Me, I am my kids' teacher

Not quite 99, but I went with that headline anyway. How about 60?

That's the number of cans in the gallon and spray variety, tubes and mixers, glazers and primers we hauled out of the basement this week.

Talk about a great cardio workout.
And talk about taking "If you give a homeschool mom a cookie" to a new level.

This impromptu clean out was to accommodate a city inspector who gave an edict during his first visit that we had to raise our new water heater 18-inches off the floor. The installer and the homeowner "respectfully disobeyed" this edict and thought the paint removal might work in our favor in case he was worried about flammables. Anyway.

We never dreamed we had that much paint down there. Outa control. However it has provided a great trip down memory lane, exercise and math lessons, a little biology and also gave us lots of inspiration.

Some of the paint pre-dated our arrival to this house. The front door paint. The living room paint. The bright green paint that we quickly painted over when we moved in. We eventually added lots of partially full (and mostly empty) cans with each new baby as we also created new ways for our house to accommodate our growing family.

All of the paint is on the kitchen table. That's where it provided a great guessing and counting game for us. And color identifying for Grant. And sorting big cans and little cans, empties and fulls.

I hadn't noticed all of that paint because a lot of it was under the stairwell and behind our spare refrigerator. Once we looked back at the dark cave, we were so excited. I was excited about the new storage possibilities. They were excited about a new hideout ... one of the kids even suggested it as a READING spot.

Forget storage then! Let's do it!

Pause here to say how very grateful to God that my daughter has brothers. Had I been seven and looking at a very dirty, buggy and dark spot in a scary basement, I would have been petrified. I don't think she considered being scared. Wew.

While they were counting cans upstairs, I started sweeping out the new hideout. Lots of sediment from the floor. Bugs. Coins! Even lego parts. Then a little dark blob. I looked at it a little closer, gasped, and yelled GILES YOU HAVE TO COME SEE THIS.

They all raced down to observe the decomposing mouse! Those who know the former me know this might have sent me over the edge and this blog entry would be way different. Instead we marveled and wondered how long it had been there. (Again, praise God for giving ME boys). We were sure it was pre-Keisha the stray cat. No mouse has dared come in the house since she adopted us, even though she stays outside about 85% of the time!

Then to the Internet. How long does it take a little mouse to "return to the earth."
So that was the biology lesson! (We don't know yet, but in our search, I did learn about composting).

The paint is staying in my view until the front door is repainted which will determine whether 11 year old paint is still usable! We'll do some other touchups. We've already painted some outside chairs with colors of Giles' room. The other chair will be green and a bench will be yellow!

We'll post some pictures when we transform the new cave.

In another post we'll do some laughing about the box we found of Stan's school memorabilia that had been keeping company with the paint behind the fridge. TREASURES!

Posted in: on Thursday, May 24, 2007 at at 8:47 AM