Minky & Me

We plunged into the cornucopia. It was exhausting. Visits from my dad and sister were all too brief. Next year I’m contemplating flying to Paris and saying to hell with the whole thing.

Say hello to the new members of the family.

I, Dad, was out walking this afternoon – Christmas Day – with Minky and Rocky, our dog. Minky said something to me that I couldn’t understand. It was very important though, so she told me the same thing several times, but I still didn’t get it. Rocky trots up to Minky, and eats something (who knows what) out of her hand. Minky says, plain as day, “Thank you Rocky. So nice.” I then realized she’d been saying “hold this” to me, wanting me to take something out of her hand. She felt that Rocky had understood her where I hadn’t.

Minky opened her gift from Papa tonight. It is the most beautiful chair I’ve ever seen. Gigi suggested making a chair and what a chair it is. It’s got her name on it, has pegs on the back for hanging a backpack and a place to put things on the bottom. It came with a backpack that had markers and crayons in it, too.

Renovations, at least where the walls in our new home are concerned, are humming along. Just about every surface in the place had been covered in wallpaper and now it’s all gone.

Wallpaper removal and painting was one of those jobs that we hesitated to pay someone else to do. We thought to ourselves, it won’t take long to remove wallpaper from six rooms. Hell, we can do it in a weekend.

Then like patients recovering slowly from amnesia, we remembered the hell that was removing just one room of wallpaper in our current home. How chunks of the horse hair plaster came off along with the paper. How we had to go out and buy a drum of spackle in order to patch what amounted to deep pot holes in the walls. How we swore under our breath about how awful it was mere moments into the job. There were those stinky solutions that were lathered all over the walls and all the God damn scraping. What we knew would be a one-night-after-work job suddenly turned into our own personal living hell and lasted an entire week.

When the flashback ended, Layr and I agreed that no amount of money would be too much to avoid doing it ourselves.

Tomorrow I’ll post some pictures.

We closed on our new house last week. Renovations have commenced. So much to do I can’t see straight.

Minky is twenty-three months old today. She used the pronoun “I” correctly for the first time this morning. When her grandmother said, “look at the mess you’re making,” she replied, “Lookit-the mess I’m making.”

Usually she says things like, “scare you,” when she really means, “I’m scared,” or “help you,” when what she’s really saying is “help me.”