The Dodge is dead.

The Dodge is dead.

Dead lies the Dodge on the roadside.

A bullet-bolt through its bowels,

A single clunk signaling

The end of Big Red.

Big Red has new friends now, gone to his reward

The “We’ll Take Anything” donation program

Offers complementary towing.

We’ll think of Red next tax season

As he delivers us

One

Final

Payload.

And we will forget that this 1973 model

Is older by only

One Year

Than Dwayne and me.

Lucky’s name turned out to be ironic.  Disobeying all parental guidelines, Lucky was taken out of his deluxe cage to watch TV with the kids…and kitties.  Kids got distracted.  Kitties did not. 

20 hours, my friends.  Lucky, lasted 20 hours. Sorry, cutie.  I liked having a hamster.

Piper is really and truly 8 years old now. After church, we took her to the pet store and got about $70 worth of hamster stuff.  And a hamster.  He was named Lucky before leaving the store. 

Dwayne made me and Jen (Aubrey’s mom) and all the kids the usual spectacular dinner.  Wish I had a picture! 

For her birthday, Piper wanted a hamster and a day at the zoo with Mama (AKA “without the other kids”).  We had a splendid time!  Piper is the perfect child…when she’s the only child.  It is not in her DNA to be a middle kid.  Sorry, Pipes.

 

Admittedly, I’m very biased, but isn’t she beautiful? Happy 8th birthday, darling girl!

To prove that I am a smidgeon smarter than a year ago, we held the Book Fair 2 weeks before Mid-Winter Break (I’m the Fair Chair, for literary and rhyming reasons) and I’m not Room Parent for two classes and therefore responsible for two class Valentine’s parties while celebrating Piper’s birthday.  Wesley didn’t vomit at this party (just good luck on my part, not me getting smarter), and I only had to do one thing at a time that week. 

Just to refresh your memory, over New Years, Dwayne and I decided to update the cabin bath by putting in a new floor and updating the vanity, before discovering that the shower needed to completely be taken down to the logs.  Oh, horrors.  At least, I’ve minimally improved my tiling skills while significantly decreasing our savings.

Before:

Now:

I like it best with the shower curtain closed, but I needed to show off the new tile in the shower. We tiled to the ceiling, and I love it!  And it can never, ever leak.  We did everything we could to make it waterproof, with jetboard between the tile and logs, inner and outer layers of caulk, and everything as tight as we can make it.  Because if water gets through, we’ll have to take out every tile, scrape through lots of mortar, and pry off some well-adhered cement board. 

It’s embarrassing that we’ve been working on this for over a month, but, in all fairness, we can only go over on free weekends. 

Our first renter is coming next weekend.  We need to rent it 16 more nights to break even on the bath.  Another night to pay for the new filter. 125,000 nights to pay for the actual cabin.  Yep, that’s a rabbit hole I just stepped into!

Wesley and Piper’s birthdays are slightly less than a month apart, a mere 4 weekends, so it’s pretty easy to do a combination family birthday party for them.  Even Papa Jim came over for the day!

We hosted a brunch, and Piper got to debut her omelet making skills.  Truly, she is very good—my omelets never turn out as nicely.

Dwayne: Hard part done…Going out for a beer evidently.

Me: Good!  I was just getting ready to check on you.  Call before driving home!  I may have groceries for you to get.

Me:  Bring home compressed air.  Piper spilled sugar all over my laptop keyboard.

Me: And vacuum just committed suicide. Can you bring home a plug?

Dwayne: A plug?

Me: Male, replacement for the vacuum plug that just caught on fire.

Me: Just discovered that to clean up after making no bakes, Piper put dirty measuring cups back in the drawer.

Me: Never mind about last two items.  I’m going to run to McLendons. Not vacuuming a 3000 SF house is a real time saver!

I got the kids down tonight, after a whirlwind of Dwayne coming home late and leaving again to go back to work (it’s an unusual week for him), when I went downstairs to assess the damage of having 5 extra kids playing at our house this afternoon. 

This is what I found. (Well, almost.  This is after drenching it in Oxy-Clean; it has faded a bit).  Blue Sharpie scribbled all over the beige carpet.  That would be the same blue pen I had removed from Wesley’s hands earlier that day with a strong reminder that they belong to Mama and my children are not allowed to use them.

Wesley strikes again.

So far, I’ve spent time scolding Wesley and checking out youtube videos on permanent marker removal.  One actually said to use a dry erase marker—which actually works great to get Sharpie off white boards.  But do you know what’s harder to get out of fabric than Sharpie?  That’s correct.  Dry erase markers are much harder to dissolve, a lesson Kyla taught me years ago.

Using rubbing alcohol, hairspray, elbow grease, and a shampooer, I got it down to this:

It stands out more than you might think, because these 3 square feet of carpet are cleaner than the rest, a perfect canvas for Wesley’s failed attempt at art.

But before I had gotten this far, Wesley came to me and, quite repentfully, apologized to me for writing on the carpet.  Damn it, I taught him that.  And damn it twice, I had to forgive him before I could get the stain out.  I’m sure Glennon Doyle Melton could make a humorous and touching sermon on…something…but all I know is that instead of a peaceful evening getting ready for Book Fair next week, I scrubbed alcohol into and then out of my carpet until 11pm.  I did this sober.

While our rule of “Don’t make more work for Mama” is clearly only half-hearted at best, we have a new motto in our house.  You will often hear Wesley forced to chant “Not all things are toys. Not all things are toys” while I chant “You must not kill your child.  You must not kill your child.” 

It’s quite…melodic. 

Dwayne and I already had our weekend planned, and it did not include completely redoing the cabin shower.  Until it did.

We gathered our materials all week, and as soon as our last brunch guests left Saturday afternoon, so did we. 

Saturday:  Earlier, we researched and found that the greenboard we put on was not going to be adequate, so we ripped everything out. Again.  Then we put in an approved waterproof jetboard and made the decision to tile all the way to the ceiling with inadequate amounts of tile.  Dwayne and I love to keep it interesting!

Here is why it’s important to keep the shower from leaking.  Those are the logs.  Bad form to let them rot.

The jetboard is on, still needs to be taped and mudded (with thinset).

Now to turn this into a beautiful shower!  No pressure.

Piper looks happy there, but here’s the message she left us during a time out when she had found the tile separaters.  (Those who have a difficult time reading the font, it translates to “I want to go home!”)

Sunday: After returning home Saturday night, as we had a house guest and Sunday church duties, we ran up to the cabin again to tile.  It took us until after 10pm, but this is what it looked like sans grout.  Going up to the ceiling was probably a good idea, and I really like the accent tile.

Piper was both a frog and mouse helper, delivering tools to Dwayne and I as we called for them.

Monday:  Dwayne wanted to stay but had too many meeting Monday morning, so he returned home on Sunday night.  The kids had no school on Monday, so I woke up the next morning at 8am, put cereal on the table for the kids, and began grouting. 

Even though I swore up and down we would run out of tile (bread and fishes, we were able to finish tiling with a few scraps and miraculously few bad cuts), I didn’t consider worrying about having only two buckets of grout.  We needed 3, so I called Dwayne, who discovered the nearest distributer of that grout was in Everett.  Dwayne left work early, stopped to get grout, and was there by 4:30 to help me do the last wall and clean it all up.  I finished the sink backsplash, and now the last few details for another day seem much more finite.  We may actually get it all back together in one more afternoon, including cleaning up all the dust we created that probably is coating every blessed log in that blessed log cabin. 

Here’s the almost final result.  Ignore the complete lack of faucets.  The grout was still curing!

Infinitely superiour to the dingy white plastic we had a few weeks ago.  I wonder when we will do a project that we actually plan for? 

I know, the lights make it all look yellow-ish, but I was trying to show how the two tiles complemented each other.