A life lived one nap at a time

One of the things I've had to adjust to since Liza was born is that I have to fit my life around her schedule. I've always been very independent, one might say almost to the point of being selfish about my time and my ability to do what I wanted when I wanted. I sort of figured that I'd get a laid-back baby who would go with the flow and happily work around my schedule. Ha!

Instead I've got a challenging baby, one who wants to do exactly what she wants when she wants. I wonder where she got that trait? Having Liza around means that the only time I can take care of consuming tasks and hobbies is when she's asleep. Finishing my thesis, refinishing furniture, quilting, writing to friends ... all of these are things that I have to chop up into nap-sized chunks of time. That's a lot easier now that her naps are more consistent; at first there was no way to tell whether she was going to sleep for 45 minutes or 4 hours, which made planning a little challenging.

Taking Liza's naps into account is so prevalent in my internal scheduling that I've started to estimate the size of projects based on how many naps they'll take to complete. Sewing project for a friend? That's about two and a half naps. Refinishing a dresser for Liza's room? That was about six naps and at least two days of Jason taking care of the kid while I was up to my armpits in carcinogenic chemicals (smiling like a giddy schoolgirl the whole time, and not just because of the fumes). My friends sometimes marvel at how much I'm able to get done, and I tell them that it's not that hard if you're really driven in a sick sort of way and refuse to turn the television on before your husband gets home from work.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how my personal life is now lived one nap at a time; I've had lots of time to do that thinking while I painted our hallway. I've been working on this for weeks, pulling out the paint can whenever I have a spare moment. Everything will look great when it's done, but I've been kicking myself for starting the project ... I hate painting trim, and the upstairs hallway alone has five doorways, plus baseboards and crown molding and bannister spindles.

But the tedium of painting has been balanced by the fact that I'm working toward a 20-month-old goal: eradicating the last traces of the boring grey the previous owners of the house painted on every wall in the house. When Sam the Electrician put the finishing touches on rewiring the downstairs hall, it was finally time to pull out the wall paint and get going. His van hadn't even cleared our driveway before that paint can was in my hand! Seven naps, three evenings of intense pre- and post-bedtime painting later, we're just about done. I still have to finish the finicky bits that involve teetering on a ladder at the top of the wall next to the stairs (and paint all of the trim downstairs), but I'm pretty happy with how the color has turned out:

It's one of those odd colors that seems to change depending on the light source and the time of day. So far I've been able to describe it as "peach," "pink," "tan," "mushroom," "grey," and "beige." On the color strip it's actually a warm shade of tan, and it's less pink than the color I was originally going to choose. I think it's a good thing I changed my mind, because the colors we ended up choosing are right at the limit for how pink we could go without having a PINK hallway (which would have upset Jason).

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Speaking of Sam the Electrician, the end of our longer-than-a-year, whole-house rewiring project is finally within sight. It's not gonna happen next week or anything, but I can count on one hand the number of rooms we have left to do. Of course, Sam the Electrician keeps finding lots of lovely surprises the previous owners and contractors have left for us, and every time I hear him sigh heavily I know we've just added at least an extra day of work to the project. My personal favorite so far is that when he pulled the lightswitch out of the wall at the bottom of the stairs, there was another lightswitch floating loose in the wall behind it ... and it was still hooked up and "hot." By process of elimination he figured out which circuit controlled it, and he also figured out that about half of the first floor of the house is also run by that circuit, which is hooked to a fuse box in the middle of the basement. Fun, fun, fun! It's a miracle the house hasn't burned down yet thanks to some of the electrical eccentricities perpetrated by Larry, Darryl and Darryl (as we've nicknamed the "good local boy" contractors the previous owners hired to do most of the work in the house ... badly).

Sam the Electrician has been working on our living room and dining room this week, and we've got the gaping holes and dangling wires to prove it. This morning he was trying to drill a hole from the basement up into the inside of one of the walls so he'd have room to run the wiring up there, and the hard wood of the floor joist was smoking a bit as Sam drilled. The smoke was puffing up the wall and coming out of the hole where the switchplate will go, which is what Zach was watching from a prime vantage point:

That poor cat isn't going to know what to do with himself once all the wiring is done and there isn't so much interesting stuff to keep track of every morning. Oh, well - by then Liza should be walking, and he'll have a whole new set of problems to worry about!