Author: Big Mama

This is probably going to be brief because I am exhausted. In a few minutes you will understand why.

But first, several people emailed me yesterday and asked about Holly and her decorating services. So I just wanted to let y’all know that she does online consultations. In fact, that’s how we originally started brainstorming about my house. I emailed her four or sixty-two pictures of all my rooms at different angles so she could begin to formulate a plan.

You can also read her version of our day together on her blog if you’re interested.

Or you can go watch Joshua Ledet’s performance last night on American Idol because MY WORD at the talent.

Or you can stay right here and read about how I’ve spent the last few days.

Covered in dust.

What? Covered in dust? Have I undertaken some elaborate home renovation project?

Not really. I’ve just been cleaning out all the stuff that has been under various beds in my house for approximately an embarrassing number of years.

Because after Holly left and I began to think about painting and fresh new stuff, I was seized with the need to get rid of a bunch of old junk. This was actually on my to-do list in August as a goal I’d like to accomplish once Caroline was back in school.

So it makes total sense that we’re down to three weeks left in the school year and I’m finally getting it done.

Procrastination, you complete me.

Anyway, I came home from church on Sunday and was struck with the urge to begin the clean out process. And so I sat and ate some Black Bean and Roasted Garlic Tostitos, hoping this urge would pass. But then I got on the phone with Gulley and we finally committed to schedule the joint garage sale we’ve been threatening to do for the last few months.

(By joint garage sale I mean that we are doing it together. There will be no illegal drugs sold out of Gulley’s garage.)

We set the date for Saturday, May 19th and that was all the motivation I needed to start cleaning. I began with the china cabinet in the dining room. I’m happy to report that it still holds craft supplies, my wedding photo album, our mortgage paperwork and my wedding stationary, but it all looks a lot neater. Plus I managed to throw out an entire trash bag worth of stuff.

I still had some energy after that was completed, so I moved into our bedroom and decided to clean out our nightstands. P’s was easy because all he keeps in it is the latest hard back Cabela’s catalog and a giant blue flashlight.

Mine? A totally different story.

I don’t know how long it had been since I’d cleaned it out from top to bottom, but I will confess that there was a People magazine dated the week Caroline was born. August 2003. Angelina Jolie is on the cover holding baby Maddox and the headline reads “My Baby Saved My Life!”

I guess that explains why she went on to have forty-six more children.

Ironically, there was also a photo of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston together on the inside which reminded me how much more innocent we all were back in 2003 when we thought the gift of matching, perfectly highlighted hair was enough to keep a marriage together.

Here’s a picture to show you the rest since words fail me.

The place where ponytail holders go to die.

In an odd way, I feel that this random assortment of ponytail holders, bullets, foam rollers, a neon green banana clip, an arrowhead, a Bible, Halls cough drops and Caroline’s little night cap pretty much sums up my life.

Oh, and those bright green little cases? Those hold the wax that I put on my braces every night back in 2006 when I still had braces.

(Have I ever told y’all that my mother-in-law is so organized that she’s been known to bring over a labeled file folder that holds ONE piece of paper? Yet it’s labeled. And in a folder. She could give The Container Store lessons in home organization.)

(This drawer would make her cry.)

I also found a receipt from a lunch I bought in 2006 for a big group of doctors when I was still a pharmaceutical rep. Why was it still in my nightstand in the Year of Our Lord 2012? I don’t know but P is concerned that I was never reimbursed for the lunch expense since I clearly never mailed in the receipt.

And I found a gift certificate to Alamo Cafe that Honey and Big brought me in the hospital the day after Caroline was born. It was hidden under the chart that I made to keep track of Caroline’s eating and pooping. Apparently she had a significant poop on August 8th at 4 p.m. and I decided I didn’t need to keep the chart anymore.

But don’t think I’m not going to go into Alamo Cafe and see if they’ll still honor it. They totally should. I’ve been busy. I had a baby EIGHT AND A HALF years ago.

The last few days I’ve found pictures that have made me smile, dust bunnies that would frighten a grown man, and a sparkly blue flip-flop that’s been missing for two years.

I have thrown out at least six large trash bags full of stuff and have started forming a pile of things to sell in the garage sale in the corner of our bedroom. It looks like the set of Sanford and San. I swear I walked in there yesterday and heard the sounds of a bass harmonica begin to play.

I worked on Caroline’s room last because I knew it would kill my spirit. And it almost won. When the head of a stuffed bunny came off thereby spilling guts all over the place, I nearly walked away. But I persevered.

Every room in my house is totally cleaned out. Purged. Set free.

Except for the kitchen.

But I’ll think about that tomorrow.

So I mentioned before I took my brief hiatus last week that my friend and decorator Holly Mathis had come to visit and helped me out with some decorating ideas. And I was ever so grateful because there are honestly things in this house that haven’t been moved or touched in almost nine years.

Which is what I explained to Holly before she even walked in the door because you know what’s stressful? Having a decorator come to your house to view all your decor. So I felt the need to over-explain that we’d renovated our house nine years ago and then brought Caroline home from the hospital two weeks after we’d moved back in and I’ve essentially been in survival mode ever since that time.

And the thing is, I used to love decorating. I’d spend hours browsing through furniture stores and even kept a little binder full of house ideas that I’d pulled from pages of Southern Living and Better Homes and Garden.

(Can we discuss how obsolete binders are now that there’s Pinterest? If I want to feel really bad about the current state of my decor or my craft abilities or the fact that I don’t make Caroline’s lunch into cute shapes, I need look no further than my Pinterest boards.)

But then I had a child and went without sleep for three years. Then I quit my job and it seemed more important to eat than to have a pretty living room. And then one day I looked up and realized I still had fake ivy on top of the china cabinet in my dining room and it was time for an intervention.

Thank God for Holly. She and I had talked about a few ideas over the last year or so, but I just couldn’t get it going. I talked a big game but then it was summer and then I had a hangnail and then I had to write a book and so that ivy just sat on top of my china cabinet.

Mocking me.

(True confession. The china cabinet doesn’t hold china. It holds six placemats, our wedding album, an envelope full of warranties and instructions for all our appliances, various craft supplies, and the game CatchPhrase.)

(This should be a clue as to my organization skills because, clearly, all those things go together.)

I promise Holly had only been in my house ten minutes before we had fabric picked out for the couch, throw pillows, living room chairs and dining room chairs. It was like Nate Berkus had walked in. But cuter and more fun.

She would walk around with her measuring tape and announce, “You’ll need two pillows here. Make them 12 x 30”. I didn’t even know you could get pillows that are 12 x 30.

So I just typed things furiously into the notes on my phone and bookmarked stuff on my computer while she basically redecorated my entire house in her head. I’ve never been so happy. Because at some point I became a person who just wants someone to tell me how to get things to look the way I want them and not have to think about it. I have enough stress worrying about Bethenny Frankel and Jason and hoping they can make it work.

And it’s not like I can do it all now because to redecorate the whole house would be right over my normal $15 price point. But it gives me a long-term goal. The sad news is it’s a lot cheaper to just look at pretty rooms on Pinterest.

Anyway, after Holly and I spent the early afternoon devising a plan (I think we all know that I wasn’t devising anything. I was just nodding my head.) we headed to Pier One, Target and World Market to look for a few things. And I was amazed because Holly would walk in each store, scan around and immediately find the two or three things we were looking for.

If I had been alone I would have walked in, spent two hours agonizing over everything, and left with nothing but regret.

We were basically looking for white pottery pieces for the top of my cabinets, some decorative plates, glass canisters and lanterns. Oh, and maybe a lamp. Or anything else that looked interesting.

The plan is to hang a fun assortment of plates on the wall in my dining room. Here’s a little bit of what we laid out so far. I need to pick out a few more which probably means Holly is going to have to come back because DECISIONS – not my strong suit.

Holly also suggested that some lanterns might look cute on the mantle. And to spray paint them red. Total madness. But I loved the idea. We found great tall lanterns at Pier One. Then I found spray paint at Home Depot in Colonial Red.

And then P spray painted them for me because he watched me try to do it and informed me I am a complete failure in the spray-painting department. Or maybe I’m a genius because guess who didn’t end up with Colonial Red spray paint all over my hands?

They turned out really cute.

Please disregard that frame and the wall color because all that is about to change since I’m also about to paint the living room and dining room and hallway and guest room just as soon as we hire someone to float and tape all the cracks in this house. Because you know what a drought does to an old house? Ugly, unspeakable things.

So the walls will eventually be a soft gray and there will be built-ins in the living room to hold the T.V. even though it looks super classy propped up on our church pew right now. Jesus and television, my two loves together.

Maybe I’ll put some fake ivy on top of the T.V. in the meantime.

Anyway, it will be a work in progress over the next few months but I’ll keep you updated on everything as we go and maybe I’ll even get fancy and have before and after photos.

In the meantime, I’m motivated to get rid of all the junk in this house and am cleaning out every room from top to bottom.

But I’ll save that post for tomorrow because, seriously, this is already over 1,000 words and you’ve probably already quit reading by now anyway.

Stay tuned for tomorrow when I will feature the contents of my nightstand. It will be riveting.

Just in case any of you have stayed awake at night wondering if Siri has become any more adept at sending text messages for me, let me assure you that she has not.

I’m not sure what she thought I was trying to say but this makes my life sound a lot fancier than it is in reality.

So.

It’s been a while.

How’ve you been? What’s new? What’s happening?

As the kids like to say, what’s goin’ down?

Or do the kids not say that anymore? I wouldn’t know. I’ve been here on my couch, buried underneath piles of paper and empty Starbucks coffee cups singing old hymns when I’m not rocking back and forth with a vacant look in my eyes.

Oh I’m being dramatic.

Truth be told, I finished the edits in plenty of time last week and decided to take a couple of days to regain some semblance of mental health. Even though I was sorely tempted to blog on Wednesday because you’ll never believe what happened.

We had a mouse in our house.

It was like God was testing me to see if I was serious about not posting on the blog.

P and I were watching T.V. late one night and all of a sudden we both thought we saw something move near our hallway. But it’s all dark and shadowy there and it was hard to tell for sure. P jumped up and turned on lights in the rooms off the hall and did a search to see if he could see a mouse or a roach or a hobbit that had made its way into our home.

He instructed me to stand at the hallway entry and be ready in case something scurried out. He also told me not to scream if it ran out because Caroline was sleeping.

Hi. Have we met? In what universe am I not going to scream if that happens?

But I tried to play it cool. He finished his search, kicked a few things to see if he could scare something out of hiding and then we decided we must have imagined it. Maybe it was just a shadow from the reflection of a car driving by or maybe it was the ghost of Christmas Past. Whatever. Just a long as I could convince myself it was anything less frightening than a rodent.

Plus, I reminded myself that P has a rich history of imagining he’s seen something. Over the almost fifteen years we’ve been married, he’s woken me up to ask if I can see the blue iguana hanging over our bed or the ninja standing by his nightstand or the squirrel running across our bedroom. I used to jump up in a panic because BLUE IGUANA! but I eventually realized that he just has very active dreams and a tendency to talk in his sleep.

Anyway, we went with denial and mutually agreed it was just in our minds. But P decided to set a mouse trap in the hallway just in case. Because like the old saying goes, better safe than infested with mice.

Then P went to bed. But I stayed up because I still needed to wind down and read Twitter updates and look at pretty fabric on the internet. I was engrossed in all this activity when I either saw or heard something, it’s hard to know which, and looked up in time to see what was undoubtably a little mouse running from the kitchen back into the hallway.

Which means it had already run from the hallway back into the kitchen at some point when I wasn’t paying attention.

Which means I kind of wanted to die inside.

I sat frozen on the couch. Not sure what to do, waiting on the sound of the mouse trap to snap. But that sound never came. And I did not, in the words of Buford T. Justice, care to be in HOT PURSUIT of a mouse.

So I just sat and tried not to think about it.

Then, just as the voices inside my head quit screaming, the little mouse came flying back through the hallway on his way back to the vicinity of the kitchen.

What is happening? Is this an episode of Tom and Jerry? Why is this mouse so active? Did he find a bunch of Sudafed in the guest bathroom?

I had no idea what to do and knew it wouldn’t do any good to wake P up because he’d just tell me to go to bed and that the mouse would still be there in the morning.

Yes. That’s the problem.

So I went to bed and rolled a towel to fit under the crack in our bedroom door in what I’m sure was an extremely effective and highly scientific mouse prevention technique. No way is a mouse going to break through a Disney Princess beach towel.

(Unless it’s Mickey. He’s always been bitter about the Disney Princesses.)

The next morning P and I whispered to each other about the mouse because in no universe did I want Caroline to be aware of our rodent issue. I told P about the mouse’s nighttime exploits and his possible addiction to amphetamines.

And so the next night, P came armed for battle. He brought a multitude of mouse traps and a bag of Starbursts because everyone knows the mice are crazy for them. Not to mention that it takes some dedication to get a Starburst out of a trap, guaranteeing almost certain death.

Sure enough, by the following morning the little mouse was no longer with us. God rest his little hyped up soul.

He met his end in the laundry room, with the mouse trap, and the Starburst.

Sadly, he didn’t fold any of my laundry before he died.

Y’all.

This is so hard for me to do, but I have reached the point where I have to cry “Uncle” if that were actually something I’d ever say in real life.

And it’s not.

I don’t know what I’d cry. Maybe “CHOCOLATE”.

The edits for my book are due at the end of this week. And Caroline doesn’t have school on Friday. Which means the edits really need to be finished by Thursday.

Which means that I’m just going to give you the heads up that this might be my last post until next Monday. Or I may end up posting here and there during the week because I won’t be able to stand it. I don’t know.

I just know that I’m feeling a little overwhelmed and need to take a deep breath. Plus, Caroline has to take standardized tests this week so I’m going to be very busy cooking various healthy, nutritious breakfasts so she can move them around with her fork and not eat them.

But I have to tell you really quick that Holly Mathis came to visit this weekend. And I can’t express how much I love her. She walked into my house and immediately envisioned about 843 things that I would have never thought about. Or maybe I would have thought about them and then that’s all I would have done for the next three years. Just thought.

It’s going to be a work in progress over the next few months and is going to require me to do stuff like paint walls and cabinets and think about fabric and pillows. But I’m excited. It’s been nine years since I’ve really done anything to the house other than that time I painted the kitchen turquoise and then painted it chocolate brown about two weeks later because the turquoise made me feel like I was living in a Gloria Estefan video. And I assure you that the rhythm was going to get me.

In the meantime, here’s just a quick, very bad quality picture I took of the tops of one side of my kitchen cabinets after Holly and I made a run to Target and World Market to pick up some white pottery pieces to put on top.

I wish I could convey what a difference just this simple thing made, but I can’t because sometimes a picture isn’t worth a thousand words.

I’m not sure what that means.

Anyway, I’ll be back in a few days or maybe tomorrow or maybe later in the week or maybe next Monday.