Yesterday Dan and I set out for Home Depot; it turned into an impromptu date because nothing keeps kids outta your hair like a trip to a home improvement store. With almost everything on our list now safely stowed in our car, our optimism was bubbling over like… like… well, like we’d never met our-nonproductive-selves before. The Friday plan for the weekend was to have all the trim installed in our sun room; by Sunday afternoon I was just hoping for a light in the new closet, the bar hung in said closet and the hooks installed on the new hockey lockers.
It’s now Monday evening and we’ve read the installation instructions for the light and packed it back into the box, we decided to build a shoe shelf in the closet before hanging the bar and, to that end, have marked where the studs are in the wall and we have about 67% of the locker hooks out of the packaging laying on the lockers. Reeeeaaaal go-getters.
Alternatively, I’d hoped to make Monday my bitch…. The best laid plans, right?
I cleaned the bathrooms. Eight hours… 2 bathrooms – my level of motivation truly knows no bounds. The downstairs bathroom did, however, involve a seat change; I can’t even describe the weird seat that came with this toilet. (Neither seat compares to the Dinnocenti’s – now THAT, my friends, is a toilet seat). Now… I’m not saying I have a great ass, I’m not saying I have a bad ass but I will say this: the ass that fit comfortably on that stock seat is not of the homo sapien variety. I wanna meet the people who decided the design of that seat was a good concept – they gotta be stretch-cotton-pants wearers, no way their asses slide into jeans or khakis.
The odd design did not stop at discomfort, it was a bitch to clean. I won’t go into detail just know – as a potential visitor to my home – you, too, wanted me to change that seat.
As I promised to play catch with Cal once he did his chores and I finished the bathroom (his reaction to this proposition made me feel guilty that I don’t make the time more often), he was quick to help with the seat swap. I sent him for a twisty wrench – I have no idea what the real name is, my dad’s been calling them ‘twisty wrench’ since I first said it circa 1977. Anyway, the only such wrench we could find is probably better suited for removing dump truck tires – I seriously felt like Alice in fucking Wonderland… and, while we’re on the subject, why are toilets wedged into such small damned places?
Alas… it was not my shining mom moment; I hated on the small space and I hated on Dan in absentia (for not having better tools readily available, for not doing the seat swap, for asking me to marry him, etc.).
Fast forward to dinner and our discussion about pant leg length. Abby has no preference, Alex and I enjoy extra length, the boys like the cuff to just scrape their shoes – this length makes me irrationally angry, I mean to the point of name calling. As I was telling Dan how dumb his pants are he glanced under the table at my cleaning attire and retorted (with a dangerous air of self-confidence), “as opposed to your elastic gathered pant legs of fleece? I mean… have you just given up on life or what?”
I chuckled and said, “you have no idea how much I loathe you right now…”. Cal almost spit out his food he was laughing so hard, “Not as much as you hated him in the bathroom earlier, mom. You were all ‘I hate your bleeping father! Bleep da bleep bleeping toilet seat that your bleep father would take 6 bleeped weeks to install !’ hahaha she was so mad Dad! She was callin’ you some names in there today!”
“Uhhhhh sometimes buddy, we just keep stuff between us…”