Little apprentice

I well overdid it today. Did far too much, kept going far longer than I should have, not giving body a chance to get over this cold and it felt like I'd been got by a fresh cold virus by evening and had to resort to paracetamol for the first time in months and months. It did the trick though and saw me through the evening, even if I did stupidly pick a paintbrush up and try to keep doing stuff!

So today's picture is an iPhone one. Before we cracked open the paint. Just haven't stopped long enough to take any proper pictures and it's not really the most sensible thing to do to get the DSLR out (or even your phone camera) when your 3-yr-old is wielding a paint-laden roller, no matter how much you'd like to record the moment!!

So today - made soup (veg all prepped yesterday), iced yesterday's cake, scraped loads of niggly bits of leftover wallpaper off a wall (with Ben's help - he did a great job scraping the odd bit off where I showed him!) (it took a long time though and really wasn't worth the effort given how much more Steve scraped off when he got home - Ben saw him scraping and told him to stop because mummy would get sad at all her paint being scraped off, bless him!), sized the wall (again with Ben's help - he did a brilliant job with his own small roller loaded with paint), and raced off to get the car to meet Steve at B&Q to buy paint which they didn't have on the shelf so got reserved for us at another store which we then raced to pick up and in the end never got round to using this evening anyway as there was simply not enough time left after finishing prepping the wall. So many bits of paper to remove and so many tiny holes and cracks and blemishes needing filler.

We did paint one wall though, one of the freshly plastered ones which hadn't needed a great deal of filling of blemishes. Was a bit taken aback at the sheer yellowness of "ivory" paint but it looks like it's drying a lighter colour...! The fresh plaster sucked all the moisture out of the paint really quickly though despite having been sized once already, so the other sized walls got another watered-down coat as well before we finally turned in. Hopefully they'll be ok to paint properly tomorrow evening.


Ben's been great today. My little apprentice. Hoovering up, using his scraper properly to scrape bits off the walls, using a fully loaded roller to help paint, only getting mildly covered in paint in the process! He's still not had a bath and I really must do something about that. He enjoyed the chocolate cake - I went into the front room at one point and it looked like his slice of cake had exploded so out came the dustpan and brush... And he liked his yellow soup (carrot and coriander) as well which is a relief since I made it specially for him as he announced he didn't like red soup (tomato) on Tuesday. He did say he didn't like carrots ("those ones") when I was prepping the veg but acknowledges they're ok once cooked and pulverised!!

As I'm back-blipping I can say now how I hope today (Thursday) will be less exhausting. Baths, a pedicure, a trip out (chauffered by Hayley) to look at pretty Christmas stuff, and then home to do as little as possible (well, pack hospital bags better, I suppose) before Steve gets home.

Really hope we get some extra help tonight for a big push on the bedroom. It's been kinda nice having Steve to myself the past two evenings but we're now almost two days behind despite Steve working flat out and me doing my best to help.