Can’t Sleep. Must Paint.

“How’d you sleep?” Davey asked when he got up.

“Not so well,” I answered. “I couldn’t fall asleep and then, when I did, I woke up thinking it was hours later only to find it was 11:30!”

“I know,” he said. “Sleeping with you was like sleeping with a bag of raccoons.”

I grinned sheepishly. “So I guess you didn’t sleep too well, either?”

Then the sun came up and I stumbled through my day, exhausted and achy and smelling sickly in my nose, and I milked the cows and taught the kids and fed the family and washed the laundry and finally, it was nearing the end of the day. We sat down to dinner. We talked. About sleep, mostly, because we both needed some. Finally, I said, “I can’t sleep in there tonight. I’m sleeping somewhere else.” The room just wasn’t restful. It was messy and cluttered and the furniture is just a hodgepodge of repurposed stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else in the house. Once I said all that out loud, though, there wasn’t really any reason to fix it. So I milked the cows while the kids cleaned up the dinner dishes and I rearranged and removed furniture while the kids got ready for bed. They fell asleep to the sound of the vacuum cleaner and I decided that I could sleep in my own bed after all.

But lying there in bed that night, we agreed that the room really needs to be painted. And we really need nightstands. And I’ve only hung up one picture in the almost-two years that we’ve lived here. (I haven’t hung pictures or curtains anywhere yet.) So I picked up paint swatches at the local hardware store and I’ve narrowed it down to three. I’ll go down to the Peddler’s Mall tomorrow or the next day and see if I can’t scrounge up some old windows to add some interest to this big blank basement wall and a small but solid table to use for a nightstand. Target ought to yield us a new lamp and a less brilliant alarm clock. Michael’s sells some wide white frames I love and I have enough of my own photographic art to decorate the walls.

Looks like this will be our Labor Day weekend project. (And about time, too!)