If you’re coming to this party please don’t look in my closets

The thing about throwing yourself a 30th birthday party is that you’re in charge of taking care of all the prep work.  

We stay so busy that we usually wait until we’re having people over to do the big jobs like cleaning the carpet and painting walls.  In some ways our house looks like we just moved in.  We still haven’t replaced the pictures that we took off the living room walls when we painted two-and-a-half months ago.  It’s just there always seems to be something more important to do, like feeding children or sleeping.  But of course, now that we’re having this big party everything has to be done.  

I have a history of this behavior.  The whole first year of Sebastian’s life I spent in a daze of trying to find my place as a mother.  And since we moved into our house right before he was born we didn’t get the things done on the house that we wanted to – like painting rooms and whatnot.  A month before Sebastian’s first birthday I decided that I wanted to paint this hideous room at the back of our house that was covered in wood paneling and a dated (as in ’80s) farm scene paneling.  We should have had ample opportunity to finish but that room was a time and paint suck of epic proportions.  Yes, I was still painting on portions of it the day before his party.  

So I’m trying to avoid that type of extreme situation.  I’ve been doing a little at a time, here and there after the kids go to bed or when they’re napping.  I’m not painting, but I am trying to organize and straighten and hang wall decorations. 

Last Friday we decided to take care of some big projects – cleaning the carpet and replanting the flower beds in front of the house.

We got a late start because we had to drop the kids off with their grandparents and then stopped for a quick bite to eat.  After that we had to go to the store to rent the carpet cleaner and buy the plants for the beds.

I’m just going to take a minute to complain about those stupid flower beds.  They’re too big and too shaded and I don’t have the know-how to make them into what I want them to be.  So it took me awhile to pick out what to buy, even though my choices were severely limited by the lighting situation.  It’s basically a hosta garden is what I’m saying.

So by the time we got home we still had to move everything off of the carpet and straighten up a little.  I didn’t get outside to the beds until 9 and I worked on that while Chris worked on the carpets.  Most of my landscaping was done in the dark and I had to move things a couple of times because I kept changing my mind.  I had to quit around 10:30 or 11 because I was getting light-headed.  It was still hot and I’m not used to that type of physical work.  

The next morning we got up early (after staying up late because we couldn’t wind down) and were at it again.  And just so you know the flower bed didn’t look the same in the morning light as it did in the moonlight.  Some plants had to be rearranged.  There was cussing involved.  But no tears at least.

So I’ll probably be up late every night this week trying to wash walls and weed gardens and stuff random bits of junk into closets.

I’m thinking that by the time the party is here I’ll probably be so exhausted that I fall asleep around 9:30. The guests won’t care as long as I have enough alcohol, right?