No Rest for the Weary

I finished cleaning Hannah’s room last night, and I think someone may have been trying to tell me something. First, the light went out, but I’m too short to change the bulb, and John was already running out the door for a meeting when it happened, so I worked by the light of a couple of reading lamps.

Then John got home and changed the bulb. A couple of hours later, we heard something shatter, but weren’t sure if the sound came from the kitchen or Hannah’s bedroom. Turns out it was the overhead light cover in Hannah’s room; it didn’t get fastened properly when the bulb was changed, but I probably wouldn’t have done it right either, if I could reach it. By this time it was after 9, and I was picking up shards and vacuuming just so I could finish putting Hannah’s room back together.

Finally, I was able to put the big tub o’ toys back under her playbed, and as I was pushing the smaller tub in from the other side, I gashed my head open on the grip to the reading light attached to the side of Hannah’s bed (facing the wall). I rolled around on the floor for a few seconds, my scalp burning, until I put my hand on the right spot and found blood. That acted like a bucket of cold water, and it stopped hurting so bad. I got up and cleaned it up and went to bed. I was afraid that if I had kept going after such a clear signal, I’d end up electrocuted or something.

John hadn’t noticed anything amiss (he was in the study during all this), so when I told him what had happened, he tried to show sympathy by patting me on the head. Hello! Gaping wound on head! He was lucky I didn’t smother him with his own squishy pillow, which was Hannah’s suggestion after I had one particularly bad night’s sleep when John was making some weird noise in his sleep.

We all slept in nice and late this morning, and then I finished the last few bits in Hannah’s room and stripped her bed. The end. Thank the Seven Dwarfs.

We were planning on taking Hannah to Mannheim for an event hosted by Nick (the tv channel for kids), but we ended up staying home. For one thing, it has been raining so much that the Rhine has gone over its banks in several places, and the Nick thing was supposed to be held in a park along the Rhine. And then when we woke up, it was raining hard enough that no one felt like getting out in it. We would have still gone if Hannah had been really gung-ho, but she declined.

So instead of partying down with SpongeBob et al., she has spent the day organizing her new-found Barbie loot into a Barbie city in the living room. In addition to the Loving Family House that has been transformed into housing for the Barbies, she has a schoolroom, a throne/princess bed, a tree house, a grocery store, and a bathroom. It takes up less space than you would think, but it definitely contradicts Hannah’s statement that she never gets anything.

One of the perks of a major cleaning action is the recycling of old toys into new ones. Yesterday Hannah got into the dress-up cabinet and turned herself out as Hip-Hop Cheerleader (TM). She even insisted on going out into town with me like that. Some days it feels like she is growing up so fast—I just noticed that the top of her head reaches my nose—but then she spends a whole day naming her 101 Barbies and dressing up as Hip-Hop Cheerleader, and I realize she still has a lot of little kid left in her.