you were supposed to re-seal once a year, but I haven't yet. 

Also, a note on the caulking: it has refused to stick to the edges of the tile, in spite of being redone once along the whole long side of the tub about a year ago. At this point I've left it until I can do it quickly before we're gone for a few days because it will likely take 72 hours to cure. It's frustrating because I took the time to clean all the tiles after grouting and sealing and it still didn't stick. The tile guy at Menards told me I should have used rubbing alcohol to clean the edges, but I've never, ever had to do that before. I'm left to choose from another brand of caulking or to use the shiny white stuff, which I know won't look as nice. The brand of caulking I used came from Home Depot, so I will definitely not be purchasing that again. I'll probably visit a tile shop to see what they recommend.

boys say the funniest things...

‎"There's one thing that fweaks me out Mom."

"What's that?"

"Jumping off the Eiffel Tower."

Didn't even have a response to that one.

take me out to the ballgame...

Apparently I am either too old or too uptight for baseball games. Or rather for YOUTH baseball games that drag on an interminable six innings. Four-year-olds do not belong there either. They are too young to follow the lack of action and too old to be distracted with a Tootsie Pop. A three-year-old might take an hour to get to the bottom, but a four-year-old will down it in two minutes.

But perhaps it’s just our four-year-old.

His oldest brother is playing baseball for the first time this summer. And Dad is helping to coach, which makes it next to impossible for him to keep eyes on the ball and the little clown running all over the stands, in the batting cage and chasing the random cat that keeps showing up trying to do his business in the outfield. (Believe me, he’s in no danger of being hit by a pop fly there.) So that means that Mom gets dragged along to the ball game to watch three boys who have little to no interest in watching 11- and 12-year-olds make errors and strike out. They’re probably just as bored as I am - the only difference is they are more capable of creating their own fun and they don’t care what anyone thinks about their diversions.

Here’s all the fun a four-year-old can find in six innings:

Game #1 - He discovered there was a water fountain behind the concession stand. By the time his brother’s team was 10-run-ruled after four innings, he looked like he fell into a mud puddle. He was wet from his outgrown buzz to his good tennis shoes. Apparently, he was too short to reach the water fountain’s spurt, but tall enough to reach the button and stand in the water’s reach as it soaked him and a 10-foot radius around. After that, he decided to play in the batter’s cage, with sand and dirt. I was so proud. So was he.
Game #2 - He spent most of the time collecting chunks of asphalt as his “special rocks” to take home. When I told him they weren’t rocks, he said that it was okay, because he wanted to make us a tar driveway.

Game #3 - He entertained the mom of a boy on the opposing team by discovering his shadow. (Yes, perhaps he’s a little late with this revelation - he doesn’t get out much.) But really all he cared about was her attention and trying to make the shadow as big as possible, and then make it dance around.

Game #4 - I looked over to see him leading a group of five older boys in the chicken dance - didn’t matter that they were within sight over nearly every person in attendance. I should find a chicken costume and dub him the unofficial Red Team’s mascot, but I really don’t want to encourage him.
Game #5 - He discovered sunflower seeds when a friend bought a bag for them all to share. He was given explicit instructions not to chew the entire seed, but to spit out the outside. After making him practice, he was allowed again to roam. But a half hour later, he came up to my friend and I and announced that he “could too” eat the whole thing and that it didn’t hurt when he swallowed it. So much for scare tactics.

Game #6 - We stayed home.

So what’s God’s game plan? He doesn’t seem to be answering my prayer to get me out of going to the game, so maybe he’s trying to teach me something. Humility perhaps? Or to appreciate the value of a four-year-old who provides entertainment while entertaining himself? Or maybe how to have fun for two hours at a baseball game?

Next game, I’ll be singing my own song: “Take me out to the ball game. Keep my boys off the field. I bought them some peanuts and cracker jacks, but somehow they still find their way back to get, get, get into ‘trouble.’ Now I just missed a double. For it’s one, two, three boys and FUN at a youth ball game.”

Feel free to join along in the fourth inning stretch.

donations

I love the public library system. Millions of books at my disposal - and it's even better now that everything is online. I can search for books to my heart's content - click a link and presto! the books are waiting for me in a neat stack a few days later. Books from three counties away are trucked to my little library that is only four miles from my front door. Amazing.

I am continually in awe that I can read books and watch movies for free.

Only lately, it's not been so free. Right now I have $9.30 in late fees that stacked up because one random movie got stuffed underneath a pile of magazines to recycle. Six days later, I realized it was there. Do the math - that's a buck a day for a movie that was so old it wouldn't have even sold for $2 at a garage sale.

Whenever the library has its little $5 fundraiser, I politely decline. Mainly because I know that I've already contributed five times that amount over the past year because of books that somehow manage to disappear exactly the same day they're due. I must be picking popular books too - because rarely will the system let me renew online. Someone else has requested that item. It even happened on an Aaron Copland CD! Who listens to classical music anymore? Other than homeschooled kids who are forced to learn music history.

I fail to understand why my $5 donation could be tax-deductible, but my $25 late fees aren't. It's all going to the same place isn't it? I should write a letter to my representative. Maybe he can do something about this travesty of non tax-deductible donations to the library that I make on a regular basis.

I guess the only difference is that I'm not making them voluntarily. I've got better things to spend my money on, like Redbox rentals that take me three days to watch and all the gas I spend driving to town to drop off one book at a time when I finally find it.

My life is all about donations. I'm just not getting any credit for it - I'm getting debited.

boys say the funniest things...

‎"The only difference being a dad and a grandpa is being slow."

The only problem is figuring out which one is the slow one. :)