Angry Sunflowers~

So I told Jack the next project was at his house. I even specified that it should be his bedroom. We vaguely discussed colors and ideas and then a few days later......WHAM! A gallon of paint, a new border, and a package of rollers are there. Already. Jack is very project focused. I should keep this in mind for the future and make sure to only mention something if I want to spend my next weekend actually doing it. Lesson learned.

In all actuality, I don't mind the bedroom project. One - because it is a relatively easy project and Two - the sunflowers were out to get me. Let me explain.

Jack has done some type of work to almost every room in his house. His bedroom is the glaring omission. I don't know if it is a boy thing and he doesn't appreciate the wonder of a bedroom sanctuary or if it is just that no one sees it so why bother, but the bedroom was just left to its own devices. Which meant that about three quarters of it was bordered with these very aggressive sunflowers. Now I have nothing against actual sunflowers, but these ones are big and bright and angry looking. I know that sounds weird- but these sunflowers are right in your face with all their ugliness, daring you to say something. They are rogue, bully sunflowers that have been around since 1982 silently glaring off that wall in mute protest of the endof Milli Vanilli. They need to die. So I will happily be digging out my painting clothes again today and murdering sunflowers.

They will be replaced by pinecones that at first glance appear much more peaceful. I take no responsibility for the pinecones, Jack picked them out all on his own. Because he deprived me of shopping for borders with him and just did the boy thing and went out and bought one at the first store he went to, I am withholding judgement and/or approval until I see it on the wall. I can't endorse something I did not specifically organize or pick out. It is against control freak dogma. So if you thought the home repair blogging was at an end because my floor was done.....no fear, there is lots more to come.

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Floor Plans: The Last Frontier

The final floor pictures. At last. And as we entered the home stretch Jack and I were cuddling at the end of the night and he says....so what is our next project? I said I didn't care as long as it was at HIS house.

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Floor Plan Pictures~

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Floor Plans 3

The saga continues....

So once I had established that my floor was more work than one woman could handle, I did the sensible thing and appealed to my handy boyfriend to help bail me out. He was glad to help (I think he is secretly thrilled to have a project to play with, but that could be my imagination) and has vast more amounts of knowledge in this arena than I do. Here is the only thing...

When you ask someone to help you that actually knows the right way to do something - all of a sudden there are many more steps to a project. And by many more steps, I obviously mean more work. Doh. Unexpected physical labor. Oops.

So what I thought was a quick sand 'em up, slap on a coat of poly job now has evolved. Jack convinced me I needed to pull off baseboards, then I had to repaint them - which meant unearthing old cans of dusty paint. Which then lead to painting the bottom edge of the wall where it wasn't painted. Now I feel like since I have the room empty and the paint out I might as well fix the stripes on wall that have needed touch ups since right after I moved in, so I spent my morning taping off stripes. This afternoon I will be filling in cracks with wood putty and hopefully rocking out one of the stripe colors on the wall. Tonight after Jack joins me we have an hour of sanding to do and a coat of stain. Tomorrow another coat of stain, more stripe painting, and reapplying baseboards. I would like to believe that is it, but I am not getting my hopes up. Hopefully I can have furniture back in there by the weekend. Pray for me.

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My Valentine~

I don't do mush well. So it goes without saying that Valentine's Day is not really my best holiday. Not that I don't like it, but the overwhelming mush of it all sometimes makes me feel like a Valentine Scrooge. (Especially last night when I had to fight through the mob of wild eyed, crazed looking moms fighting for the valentine packages just so I could get a heart shaped peanut butter egg.) Don't get me wrong- I love romance and flowers and Kenny G playlists as much as the next girl. But after a decade of dating in the real world, I am way too much of a realist to suspend belief for the day and believe in fat, winged babies shooting people in the ass to make the world a happier place. However...

This Valentine's Day is not only mushy, cupid day- it also marks six months of dating for Jack and I. Sometimes I find it impossible to believe we have been dating that long already - and other times it feels like we have been together forever. So I am feeling not exactly more mushy, but maybe more sentimental than normal. That does not mean I believe in fat, winged babies, but it may inspire me to find racy lingerie and wear it to Jack's with a trenchcoat and hooker boots. Of course, that is really just standard Monday night entertainment....

All kidding aside, (and me putting on hooker boots on a weeknight after being with kid since six a.m. is definitely a joke - so you can breathe again Mom) Jack and I will be spending our Valentine's Day barricaded together in his house with steaks and red wine and pajama pants and probably large amounts of pink and red peanut M&M's. It should come as no surprise that I love the parts of Valentine's Day that are comfortable....or edible. It is a testament to how much I love Jack that I am even willing to share~

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Timeline of a Relationship~

In the beginning, we try hard. We exfoliate, we curl, we lipstick and whiten and pluck. We clean our cars and our houses and our lawns. We do our nails – hands and toes. We curl up on the couch in the most flattering position – the one that hides our extra love handles and pushes out our cleavage. We stock up our purses with lip gloss and breath mints and other emergency supplies. We try to put our best foot forward, say the right things, dress to impress.

Then we get comfortable.

We start shaving every other day instead of every day – you can barely feel it anyway.

We resume using ponytail holders and ditch the more intensive make up. Goodbye eyeliner.

We have the break through night in where we trot out the pajama pant look, ruining the fantasy that we really sleep all the time in sexy nighties and thigh highs.

We talk about our periods.

We admit we don’t like their crazy friend.

We begin to roll our eyes when they find yet another sporting event on tv.

We stop wearing the heeled boots that make our ass look good and yank back out our comfy tennis shoes.

We break out all our favorite foods that make our breath stink – for me, sour cream and onion stax. Yummy. But smelly.

Men should take all this slacking off as a compliment actually. I don’t feel the need to impress you anymore, I feel comfortable enough in our relationship to know you aren’t in it for the sexy clothes or perfectly curled hair. I feel safe enough with you to be myself, the way I am at home on the days I am not with you. There is no longer days where I have to ‘pretty up’ because I am going to see you – which means that you see me an hour earlier than before. Not that I won’t pretty up from time to time, but I no longer feel the need to do it all the time. I am secure enough in us to believe you are going to stick around when you see my hair without styling products. So here is the message men should take from this : the worse I look when I come see you, the more I love you. Enjoy the extra hour of me in my sweatpants.

Snow day~

Ok -technically this is several days post-snow day, but this is my favorite moment of my lazy Saturday afternoon:

Jack's six year old son runs into the house where his sisters and I are relaxing on the couch and yells, "Stephanie! We are building the coolest snow tunnel ever! (Insert more gushing over snow forts/fights/tunnnels here)" And then he runs back outside. I laugh and doze back off.

Fifteen minutes later....

Jack walks in the house, grinning like a little kid. "We are building snow tunnels! (Insert more restrained gushing here) We may be out playing all night!" And then he is gone.

This is exactly how I have always wanted my Saturday afternoons to be. Thank God for Jack.

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Bikinis in Winter~

If there was ever a time where it was glaringly obvious to me that men simply do not think like women, it would when Jack asked me to go swimming. In January. Granted, it was an inside pool with a hot tub and I like water. But I am willing to bet that if you asked any woman to go find a bathing suit to go swimming with twenty four hour notice in the middle of winter….she would react the same way I did in my head where Jack couldn’t see or hear. WHAT?!?!?!?

My brain frantically began cataloguing all the reasons this was a bad idea. One, I am almost albino white by the middle of January once my summer tan is completely dead. Two, my skin is super dry on a normal day – and this bitter cold day that was probably the driest of the entire year had leached whatever little moisture I had left. So I am white, flaky, and dry. Three, winter shaving. Any woman that tells you she shaves the same way in the winter as she does in bathing suit season is either lying or has waaaaay too much time on her hands. Or she is truly Superwoman. So now I piss off my super dry, super white skin by trying to super shave like I haven’t in months – which naturally results in angry red razor bumps that show up beautifully against all the albino that is my skin. Perfect. And I am not done yet.

How about the fact that even though my elliptical machine is in my living room I haven’t used it in probably two weeks? Or that I have ate fat-sucking carbs day in and day out all week in the form of pizza and breadsticks? Or that I recently discovered how much I miss full caffeine, non-diet Coke? Or that Jack and I have been dating almost six months so I was lulled into that comfortable stage where you don’t worry so much over dimples that no one can see anyway? Or that I hadn’t looked at any of my bathing suits in months, much or less looked at myself in one. Bathing suits never look the same from season to season – how in the world am I supposed to have one magically ready in twenty four hours that will instantly transform me from a water-retaining, carb bloated, flaky dry, red bumped, dimpled albino into anything resembling sexy and attractive???

Of course I said none of this to Jack, because that would make me look like the insecure, typical, body conscious woman that I am, but try not to be. Instead I said – sounds like fun! And I pulled out my drawer of bathing suits, braved the mirror in a bikini, breathed a sigh of relief that I could actually wear it in public without feeling like I need a mask to disguise my identity, and I went swimming. And it was fun. And I forgot all about everything that I had obsessed about for the past twenty four hours and enjoyed myself. And later that evening, Jack gave me one more example of how men and women think differently when the only comment he had about the way I looked in my bathing suit was …..hot.