Weekended

What I Did
This weekend was almost entirely filled with one thing: tearing my dining room apart.

When I was still working the dining room (really the “dining corner” in my open-plan apartment) was strictly for the daycare kids. Little kid table, little kid chairs, cupboards full of little kid toys and little kid art on the walls.

After my maternity leave started the dining room found a new use: JUNK STORAGE. All the boxes and bins of things I didn’t know what to do with cluttered up the space, and when I added in a grown up-sized table and chairs it just became even more crowded and messy. I’ve been developing a lot of nebulous plans on ways to make it into a better looking and better organized space for adults AND kids once I go back to work in the fall (unless we win the lottery in the next five months, fingers crossed), and this weekend I decided to just GET TO IT.

I’d already made a little progress- in addition to painting the table & chairs, I’d had Sym empty out all the cupboards daycare toys, throw away anything broken or damaged and put everything else in a single bin that’ll go out to the storage room until September.

On Saturday I went through the kid craft cupboard and threw away everything crappy (ie everything but a stack of coloured paper, a box of 64 crayons and some pompoms). Once all the cupboards were empty I moved them out of the dining room area- one is going to be painted green and moved into Sym’s room, the other I already sold on craigslist for a cool $25. I also took down all the drawings on the walls. Once I was done I had almost a clean slate of a room…

The downside being that I’d actually just moved most of the stuff into the living room.

OOPS.

Anyway, now that the room is cleared I’ve been filling all the holes and dents in the walls in preparation for painting. I’m going to do it the same light yellow-green as the living room, and mount a couple Expedit shelves on the walls as fauxdenzas. Right now they are being bookcases in the office and are full of Taylor’s comics, but I moved the huge Lack bookcase out of Sym’s room into the hallway (which is why I’m painting that one cupboard green for her room) and Taylor is going to move his comics there. It’ll hold sixteen comic boxes, plus it has space on top for our board/card games, freeing up more shelf space for video games. I’m also going to be making Taylor a SUPERDESK three meters long and streamlining my side of the office to just one desk and fewer shelves. Basically there’s a whole furniture moving/rearranging/repurposing thing going on around here!

On Sunday I continued spackling holes in the walls and also the ceiling, as I decided it was time to say goodbye to my rope light chandelier. About half the lights had burnt out and it wouldn’t have gone with my new plan for the dining room. I ended up putting the old fixture back up, but without the hideous shade so for now I just have a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

LOVELY. I’m planning on buying a simple shade and also maybe covering the cord and painting the base because WOW even without the ugly shade that fixture is still ugly!

What I Ate
All the work I’ve been doing around the house didn’t leave a lot of time for doing much else this weekend, least of all cooking, but I did make a pretty good dinner on Sunday night. Usually I don’t make anything as it’s just me, but Sym came home early from her dad’s and I woke Taylor up and forced him to eat.

This was just a store-bought potato & leek soup that I zazzed up (yes, “zazzed” is the scientific term). I have a problem with the texturelessness of most store-bought potato soups, so I diced up a potato into 1cm squares and boiled them before adding them into the soup to make it more interesting and then topped it with cheese, bacon and green onions.

What I Watched
On Friday night we spent family night watching Wreck-It Ralph, which we all liked. Taylor did feel like it was manipulating him via childhood nostalgia, but I didn’t play video games as a kid so I didn’t have that problem.

One thing we need to work on for family night is TIMING- we started the movie at a totally stupid time and had to pause it in the middle for half an hour to give Gwen her bath and put her to bed.

Also, today Gwen is five months old! So far she is celebrating by refusing to have her afternoon nap.

Taylor told me that she almost rolled over from her front to her back this morning, which would be a great milestone for her to reach today. This whole rolling onto her front, getting stuck and frustrated then barfing and rubbing her face in the barf is getting pretty tiresome for all of us. I also wouldn’t mind if all the teething & drooling she’s been doing for the last couple months actually showed some results ie TEETH. You can do it, baby!