Pillow Talk

I've been absent from the blog-o-sphere (again) for a very good reason (honest!)

We're moving.

Well, not moving house, exactly... but there is a serious re-shuffling happening inside the house we already live in.

My husband is moving his office home, not only for economic reasons, but also so that he can be here next year while I return to university to complete my post-graduate studies. In order to make room for his enormous desk, filing cabinets, book cases, and maze of electronic equipment, we have had to move the girlies' playroom.

And the less said about THAT re-shuffling process the better.

Suffice it to say that my children have WAY. TOO. MUCH. STUFF.

Toys'r'us has NOTHING on our collection.

And, if I weren't so exhausted from moving stuff from one floor to another, carrying furniture to-and-from the loser cruiser and shoving it around across the hardwood floors (screeeech!!), running up and down ladders, rolling gallons of paint onto walls and ceilings, and replacing electrical outlets...

I'd have one HELL of a garage sale.

But lucky for the girlies... their mother IS too tired.

I think what finally finished me off was coming home from teaching my literacy programs at the library on Saturday afternoon, and discovering a large, white toilet sitting smack in the middle of the downstairs hallway, in front of the mudroom door.

During my two-hour absence from home, my handimaniac of a husband apparently caught the renovation bug, and decided to rip out and replace the bathroom floor.

Dust?

Check.

Sludge and slime and unmentionable bacteria-spreading that the World Health Organization would be fascinated to examine?

Oh, most likely.

The kind of disaster one wants to return home to after trying to corral 30 four-to-eight-year-olds on a gorgeous, 27-degree Saturday afternoon, and attempting to convince them that they really WANTED to be stuck in a classroom reading books that they couldn't have cared less about had they TRIED??

Ab.so.lute.ly. NOT.

Oh, it was a weekend, all right.

On the up-side, after much marital strife, battles that involved industrial-strength adhesive, large, lethal power tools, and exhausted every last syllable of my fruity and fluent knowledge of swear words...

The new floor looks fantastic.

By eleven o'clock last night, the bathroom had been put back into some semblance of order, sanity was restored (well, as good as it gets around here, anyway), and weary bones were dragged off for a long, hot soak in the upstairs bathtub.

I had just switched out the light and snuggled into bed, when I heard my husband's trade-mark elephantine thundering up the staircase. He sneaked into our darkened room, closed the bedroom door, and enveloped me in a warm embrace.

Him: (whispering tenderly into my ear) The toilet's overflowing.

It's not so hard to be married,

When two maneuver as one.

It's not so hard to be married,

And Jesus Christ, is it fun.

--"The Little Things You Do Together" by Stephen Sondheim