Life Behind the Curve

A few *cough* of you have noticed I’ve been AWOL from the world of social media recently. (Katie, I’m glad you don’t have to look up what this means anymore.) See, as it ends up, I may be willing to tell the world about my problems but I’m not so into sharing those of others. In vaguely general terms, someone who is close to me has been going through a trying time medically speaking and I have been doing what I can for my family to be there, both physically and emotionally and frankly, it’s been draining. (Many, many thanks to those of you who have been around to help out, both IRL and virtually.)

Though the past month has been a bit rough, it’s also demonstrated yet again why I am absolutely, 100 percently, with all of my heart devoted to Scoot, my very own super hero. People who know us see him as an introvert and me as an extrovert and think we get along because opposites attract. What they don’t realize is all the weird ways we’re alike as well. One of those is in how we deal with hardship.

See, we both become slightly obsessive…and during this last month that’s played out by us painting and decorating the upper floor of our house. It’s bizarre sounding, I’m sure, but bottom line is that painting into the weeeeeeeee hours of the morn’ allowed us to spend time having some difficult, but important, conversations.

We took this time to paint our bedroom (in celebration of our anniversary), Bop’s room (that we never use because he sleeps with DJ), and the playroom (which is now, 100% BOY). The theme of this room was born when DJ said he wanted it to be red. Of course we wouldn’t paint the whole room red, especially because two of the walls can be seen in our very open floor plan from our stairs, bedroom and hallway. We made a compromise: mommy got to pick the color on those two walls, DJ got his red wall and we settled on blue for final wall. With colors like that, what theme would work better than a super heroes one?

The Back Wall

(I’ve made my mom promise to sew covers for the pillows that are *supposed* to be on this couch to represent their five favorite super heroes)

The Window Wall

This is hands down my favorite part of the room, because really, what good is it to teach a young boy to admire a super hero without empowering him to become one on his own? (Vinyl lettering courtesy of It’s Written on the Wall on Etsy. It was originally designed in a rectangle shape but I was able to cut the words apart to make a single line.)

That desk holds the boys’ new netbook that I referenced in my last post. I’m planning on getting some shelves from Ikea to go over the desk to hold the workbooks that they love to do and some pens/pencils/markers. (BTW, if you’re wondering, those bodies hanging on the wall are outlines made in 2007 at DJ and Bop’s daycare…they’re a bit bigger now…heh.)

The TV Wall

We got these vinyl super heroes from Roommates Peel and Stick Decor. They were half the price of a Fathead and are a nice, thick vinyl that sticks well. (Please don’t comment on how Wolverine could really be moved up and to the left a smidge…I know…my OCD side is already obsessing about it and I’m pretty sure it will win out before day’s end.)

The Hidden Wall

My boys don’t understand that there’s a difference between Marvel and DC Comics and as a die-hard Batman fan, that breaks my heart. But, this isn’t my playroom, it’s theirs, so we tried to balance the two as much as possible. Also…you see that red wall? That was created with ONE COAT of Behr’s Primer + Paint. Seriously…we bought this because the woman working at the Home Depot paint counter lamented with us on a previous visit how much it sucks to paint a wall red (we’ve done it before…it took FOUR coats). We had her color-match the Martha Stewart Living color we had chosen (this wall is Maine Lobster, the other two are Yellow Magnolia and Azurite). One coat. That’s it. I’m still amazed.

We may have a weird way of dealing with difficult times but hey, at least our kids get a cool playroom out of it, right?