Man, after the fall...

Jane and Tony both have birthdays in November. So does Michael's other kid, the one he had with Jamie last year. I spent the last week planning a birthday party for the two of them, which went off rather well, I might add...

Baby Tony (who turned two - maybe I should start calling him "Toddler Tony") received a "doctor's kit" from some friends and a video from a cousin of mine, but mostly clothes. His favorite part of the party, though, was the sugar rush he got from the cake. My mother used to make incredibly complicated cakes for birthdays (and just about any other party she could bake for). She would make a scale rectangle, one centimeter = one inch, of a 13x9 pan, then draw, cut, and re-arrange pieces of paper to make just the right shapes, with no wasted pieces. Birthdays from my youth featured cakes shaped like various cartoon characters or childhood heroes. As much as I'd like to do that for my kids, I'm not quite that talented, especially with frosting a cake that's been cut. I always get crumbs in the frosting. I also don't have all day to make a cake. This year I made a dozen cupcakes, put 7 into a "flower" shape, (one in the middle and 6 around it) and the other 5 in a "caterpillar" shape (end to end, slightly off) and baked sugar cookies, which I cut into butterfly and frog shapes. I put the whole garden scene on a piece of cardboard covered in wax paper. I'm actually pretty proud of that "cake", and may use that design again.

Jane was given several dresses for playing dress-up, along with some "costume jewelry" and a purse. For my gift, I painted her room purple, and hung up a "Disney Princess" poster and some home-made curtains. As much as I would have liked some help with the painting, I was glad to achieve yet another small piece of my "five year plan".

As corny as it sounds, I gave myself five years from the time Mike left - until April of 2013, to get out from under the debt he left me in, and to remodel the house enough that it would be "mine" instead of "ours". I have already done several home improvement projects - although I hired out the big ones - and got the debt down to about half of what it was. And while painting a room might seem like an easy task, I had to do it by myself, moving all of the furniture, laying dropcloths, hauling a ladder upstairs, and actually doing the painting, by myself.

The whole time I painted, I fought the re-surfacing memories:

Jane's room was painted "dragon-skin". When I was expecting her, we put Jake in our "guest room" and made his old room into the nursery. The rug was dark blue, which would have clashed with "nursery pink", so we went with a light green, and a 'spring garden' design: flowers, fairies, etc. I have to admit, the idea of using a color called "dragon-skin" also appealed to me. In preparing to paint the smallest bedroom in our century-old house, Michael and I had to strip off 4 layers of wallpaper, only to find VERY crumbly plaster-and-lathe underneath. While it would have been sensible to just tack up pre-primed drywall, that would have made the room even smaller, and the one wall was irregularly shaped, since the long-dormant chimney passed behind it. So, rather than take the easy route, or even go with my mother's suggestion to simply paint on top of the wallpaper, we stripped, re-plastered, and painted. I sewed curtains and assembled nursery furniture. Now, with her turning four, I painted the room again. I went with a very bright purple, although not dark in hue, attempting to mimic the lilac flowers growing on the bush I'd planted in the backyard last year.

Michael made his usual phone call, a day late and a dollar short. I didn't care. I baked. I painted. I survived. And I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself.