Life Imitates Art

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you'll want to look this one up online because there are video clips that are essential to the post***

To be completely honest, this week did not start out great.  I woke up Monday morning with a pounding headache, chest congestion from you-know-where, and a slew of appointments to cancel or reschedule because of said maladies.  To make matters worse, I was pretty sure that Will's ear infection was back and Matt was leaving that afternoon.  Fast forward to Monday night, and I'm totally having a Clark W. Griswold moment.

Now to be fair, our shitter wasn't full..... it was OVERFLOWING.  Like swimming down the hallway, overflowing.  My family should also take note that it was, in fact, NOT MY FAULT this time!  Anyway, as I'm trying to impede the flow of raw sewage down my hall and keep the baby from crawling through it, I am having a heckuva time trying to get help from the remaining kids.... including the clogging offender.  After the problem is sorta solved, with a phone call to Matt in California, something in me snapped.... BIG TIME.  Cue the next clip.

You must know, that I am not a yeller by nature.  Hold on, hear me out.  I am a screamer.  What's the difference you may ask?  Well a screamer, such as myself, will scream at the kids, or the dog, or traffic or the husband when they make me mad or cause a problem, but like a ride on a roller coaster, it is fairly short lived.  On a normal day, I don't have the breath support for yelling.  It takes a lot of effort and usually requires hand gestures and throwing things.  If you're good enough to make veins in your forehead pop out, all the better.  Well, I must have eaten my Wheaties on Monday morning because the yeller in me came out with a vengeance.  I threw American Girl dolls, Matchbox cars and kicked a few things.  The dog hid, the baby cried, Jack was the tiniest bit remorseful and my girls shared a look that said, "Oh crap, if Mom's this mad, we're really in trouble; she's generally the nice one."  The whole episode ended with me losing my peripheral vision, seeing spots and the migraine from hell knocking me down.  Needless to say, I didn't have any problems getting kids to bed that night.

Tuesday morning arrives bright and early, and after getting the kids to school, I come home to tackle my day.  The night before I had turned the fan on and taped the door closed to the bathroom.  Well, the time was at hand.  After a considerable amount of elbow grease, the dry heaves and some creative swearing, the toilet was clear.  Unfortunately, our bowl runneth over again in the process.  That's okay, sopped up sh** again.  Mopped the floor, sterilized everything, and felt quite accomplished in the process.

Next item on the agenda, the pantry doors.  For some reason (I think there are actually three of them) my doors are continually coming off the track that they run on to close.  Over the weekend, they nearly fell on the baby.  Matt is really good about fixing them, but we find ourselves in the same predicament again and again.  Well, I decided to fix it once and for all.  I ripped those suckers out.  Put up a tension rod and curtains.  Problem solved (and yes they have been hemmed since this picture was taken.)

At this point in the day, I was really feeling like this clip.

Honestly, I had had it.  I decided that I was sick of a few things around the house and I was going to fix them.  Changed light bulbs that have needed to be changed for a year and a half; yep, you read that right.  But that was nothing compared to my next step.

You have to know that I absolutely HATE the carpet in my house.  It is cheap, contractor carpet designed to look good when someone is looking to buy the house, but doesn't hold up, IN THE LEAST to living with a dog and four kids.  What is the worst part?  The stairs.  Besides them being high traffic, my kids have dragged leaking garbage bags up and down the stairs and on Sunday night, Erin spilled a LARGE bowl of Cocoa Puffs down the length of them.  Well guess what?  I'd had it!  After some brainstorming and asking myself "How mad could Matt really get if I recarpeted the upstairs while he was gone?," I headed to the computer and then to the Home Depot.

I did it, or rather, Jack and I did it.  We pulled up all the carpet on the stairs.  

Pretty soon, the stairs looked like this.

My hopes of finding solid wood stairs (I knew there was no way they'd be hard wood) were dashed.  I had pressboard and particle board.  Jack and I went to work and by the end of Wednesday, this is what it looked like.

So in my opinion, this is already an improvement.  And yes, I know that it will hurt more now if we fall down the stairs.  But get ready to be wowed, because this is what I did today.

That's right.... I tiled my staircase.  It looks really cool, if I do say so myself.  The question will be this... will Matt like it?  He knows I've been working hard all week, but he has no idea at what.  I hope that he likes it.  You have to imagine it finished; take off the blue painters tape and add a little bit of grout after the adhesive is cured, but I think it's going to look awesome.  And I did it!  So of course that makes it even more awesome.

I think it's good to have times like this occasionally.  I know that I cannot live like this all the time, but there is something deep within me that is stirred when I take on a project like this.  I can't name what the particular motivation was for this burst of energy, although I'm thinking I may have forgotten to take my anti-depressant on Saturday and Monday night's outburst might be my punishment for that.  Whatever the reason, I found myself in a manic, kick-butt and take name mood on Tuesday and I'm pretty happy with the results.

With all that said, however, my entire upper body is crying and I am ready for a long winters nap..... and a hot fudge sundae.  Good night people!