A Jen Too Many

Yes! We are getting air conditioning! And (insert happy dance here) it's going to cost $2000 less than we were originally quoted.

I wound up getting several estimates, and quickly noticed that they fell into two categories: $6,000 and up, and hovering about $4,000. The smaller companies gave us the smaller quotes, with the same guarantees, warranties, and service promises as the larger companies. My sweetie reminded me that we used to have a neighbor who did this sort of thing, so we called him, too. His quote was not only the cheapest, he was the one who was most willing to spend time explaining things to me.

You only get one guess who we chose.

The new system will go in on Tuesday, instead of the two weeks everybody else was telling us to expect. My old neighbor has connections, which is a happy making thing, because I am getting so hot, and not in a good way.

(Insert picture of me, pouting, with limp hair and my shirt sticking to my back.)

You know why southern belles went around fainting all the time? No air conditioning, and corsets. They weren't fainting - they were passing out from heat exhaustion.

You can blame this one on my sister.

1. My PDA
I went for years without a PDA, never feeling the need for one. And then my husband upgraded to a cellphone/PDA combination and I decided to appropriate his old one. I'd been eyeing it for awhile and had started thinking it would be a pretty handy thing to have around.

Thus is a monster created.

I actually wore out the first one I had, and insisted on getting another one of the same model, a Palm M130. It's old, but the faceplates are interchangeable!* And since it's so old I can pick up cool accessories really cheaply, like this portable keyboard that I can keep in my purse for those moments when writerly inspiration strikes. (Cannot write with the stylus. Must have my keyboard. My thoughts go faster than my fingers when I can't type.)

I go everywhere with my PDA It's either in my hand or in my pocket. Although I do tend to put it down in absent-minded moments and then forget where, which leads to me wandering around the house, searching frantically, begging my family to tell me if they know where it is. When my first one broke I practically went into withdrawal and when my second one got dropped in water last night I had to work hard to keep a firm grip on myself. (But it dried out by this morning, and it works, it works!!)

I do have to admit, though, the biggest attraction it holds for me, and what I use it for the most is

2. Ebooks
I discovered ebooks before I discovered my PDA, but as delightful as it was to find all sorts of free books out there, it drove me crazy that I had to sit at my computer to read them. Not a problem anymore! 90% of my PDA use is as an ebook reader. That's why it goes everywhere with me - I'm constantly reading. (Note to self: no more reading while washing dishes one handed.)

Not that I don't have other forms of entertainment. I'm thoroughly hooked on

3. Netflix
I have to admit, our subscription to Netflix is almost entirely for me. For years I never went to movies, and I love movies! Going to a movie when you have a nursing infant, however, is not a fun thing to do. I only tried it once. It ended ... poorly. (Apologies to everyone who was wondering what the crazy woman with the crying baby was doing at The Lord of the Rings.)

It does take two hands, but no more, to count the number of times I've been to a movie in a theatre since Oldest Girl Child was born. I just wait for them to come out on DVD.

The problem with Netflix, though, is that it preyed on my fascination with

4. Loki
I have had a Loki-crush since I was a little girl reading Norse mythology. The other gods were interesting, but it was the stories about Loki that really made me sit up and take notice. As the years went by I read everything I could find that featured Loki. My favorites were the stories that represented him as misunderstood. It's kind of difficult to justify a crush on the Norse god of evil, after all.***

Netflix ties into this because they kept suggesting a series called Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok to me. Every time I logged in, there they were, in my face, pushing Loki, daring me to try it in spite of the fact that it was

5. Anime
I used to think anime was so stupid. I was familiar with Pokemon, because The Boy Child was heavily into it, and I thought it was cute enough, but, my heavens, the style was so annoying, and couldn't they draw people that actually moved, instead of just using one picture per conversation?

No. No. Never. I would never watch anime without the impetus of a child with whom to watch it.

But ... it was Loki. I succumbed. I rented the first disc. I rented the second disc. I upped our subscription so that I could get the rest of the discs in the series without waiting. I stayed up late watching them, was grouchy with family members who interfered with my watching them, and when I finished the series I sighed with satisfaction and then started looking for more great series.

Princess Tutu? The duck, who turns into a ballet student, who turns into the superhero ballerina princess? Sooo much better than you would think from the description. Really. Not stupid at all. And a really wonderful, sweet

6. Romance
I adore love stories. I first encountered romance novels in high school, where they had a huge display in the middle of the library, chock full of ancient Harlequin romances. Lots of dominant men, stupid women, and fighting as a substitute for passion. What was a 15 year old girl to do? I gave up science fiction, I gave up fantasy, I gave up mysteries, and I got scolded by my teachers for rotting my brain. I didn't care - it was looove! Not to mention hot guys and a discreet amount of heavy breathing that never went beyond searing kisses.****

Even now I love a good romance novel. There's a fairy tale quality about them that appeals to me, especially when life isn't going well. A nice, uncomplicated happily ever after can really lighten my mood at those times. It's hard to find any, though, that don't embarrass me. I really do prefer not to know all the, ahem, details.

Plug for a friend - Cari Hislop - books that are quirky, funny, romantic, and worth

7. Staying up late
I hate sleeping. There are so many interesting things I could be doing instead. Especially since I started this mommy gig. I need alone time the way other people need air, and the only way to get it is to stay up late. If I get up early, so does everyone else. But if I can stay up until they've all fallen asleep, then I can have hours to myself.

Unfortunately, this leaves me pretty sleep-deprived, since my children never let me experience

8. Sleeping in
Oh, lost heaven of waking up without an alarm! Sleeping in anymore means getting up at 7 a.m. instead of 6 or 6:30. To think I used to regularly sleep in until noon on Saturdays when I was a teenager, and resented my parents rousting me out of bed any earlier. Dad always used to call me Sleeping Beauty, which just infuriated me.

Now, on Saturdays, it isn't just my kids dragging me out of bed, it's

9. Yard sales
Hee hee hee. *rubs hands together*

OK. I'll admit, I have to watch myself. I bought a bowl with a hole in the bottom once, just because it was only five cents. What can I say? It was marked down from 25 cents!

On the other hand, I get fantastic stuff, for almost nothing. Especially children's clothing. It's getting harder now, because the girls are getting into the ages where kids tend to wear things out, but every time I find a nice pair of jeans for 50 cents, it's worth the gas spent jaunting around town that day. And I got two complete sets of matching twin bedding for $5 last spring, which is making the girls' bedroom oh! so cute!

Of course, all this stuff just feeds my passion for

10. Organization
You would think this was a good quality. Hah! Well, it just all depends, doesn't it? Me, I am the Mad Hatter of organization. "Move down, move down!"

I tend to accumulate too much stuff (like fabric) and then I have to figure out what to do with it to keep it from taking over the house. So I organize it. I organize my frighteningly large collection of Tivo'd shows I mean to watch someday. I organize my To-Do lists. I organize my food storage. I organize the clothing one child has grown out of and the other child hasn't grown into.

I especially do this when life is starting to feel out of control. Not that I actually accomplish anything. I don't get rid of anything. It doesn't make anything else in life better. In fact, it uses time I should be spending on more important matters. But, it makes me feel better and I wind up with the illusion of some sort of control over things. I might not have working air conditioning, but by gum! I can find any ebook I own, all organized according to author.
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*I found a place online that was selling them for five cents each, so now I have seven, two of them red.**

**It's bright and cheerful. Also easy to find when I forget where I put my PDA.

***Can I help it if I find Trickster types attractive? You have to be smart to be a Trickster, and intelligence is mmmmm, yum. Dearest - I admit it. I married you for your mind.

****Very important since boys still made me fairly skittish. Non-threatening, that was the keyword, if I'd been self-aware enough to put it into words. All my crushes were on boys that looked like they were still pre-adolescent.

It's been beautiful weather lately. Temperatures in the 70's, not too hot, not too cold, comfy shirtsleeve weather, with just a bit of a nip at the cooler temperatures to keep you awake.

Which is a very good thing, because we don't have any way to heat or cool our house right now and won't for at least another week. Our heat pump has died - at least, the compressor has.

"...the compressor windings are internally shorted ... also the crank case heater is bad" We also need a "3/4" rotor lock" whatever that is.

The company we called when we realized the air conditioning had stopped working, has quoted a price of $2800 to replace those three parts, but that's just the starting price, because they "cannot determine if any other components are bad at this time." In other words, they can't turn it on to find out if anything else is broken.

A new one will cost us anywhere from $5800 on up. It will, however, be higher efficiency (something called a SEER rating. Our current heat pump is 10 SEER, which they don't make anymore. The lowest rating being sold now is 13 SEER.) It will also have the advantage of being new, and therefore having such nice little details as a warranty, which this one hasn't had for three years. We can also get one with new-fangled cooling juice instead of the old-fashioned kind which is going to be outlawed soon.

I am working on getting quotes from other companies. I confess to having indulged myself in fantasies where another company will quote us some delightfully low amount to repair our current system ("Three thousand? They told you three thousand? Well, shoot, ma'am, we can do this here job for three hundred!") but I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're going to have to suck it up and resign ourselves to the ugly truth. This is gonna hurt.

On the bright side, though, we're sure saving money on our electricity right now!

Oldest Girl Child walked in the door from school the other day, with a distinct swagger in her step. So distinct, in fact, that it was almost a dance. It was a walk that screamed, "Look at me! Something special has happened and I am proud of myself!"

She also had a purple clip in her hair, heart-shaped, with purple ribbons hanging down. I knew it wasn't ours, and I knew she wasn't in possession of it when she left home, therefore, "Ooh, that's pretty! Where did it come from?" I asked.

With a little hop of excitement she ran over to me, talking a mile a minute. Her teacher does this thing, where if a child is unusually good, they get a sticker. Get so many stickers and you get to choose a prize from the prize chest. She finally had enough stickers, and the hair clip is what she chose.

Oh, so proud of herself! So excited to tell me how good she's been! She actually got two stickers that day, exactly how many more she needed to get a prize. For the first, she had been the only one standing quietly in line. For the second she had been the only one to answer when her teacher asked a question.

It's so much fun when they have a success. I love getting to rejoice with them. I wish all parenting could be like this.

Tomorrow will be school photos. On her instructions, we braided her hair before bed, so it will be wavy and beautiful in the morning when we brush it out. She is planning to wear her purple hair clip on one side, so we will remember this triumph every time we look at this year's school pictures.

Youngest Girl Child informs me that she is going to have four children. The first two will be named Sunshine and Sunshine. They will be twins. The next will be named Rainbow and the youngest will be named Carly.*

Ooooohkay.

By the way, she also has her husband picked out already. He's a little boy from her preschool class. I don't know his name, however, because, "I forget."

On the other hand, she asked me today what would happen if she got lost. I told her if that happened she should go to a police officer and say that she was lost. The officer would ask her what her name was.

"What would you tell him?" I asked her.

"YGC!" she told me.

"And what is your last name?"

"YGC Wyle Mitchell!"

Huh? Umm, no.**

After a few more attempts with no success, I tried a different direction. "What's Mommy's name?"

She answered immediately. "Mommy!"

Hmmm. Let's try again. "What does Daddy call Mommy?"

She thought a little longer about that. "Honey!"

Well, at least my child is learning about treating your spouse lovingly.
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*Carly is her best friend and a preschool classmate.

**Needless to say this was nowhere near accurate, or I wouldn't be putting it down here. I'm not sure where it came from, but I couldn't convince her to say our actual last name. As far as I can tell, however, she was mispronouncing her middle name as the last name and our last name as the middle name.

When your daughter starts moaning, and then asks, "Is this chapter almost done?" it's a pretty sure bet that she's still too young to fully appreciate The 101 Dalmations.

Because we don't. All we know is that she is some sort of relative and/or ancestor from my husband's mother's side of the family.

I don't even know enough about history to date this photo. If I knew more about hair and clothing styles I could guesstimate a year or decade, and then we could look through our genealogy and figure out who she might be.

So. Any clever types out there who can look at that and say, "Oh, yes, that's 1910!" or "Definitely 1860." Because I'd dearly, dearly love to get some kind of idea about who she might be.

Beautiful, isn't she?

UPDATE: A friend wrote me to say that in her fashion-history-expert experience, this woman's dress and hairstyle are from the early 1900's probably 1900 - 1910. Evidently that particular hairstyle is called a Gibson Girl. Here's a how-to, if you want to try the style for yourself.

Thank you, Cari!

I just finished filling out Oldest Girl Child's Scholastic Books order form. $31. Of course, as I pointed out to her father, we are getting 9 books for that amount. (Actually, I pointed out to him that we were getting 8 books for $27. That was last night. I decided to buy another book this morning.)

The one that OGC is the most excited about is Barbie and the Diamond Castle. Bleagh. That's really my only problem with Scholastic. I do wish they wouldn't have so many Merchandise of the Week books.* I'd like to buy classics and books that are going to become classics. I'd like more books that aren't related to anything my daughters might have seen on TV. Scholastic has plenty of classics, sure, but every time we get one of these catalogs, I have to spend a considerable amount of time dissuading OGC from buying all the books that I am snob enough to regard as junk reading.

Yeah, I admit it. I am a children's book snob. I hate, hate, hate, all the Dora, and Disney, and Scooby, and Pokemon, and Sponge Bob, and all the other Merchandise of the Week masquerading as books. Bleagh. Naturally, those are the books OGC is most enthusiastic about. When she comes home with the latest school library book, it is all too frequently one about a toy or tv show. It makes me grit my teeth when I read it at bedtime.

I am enthusiatic about Duck for President, and How Do Dinosaurs Go To School?, and Will You Read to Me? which OGC rejected, but which I added this morning, because, darn it, I want it. I'm sure she'll like it when I read it to her. Or Youngest Girl Child will. If nothing else, I'll like it, I'm positive.

Ooh, ooh!! Another good book I read recently is Hold Onto Your Horses. Such a cute book, about teaching a little girl to think before acting on her impulses. My parents were always telling me, "Hold your horses!" so this tickled me right away. Follow the link to get a free PDF file of the book.

You know, I just realized. I write about books a lot, don't I?

Maybe I shouldn't get into the story about my first experience with picture books, then. OK - you dragged it out of me.

First grade, my class's first visit to the school library. The librarian sat us down on the floor and started showing us all these stupid books that had pictures, but no words. I especially remember Harold and the Purple Crayon, which just annoyed me beyond measure. I'd never been exposed to picture books before and was seriously offended. There was no story! Just pictures! Where was the story? Don't tell me to make up the story in my head. That is not what books were for, I knew. They were for words, and for stories, and while pictures were very important, they were by no means all that was necessary. What was necessary were the words!

Finally, she let us go, and we wandered off to look at books for ourselves. Now, I can't help thinking I'm not remembering this correctly. If I am, they must have waited until well into the school year to take us to the library for the first time. Otherwise, I'm conflating two experiences, because I know I learned to read pretty quickly, but it still took a few months.

As I recall it - and I am quite sure this happened in first grade, just not sure if it was indeed during that first library visit - I had no interest whatsoever in those infuriating picture books. (I can still remember just how upset I was that they had cheated us with picture books instead of a story book.**) Instead of staying with the other kids, I wandered off to another area, where there were books that looked much more promising. I pulled a nice fat one off the shelves - Ben and Me - and started reading.

It was great, all about this mouse and Benjamin Franklin - I wasn't too sure who Ben Franklin was, but I sure thought the mouse was funny. That was when the librarian came over and tried to take the book away from me. That was a book for bigger kids, she explained. It was too hard for me. There were better books for me over there with the rest of my class.

I panicked and held onto the book. She was going to take it away from me! I wanted to read it! I didn't know how it ended! Luckily my teacher, Mrs. Sizer, came over right then.*** She let me prove that I could read the book by having me read a page of it aloud to them. They talked over my head for a while, then let me check it out. I also got permission to go to the big kids' section whenever I wanted. Although I do remember being very nervous the next time we went to the library until I was sure nobody was going to snatch me away from the interesting books.
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*Granted - Barbie is not exactly Merchandise of the Week. But you know what I mean.

**I didn't learn to appreciate picture books until I was an adult. Now I think Harold and the Purple Crayon is cute and clever, but for years I hated it passionately, remembering how deeply insulted I was at being told to read picture books instead of "real" books.

***Mrs. Sizer was the coolest. That wasn't the only time she went to bat for me. I adored her, and still love her dearly, to this day. I sure wish I could tell her how great an influence for good she was in my life.

It is the Season of Birthdays here in our house. They start in September and keep on until January. There's a lonesome one out there in the middle of nowhere in the spring, to give us all a lift and legal excuse to eat sugar, but that's it. It all comes down starting -

Five, four, three, two, one -

Now.

The girls are practically beside themselves with excitement, Youngest Girl Child especially. She has been asking me when her birthday is since, oh, 30 minutes after opening the presents for her last birthday.

Oldest Girl Child went through the same thing, at the same age. We endured a full year of at least weekly petitions to know when was her birthday coming, and was it today? Tomorrow? Next week? It was only one year. I guess she was old enough on her next birthday to realize that it was going to be a loooong time before there was another day just for her, and it was better to focus on the upcoming Christmas presents.

I am hoping (oh, so hoping!!) that YGC will stop this after her birthday, too, because I can endure a year of this. I'm not so sure I can handle two years.

Meanwhile, I was foolish enough two years* ago to promise YGC she could have her first birthday party this year (the same age at which OGC had her first birthday party.) Unfortunately, what one does the other wants to do, and neither is old enough to grasp that a birthday party two years ago is equivalent to one your sister is having this year. So, OGC is having a party, too.

The RSVPs are piling up for the first party, and the numbers of guests are mysteriously increasing. What happened? And will I survive?

Maybe I'll get lucky, and a black hole will swallow the Earth before the day of the party.
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*Note to self: Never again make promises two years in the future. It is not comfortably far away. It is coming at you all too quickly and you will hate yourself.

Last Friday I went to Oldest Girl Child's school and read to her class.

It was terrifying.

I signed up to do this at the student orientation the week before school started, when the teacher gave the parents the handouts of the class rules and the kids learned where their classroom was. I was excited. I like reading aloud to my kids. In fact, now that OGC can read, I often find that I have to restrain myself at bedtime. She wants to practice her new reading skills by reading the bedtime story, but I want to read, too! So I sit on my hands and keep my jaw clamped shut while letting her read.

A week ago I got the note from the teacher letting me know what day and time she wanted me to come in - Friday, from 3:00-3:15.

15 minutes to fill. I started timing myself reading aloud, and do you know what? Most of my favorite stories to read aloud take about 6 or 9 minutes. Longer books take much more than 15 minutes - at home, we break those down into chapters and read them over several days. Since I couldn't see getting to come in every day for a couple of weeks, that ruled out My Father's Dragon and The Wizard of Oz. Winnie the Pooh seemed too young for first graders. Eventually, I wound up digging out Rootabaga Stories* which I bought a few years ago, and then found out the girls were too young to really enjoy it. (The wandering off and playing while I was reading was a real tip off.)

I selected the story very carefully (How Bimbo the Snip's Thumb Stuck to His Nose When the Wind Changed), and practiced reading it aloud several times, working out hand gestures and motions to use to keep the kids' attention. I picked out a back up story, too (Never Kick a Slipper at the Moon), because the Bimbo story only took nine minutes. I was hoping the last three minutes would be taken up by things like the teacher introducing me and getting everyone settled down.

Off I went, fearing and a-tremble, first arriving too early at the school (20 minutes) and then (after deciding to use the extra time by checking out a sign I'd passed, saying PEARS HERE) almost arriving late. In the end, I got there right on time, trepidation making me breathe a little too quickly, and accentuating my natural clumsiness, so that I was tripping over things like desks, chairs and tables as I followed the teacher over to where the kids were sitting on a mat in front of a small chair. Not an adult-sized chair. A kid-sized chair. Placed so close to the kids that it was practically on top of them - and then the teacher moved it closer.

So I sat down, looming over the front row, hands shaking as I opened my book, voice failing me as I tried to tell the kids what the title of the story was. My daughter grinned and waved at me. I smiled back and felt a little better. I cleared my throat and started again. Then, of course, I read much too quickly. I was halfway down the second page before I took a breath. Trying to calm down, I took a second, deeper, breath and tried to read the next sentence a little more slowly. I scooted the chair back a little. I shifted to sit back more and stop hunching in the chair. Gradually I stopped shaking, and started making eye contact with the sweet little faces staring up at me. I made funny gestures and gave the right words the right emphasis.

And then I finished and there was a lot more than six minutes of my time left. So much for timing myself in my preparation - and a good thing I'd prepared a second story! I read my next selection, doing much, much better than the first story. Only, there was still time left when I finished. I grabbed for my original choice, a story I'd considered but passed over as being not as likely to hold the attention of little people as Bimbo the Snip.

How They Broke Away to Go to the Rootabaga Country, I read, and kept on reading until the bell rang for school to be over. Which was before I finished the story, but that was OK, because it wasn't holding the kids' attention the way the other stories had. (Good thing I didn't read that one first, huh? I might never have calmed down!)

I'll do this again next month. Hopefully I won't hyperventilate next time. By the end of the school year I might even feel confident about it. (Hah! Pigs/wings, snowflakes/Sahara, bridge/New York.)
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*Why Rootabaga Stories? I wanted to impress the teacher. Yes, I admit it. I wanted her to see me as a Good Mother, as an Intelligent and Literate Woman, the sort of person who reads Carl Sandburg to her children. Not as the overweight, middle-aged and dowdy woman with bad hair, looking like every other overwhelmed and frazzled mother, that I really am.**

**Yes, it does annoy me when people assume that being a stay at home mother means I must be too stupid and/or lazy to hold a full-time, accountable to a boss-who-is-not-a-relative, job. It also makes me paranoid that everyone is thinking that I am too stupid and/or lazy to hold a full-time, accountable to a boss-who-is-not-a-relative, job.***

***My sister will roll her eyes at me for thinking that way. She'll probably lecture me, too.

If you are one of those people who frequently find they've gotten too busy to breath, because they can't say no, you might be interested in this list of 20 Ways to Say No.

Unfortunately, there aren't any tips on how to say no when the cashier ringing up my groceries asks me if I want to donate any money to support the latest worthy cause. I mean, what am I supposed to say when I get ambushed just as I pull out my wallet?

• "Sorry, I donated elsewhere."
• "No, because I need all my grocery money to feed my family."
• "Sorry, but no, because I'm an evil, greedy, selfish witch who doesn't care about the terminally ill."
• "I'm so sorry, I'd love to, but my husband's paycheck didn't get direct deposited this week. We're living on our limited savings while the bank and his employer try to figure out what happened, and I need every penny I can scrape together to make our house payment. I'm hoping they won't turn off our electricity before we find the paycheck."
• "I can't, because I'm using all my extra money to cover the deductible for my own family's medical bills."
• "No, because you put the names of the people who donate money on the little balloons / shamrocks / puppies in your window and I believe in donating anonymously."
• "Sorry, but I can't afford to donate even $1 to save adorable children who desperately need more money for research on their tragic illness. I'm saving all my money to buy a Dalmatian fur coat."
• "I'd love to! As soon as you tell me how much of my dollar is going to research and how much is going to administrative costs."
• "Umm, errr, uhhh ... Look! Space aliens!"

I never can seem to just say, "No, thank you." I stammer and stutter out a no, feeling like I have to justify why I can't donate a lousy dollar, and then slink away feeling like a rat, worrying about what the high school student who just rang me up is thinking of me.*

It's enough to make me stop shopping.
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*A quick justification, lest I sound like a evil, selfish, greedy witch who doesn't care about adorable terminally ill children, babies, kittens and puppies - I do donate to worthy causes. Just not at the grocery store.

You know when you have a cold, and you hit the part where you're so sick the cold medicine just doesn't help anymore?

Yeah. I hate that part.

Ah, yes. September. Time to sharpen new pencils. Time to make those first marks on clean white paper. Time to crack the binding of new schoolbooks (or tape together the ancient and tattered one you got stuck with.) Time to go back to school. Time to get sick.

And might I just point out how viciously unfair it is, that Oldest Girl Child's cold only lasted about 36 hours, whereas I am on my third day and still going strong?

Might I brag just a little? I am so proud of this bookshelf I made for my daughters' room. We recently, finally!, got twin beds for both of them. We had a huge wooden bunkbed for the Oldest Girl Child and a toddler bed for Youngest Girl Child. You'd think we were all set for the move out of the toddler bed, but...

1. The bunkbed was one of those that had a full bed on the bottom and a twin on top, and it took up a huge percentage of the room and,

2. I realized that I just do not have the courage to put my little OGC onto a top bunk, as much as she would love to be there. I just knew she would fall off and break her arm or neck.

So I decided that I just couldn't live with anything but twin beds for the two of them.*

Two twin beds take up less space that that one bunkbed, which meant we had room for more furniture! Yay! Because we desperately needed a bookshelf in there. I was keeping their books in a big plastic bin, which just wasn't working. So off we went to the store, where there was a very nice sale on cheap bookcases.

Children were involved, however, which meant it wasn't fated to be that simple. They had fake wood-grain bookcases, they had black bookcases. They didn't have pink bookcases, or white bookcases. Which is what OGC decided she wanted. Pink, or white. Either one would work. Nothing else would do, and while the world wouldn't come to an end if she had to put up with something else, her little heart just might be broken into a million Humpty-Dumpty pieces.

Desperation / mother / invention. (You should have seen the way her little shoulders slumped and her head drooped! You'd have felt desperate, too.) I considered paint, I considered contact paper. I decided on fabric.

Now, when I say in the About Me section that I have too much fabric in the basement? So. Not. Kidding. As in I have not only 3, 4, 5, 6 yard lengths of fabric, but actual bolts of stuff I found cheaply** that I loved and decided I Must Have. I justify it by calling it my year's supply of fabric. My husband not only doesn't complain, I have fooled him into thinking I am very cool for my preparedness. (Don't read that bit, honey.)

So we picked up the wood-grain bookcase and headed back home to find the perfect fabric. Naturally, the fabric the girls loved, though, wasn't one of my bolts, it was a 2 yard length that I'd picked up thinking about Halloween costumes. So I got creative, and used three different fabrics. Pink and shiny to cover the shelves, 100% cotton floral to cover the sides, top and bottom, and blue floral flannel to cover the back.

I covered each piece separately, wrapping the fabric around, then using my staple gun to fasten it to the wood in the areas where it wouldn't show when everything was put together. (If you do this, make sure you pull the fabric tight, as tight as you can. Even as tight as I pulled it, I'm already having a slight problem with the fabric loosening on the shelves. Luckily I can pull those out and tighten it up prettily easily.)

Putting the bookcase together went pretty easily, except that the company had supplied evil plastic pegs to hold the sides and top/bottom together. When I lost control of all the various pieces had a crucial moment and they tipped over, the pegs snapped off. Whereupon I lost my temper and just used nails to hold everything together (covered later by flower stickers.)

Of course, in the end it made very little difference at all. Everything is all covered with books, and where there aren't books there are various treasures, like the Really Big Rock they dug up out of the back yard, but at least the sides look cute!
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*Luckily I have a very nice husband, who never, ever pointed out how very much money we had paid for the bunkbed when we bought it not long after OGC was born. A furniture store near us was having a going out of business sale. Which meant things were on sale, but still expensive.

**It's amazing what you can pick up at yard sales and the Walmart $1/yard table.