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.

Nee the Cleaning Lady

I started yesterday on Hannah's room, and I probably won't be done before tomorrow evening. If you ever saw my room as a kid, Hannah's room was--ok, it actually wasn't that bad, but Hannah had been put in charge of straightening up the last couple of times, and her room had gotten to the point that you could hardly get under her play-bed without the aid of a compass and a shovel. I'm throwing away a lot more than the last time I had a mega-cleaning in there, but it's mostly small plastic toys out of the chocolate eggs. Those things seem to multiply in the bottom of her toy boxes, and she never plays with them after eating the chocolate, so it was time to give them the old heave-ho.

All the cleaning has eaten what is left of my brain, but maybe I have enough to watch some SpongeBob. Maybe tomorrow I will manage to scrape out whatever it was I was thinking on the bus earlier today. hmmm...

My Dirty Secret

You all know how much I have loved the series of Harry Potter books. If the price of Book 7 had been 45 bucks, a pint of blood, and my left hand, I would have been, "Here's 50--keep the change. Do I need to bring my own clean needle and tourniquet?"

So it may come as a surprise to you all that I do not particularly care for the movies. The first 2 movies were ok, but Prisoner of Azkaban was already getting a bit thin, plot-wise, and Goblet of Fire was almost unintelligible due to the amount that had to be chopped out to make it fit into a reasonable time frame. Hannah got to see Order of the Phoenix during a friend's birthday party, but I don't even have the urge to see it, even though we can watch it in English at one of the small movie houses here. If John were really set on it, I would go with him to that one, just to simplify explaining all the bits missing from the book and the bits John missed on screen, but otherwise I am not planning to go. I think Hannah is starting to feel the same; we could have bought the DVD of Goblet of Fire on sale this weekend, but she wasn't even interested, even though we had bought the videos up to that one.

So, to sum up:
Harry Potter books=yay!
Harry Potter movies=boo!

Hannah was going to spend the night with her friend last week, but she didn't manage to hold out (she had already spent the night with another friend the night before and had spent the whole day at the swimming pool with a local youth group, so I could have predicted that another night away from home might be too much). John was watching a video when she called (I was already in bed), so he turned it off and went to get her. The next morning I had to leave early to tutor, and I discovered that John had left the VCR and converter, and the computer and accessories, on over night. He is so anal about wasting electricity that I had to leave him a note about that. Then I left another note that I had baked some pretzels and he could find them in the oven. When I got home, this note was on the table:
Nee,
This morning I found handwritten notes on the dining room table and the computer keyboard, and some pretzels in the oven.
Love, John

He was actually home when I came in. He had just been watching the complete set of Monty Python DVDs and was feeling a bit whimsical, hence the note.

It's always fun and games around here.