Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Regaining Control of my Living Room

I always thought I would be one of those uber-cool hipster parents that had no brightly colored baby crap strewn about their house. Before I had Rito, I envisioned him playing with neat stacking cups and brown monkeys that blended with the "decor" in our home. I thought we would spend our days reading books, listening to British import music, playing little games like patty cake and going for nature walks with BuddyLove in the ravine beside our home. 


Reality bit me in the ass. Hard. Who has time for all of that? There is laundry to get done, you know. 

My home is a shrine to all things toddler, including the big three: Fisher Price, Little Tykes and Other Plastic Crap Made in China. Primary colors now dominate our serene beige and brown (and some may say bland, so be it) color scheme and plastic things that sing and make noise are always eating our batteries. 

Why did I deviate from my idealistic bullshit ideas? Anything for 10 minutes of peace, that's why. 

Now that Rito has a ton of toys strategically placed (thrown.... left behind and abandoned) throughout our home we have come to the mighty conclusion that we need to develop the final room in our basement to be a playroom. Rito has some cool big wood toys  like this huge bus that need to be built and played with, but it takes up so much room that we really needed extra space to put it in. 

Dad! and I never really have anything we want for gifts, because let's face it we both have good jobs and pretty much buy what we want. What we really are short on is handy skillz (actually we are fine at handy, more short on hours in a day to do things), and the idea of developing the last room in our basement seemed like a logistical nightmare that we kept putting off. 

Enter my Mom (who we can blame for the huge bus, but it is a cool ass bus).

LoudGranny (my Mom) has no handy skillz either but she is fantastic at hiring men, writing cheques and deciding that shit needs to get done. So for this year's Birthday and Christmas gifts for Dad! and I, we are getting a playroom courtesy of LoudGranny. I have spent the last two days picking out flooring (cork) and french doors. Later this afternoon is an outing to the hardware store to investigate lighting. The demo of what was in that half done room was finished yesterday, and once a couple more decisions are made the construction will start. 

You may think the gift is more for Rito, but think about it first...... We are regaining some control of the main floor. 

And that is the best gift I can think of right now.

4 comments:

geenalyn said...

in our last house when we moved in my FIL finished the basement for us (he's SUPER handy). It became the kids toyroom and it was super cool, we even had slides down there. The kids never wanted to go down there to play by themselves, and i didn't want to spend my whole life in the basement lol. When we moved here we made the formal living and dining rooms the dedicated toy rooms and no toys are allowed to cross out of those two rooms.

dog mama said...

Can I have your mom come be my mom for awhile. What a kick ass present, love her.

dog mama said...

PS. I really want to see that cork floor, have never seen it.

Sleepynita said...

My Mom rocks, I don;t know if she can afford many more kids like me though :)

The cork floor will kick ass, and I found some for cheap too. At Carpet World I woulda had to pay 8$ a square for for it, but the same stuff at TimberTown is only 2.99 a square foot. Nuts I know $8 a foot would have been a total budget bister.