It suddenly dawned on me that, despite the two feet of snow in the yard, it's going to be spring in the blink of an eye. I long ago decided that by the time the birds start chirping and the daffodils brighten the world with their sunny blooms, I need to be done with the projects that I've started inside the house as it will be time for me to focus completely on becoming Master of the Back Yard. That means that the four rooms that are currently in various stages of getting painted need to get finished. Quick.
Finishing the three bathrooms that I've started is no big deal. Once the light fixtures that I finally ordered show up and get installed, it'll take a couple of hours to finish the touching up that's left and TAH-DAH! The fourth room, however, is no small feat. The sad thing is that it's the first room I started--Alexis' bedroom.
Within the first week of our move in mid-July, I had started her room. It took no time to coat the whole thing in sky blue paint, add a few clouds, and toss up a rainbow. The pesky fairies that were part of the plan, however, seemed a little too daunting and I decided to leave her room alone for a while and instead focus elsewhere. Eight months later . . . Ahem.
So, last weekend I got started with the first fairy and, amazingly, nobody died. It actually went kinda fast, even. This weekend I geared up to add two more fairies. No problem! I might even be a little proud of my progress up to this point.
Midway through sketching out the third fairy, Alexis showed up and started to offer her opinion. She asked me to give her a yellow dress. She asked me to give her brown hair and a ponytail. She asked me to give her blue eyes. And then she asked me to give her "Mom shoes."
I had no idea what she was talking about. I asked her to clarify a few times and kept getting the same two words repeated back to me--"Mom shoes." I tried to think of a single time in the history of mankind that the word "mom" used as an adjective has ever been good. There's "mom jeans." Bad. "Mom hair." Also bad. "The mom stare." Powerful, effective, but still not exactly considered the most attractive of looks.
As I sat pondering what the kid could possibly mean by "mom shoes," I turned to another fairy to quickly fix a minor little issue. WHOOPS. Today's major life lesson immediately became evident: Never turn your back on a kid who has access to paints and a pencil. In the split second it took for me to slather the star on the end of a wand with a little more yellow, Alexis took matters into her own hands and made the fairy some "mom shoes."
Mom shoes = shoes with a heel.
And now I feel kind of like a heel for assuming she meant "mom shoes" as a negative thing. Or maybe she did? I may never know.
