and the boy snored on...

Today we managed to paint the kitchen, including taking down all the stuff in the room, painting and putting it all back - while the spud napped. No, it wasn't a long nap. We just have a small kitchen.

Nothing much is happening of bloggable note at the moment and that's largely because I've been outrageously busy for the last two months with another month of events taking me away from my comfortable couch. Luckily for the most part they are not keeping me away from my little potato though as most of them involve holidays. I know, lucky me, however really I need to work and this isn't doing a lot for my bank account. I guess love matters more than money though and the spud certainly has lots of love at the end of his pudgy little fingertips.

Anyway today was not an abnormality: - an awful lot of work gets done here while the spud sleeps on a regular basis. He's still taking blissful 2 hour naps in the afternoon and on the days that he's here with me I am becoming adept at timing things to fit into that 2 hour gap. The trouble comes when he wakes a little early and I'm on the phone to a client or having a nap cleaning the house - nothing says 'unprofessional' like the sound of him wailing that he's been cast alone into the void with nothing but Tigger for company. For the most part however he's a safe bet and today was the perfect example. It's a bit like Changing Rooms if anyone remembers that (and what HAS happened to Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen anyway?): two hours to take a room apart, paint it and put it back together. It wouldn't work with any room larger than a cupboard which luckily includes most of the rooms in our flat.

This all started because I flooded the bathroom last week, coming home exhausted, running a bath and forgetting about it. The frog has been very un-froggily forgiving about this, particularly considering that it was such a bad flood that I have curled some of the flooring and caused damp so bad that five inches up, the plaster is leaking salts and all the paint has come off in the bathroom... and in the bedroom... oh, it's bad.

Anyway, when we moved into this place the builders had painted it all in a really impossible-to-match neutral. Years of trying to find a match has left our cellar full of match pots and our walls a peculiarly mottled colour in places where marks have been painted out in the wrong colour. So this weekend while picking a new bathroom colour, the frog managed miraculously to pick the exact right match. With the bathroom plaster still too wet to paint we decided to start on the kitchen and, since the spud was asleep, we figured he would be safe from wet paint problems.

Not so.

The frog, so excited to have finally found the matching paint, spent the rest of the afternoon hunting around the flat brandishing a loaded paintbrush and panting gently with excitement. He painted in the hall, he painted in the livingroom, he painted wall by the changing table as I was approaching it with a dripping-wet spud, he painted the bedroom at spud-level and generally loaded up the place with impossible-to-see wet paint. Resultantly, the spud entered his bath with a full complement of neutral paint on his hands, face, hair and clothes.

Next time I think we'll just get started on the painting without waiting for the spud to nap. Maybe we could just dip him in the paint and rub him directly on the walls, thus cutting out all that brushing.

.