Excelsior!

I got up this morning, checked email, and found a note from my girlfriend saying she can't come over and help me paint after all today. She and her husband are involved in trying to adopt a baby from China, and there's been a hitch in the proceedings that requires them to get a lot of paperwork done *today*.

I completely understand, and I'm not upset with her, but it would have been nice to have her company and moral support today. She has a positive, energetic attitude and a great sense of humor -- the perfect buddy for a big project. (Like life itself, come to think of it. She always has an encouraging, inspiring, insightful - and often humorous - way of commenting on whatever it is I'm dealing with.)

One of my ex's god-daughters is staying upstairs for a while with her son, and she claims to love to do interior design and home improvement and has enthusiastically volunteered to help. I don't know her well enough to know if she'll actually follow through or how long she'll last, but perhaps I won't be entirely without help.

And if I am without help, I can still get this done today. The room is not very big and there is a certain peacefulness to doing a project alone.

Painting with my Kid

I spent about an hour taping the trim in my office (later realized I needed to do the ceiling edge too - doh!), and then started doing the "cutting" -- painting next to the masking tape. My daughter came in several times asking to help. I put her off for a while, because I wasn't confident her eight year-old self would be able to handle the roller. But she persisted, and I finally figured I'd let her try. I didn't expect her to last more than fifteen minutes.

The little critter did the whole blessed room! I taped and cut, and she went to town with the roller. And this was a 12" wide roller, which got a bit heavy when coated with paint. But she did virtually all of the walls, getting up on a chair when she couldn't reach high enough on her own.

We took a break mid-way through, eating chilled shrimp with cheese and crackers and drinking soda while sitting on the floor in the living room. The new couch beckoned temptingly, but we both had paint on us, and so the couch is off limits until after showers. (But it looks gorgoues! It's a perfect fit in the space, and the color is rich and just what I wanted.)

I half-expected her to flake out after the break. Sometimes once you stop moving it's hard to get started again, but she finished the job, including the clean-up.

It boggles my mind that the only help I had today was my little girl and she was all the help I needed. It made the whole job much more fun than it would have been, and brings a new depth to my appreciation of her.