1.)    I got married at 23 and was with child almost instantly. Given that I was committed to a life of independence, or at least a few years of selfish yuppie traveling with my husband, I’m shocked that not only this went down this way, but that it’s been so fantastic.

2.)    Decided to become an Almost-Stay-At-Home-Mom. I used to think that I needed a career and two high incomes to be happy. Turns out I need a toddler who likes to wipe his runny nose on my husband’s side of the bed.  :)

3.)    I assumed that everyone else at my leadership retreat in high school was going to go on to sing the second verse of “This Little Light of Mine.” Apparently not. I sang the whole thing by myself because I don’t believe in trailing off into the distance. Everyone thought I was amazingly confident. Nope, just proud.

4.)    I got locked in a relative’s bathroom when I was 3 or 4 years old and a fireman had to come through the window to get me. The cause was not knowing how to unlock an old fashioned door, and not knowing my right from my left. (Yeah, telling a 3 year old to turn something to the left is not very helpful.) I was still having to right ‘R’ and ‘L’ on my hand during Driver’s Ed.

5.)    I told a cab driver who was hitting on me, in Spanish, this entirely fabricated story about how I wasn’t dating because I was in mourning….for my husband and children who were killed by a car bomb back in Ireland. I never really did learn the fine art of “No, thanks” when it came to guys. I just got married, which is the perfect deterrent.

6.)    When I was working at a corporate job, and my new manager was treating me like something stuck to the bottom of her shoe, I took her car keys off of her desk and dropped them in the Lost and Found after she had taken the train home. I only regret that it was on her husband’s birthday, as this meant she noticed the missing keys long before the office was empty and she was able to catch a ride to the train and catch an early train. My plan had involved a long walk in the cold to the train station, and a nice two hour wait for the 9 PM train. I’m surprised I did this, and I’m surprised I don’t feel bad about it.

7.)    When I was a junior in high school, and very much in favor of being liked by my teachers, I took a look at my classmates who were forming themselves into pretzels and trying to mimic the posture of the rubber animals the English teacher had handed out, said “this is bull****,” walked out, and homeschooled myself in half of my subjects for the rest of the year.

8.)    I had a fight with my mom, right before I turned 20, she said “It’s my way, or the highway,” and I moved to Mexico for a month.

9.)    Despite being a major league tightwad, I didn’t learn to love buying clothes at rummage sales until this summer. A light went on when I bought 15 new Ann Taylor, Eddie Bauer, Land’s End, and Express sweaters for $.75 each.

10.) I bought a hideous pair of black cowboy boots while traveling, for the obscene price of ~$80 USD. I let them smolder in the back of my closet after being worn 4 times, and then sold them on eBay for $26. The surprise? Someone else wanted them and I was happy to get 32 cents on the dollar.

Today, my husband and I decided we really wanted to get the garage painted. He had worked hard to get the drywall up, and we both felt stressed out by the heap of junk in the center of the floor. With a two-year-old around, we normally can’t both work at outdoor projects. Wolfie is just too prone to wandering off, picking up stinging insects, eating rocks, and other bizarre baby behavior. So, we called up my parents and found that one of my siblings was eager to come over and babysit.

While Libby was watching Wolfie, Fierce and I tackled the garage. We realized that we didn’t have all the supplies that we thought we had, or they were buried someplace. So we ended up splitting the labor in odd ways. He rolled the walls with primer, while I scooted around the floor and edged the walls. Because we only had one paint tray, I made many trips around the heap in the center of the garage to get another swipe of paint.

Eventually, when I had exhausted the edging possibilities, I ran to the store and bought more brushes, paint trays, another can of primer and brushes. Since we still have to paint three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the kitchen, and a hallway, I had no doubt these would be used.

After a long break, during the time when Wolfie was supposed to be napping but was instead running around the bedroom with a miniature statue of the Infant of Prague, saying “Baby, Baby!”, we put Wolfie down for a late nap and headed out to the backyard for a powwow.

Fierce had been trying to put up a free swingset, but it was close to impossible to figure out what went where, and to remember how many beams he had left in the ground the previous October when he dismantled it from the donor’s house. We had decided that because the set was not coming together well, because it was so huge and our yard so small, and because we live one block from a good park and five blocks from a great park, that we would find other uses for the wood. After taking a trip to Growing Power in Milwaukee, an urban garden that makes soil from 100,000 pounds of donated compost materials a week, we decided to build a compost bin. After listening to “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” on CD, and watching the movie Fresh, we decided to build some raised beds.

While Fierce pulled apart the wood and laid out the beds, I painted the garage a light blue. I know that garages are almost always painted white, but Fierce bought one gallon too many of the blue paint needed in our living room, and rather than wasting it, or using it reluctantly on one of the bedrooms, we decided to paint the garage. We didn’t love the shade in our living room as much as we thought we would, but for the garage, it’s fine. Plus, compared to the stained brown drywall that we were used to looking at, it’s a treat. It’s a semi-gloss with primer, so the high quality paint is finally covering up some deep greasy stains that had surfaced through seven spot-applications of primer.

Fierce finished his work about 20 minutes before I finished mine. He woke up Wolfie and made dinner. When I came into the house, I was exhausted and my blood sugar was low. My hands were aching from the roller and looking down, I realized that I had blisters on my palms.

Wolfie was not happy about the paint on my hands. Fierce, the neat freak, has taught Wolfie to say “Ewww,” and “Yick yick yick” in the face of dirt. Wolfie kept pointing to my paint stained shirt and letting me know how offensive it was. “Ewwww!”

After Wolfie went back to sleep and I had showered, Fierce and I hung out. I felt closer to him than I had in a long time, and I realized that because my tasks include tutoring outside of the home and doing a lot of highly-repetitive, highly-redoable tasks inside the home, like making bread and folding laundry, Fierce is often left with little support for the huge projects he has to undertake. Admittedly, I can be a little bit of a drill sergeant. I want my raised beds, my compost bin, my painted and organized garage, my flower beds, etc. and I want them yesterday! Because I had worked alongside Fierce for the first few hours, and then finished our manual labor and freed him up to hit another one of his goals, he was in a generous mood and I felt really capable.

It isn’t that I think my cooking and cleaning aren’t as important as his renovating and gardening. I know that what I do is really important and because we need to eat, fairly urgent. However, having a child has made it a lot harder for me to do anything that doesn’t allow me to keep my son in sight at all times. Getting a little help this afternoon made a big difference, because it allowed two of us to work diligently for three hours, and helped me feel up to the task of finishing the garage.

I realized a few things today. One, I really do ask too much of Fierce. He already sets high goals for himself, and I often feel like “It would only take an hour or two to install those shelves, and then my life would be awesome.” He ends up feeling that he has to tackle all 42 household renovations at once, by himself. Two, I need to set up regular family babysitting so that I can work alongside Fierce more. Our spheres are too separated, and it’s hard on both of us. Working together was refreshing after such a long stretch of doing most things separate. Three, many hands really do make light work. Fierce and I finished painting the garage today, and he did a considerable amount of yard work and planning. Even if I can only arrange one afternoon a week to tackle projects with him, we should be able to get most of the big, cheap projects completed by the start of the new school year. Having me on board means that he can power through some of the drudgery, or have a second set of hands and eyes helping with something tricky, or finish a project that takes a lot longer alone.

Because I want so badly for my house to be a sanctuary, and for my family to eat wholesome, fresh foods, I am highly motivated to get everything done immediately. However, because I spend my mornings tutoring and my afternoons watching after Wolfie, I end up placing a lot on my husband with little regard to how much I’m really asking. Working alongside him today reminded me of how exhausting manual labor is. My body is tired and sore, my hands are blistered, and I know tomorrow will be even worse once the aches set in. But this is what I expect my husband to do every afternoon, by himself. This is what he has been doing, even during the school year, after getting home from work.

I’ve rarely found it this enlightening, productive, fulfilling, and romantic to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

So, the odd thing was that I was seriously looking forward to fall, since I would be working far less under my new schedule. Now that I teach one day a week, and tutor seven hours a week, I have the time to tackle things that have been on hold for a long time. These include, in no particular order:

• Organizing cabinets, closets, and drawers. I see no particular reason to live in disarray.
• Reading the whole Bible. I am terrified of dying before I finish, and having to explain to God that, while I did have time to watch 10 seasons of Law and Order SVU, six seasons of Medium, six seasons of 24, six seasons of House, five seasons of Bones, five seasons of Law and Order Criminal Intent, and two seasons of Lie to Me, as well as countless other little episodes of stuff I don’t even like, I did “not have time” to read His book.
• Dusting and vacuuming (with my fancy new Dyson canister vac) every surface imaginable. This is not as neurotic as it sounds. When you don’t do a good job at this for the first six months of living in a recently renovated house, the grime deposits on very high or very low or very awkward surfaces rivals that found in a crypt.
• Finishing my book. It’s fiction, geared at 12-16 year olds, about a boy who time travels with his aunt and uncle. I have over 40,000 words out of 70,000 words done, and I really need to sit down and finish.
• Finish getting down to my best weight, which is 140 pounds. I’ve lost 10, and have 10 more to go. My plan? Low Glycemic eating, since I don’t want diabetes anyway.
• Crochet, knit, or sew something for my soon-to-be-born niece or nephew. I craft because I care!
• Can a year’s worth of tomato sauce, pear butter, apple sauce, and as much produce from local farms as I can.
• Eat locally, organically, as much as possible.
• Make at least one local friend, my age, who wants to spend time together in person. Or make one of my local friends want to spend time with me, but this might be considerably harder.
• Find a way to volunteer for my church, preferably doing something that nobody else can do. Not to be arrogant, but since I have some rather unique skills, like penny pinching, writing, and alphabetizing socks, does it really make sense for me to be a Eukie? (Eucharistic Minister.)

In short, I would like to be a rock-solid Catholic with a small flock of children in my attendance, who happens to be intellectually stimulated by both tough books, and the traditional feminine arts. Or something like that.