Capital P

Yesterday was one of those days where it threatened to rain all day, but it never actually poured down rain until the minute I walked out the door to pick up Caroline from school. I was so glad I was wearing a white shirt. Nothing like a peep show at the elementary school.

After we got home and changed into dry clothes, I emailed the soccer team to let them know we would still have practice unless it was pouring down rain at 5:30. If we’re going to continue at our current level of mediocrity, we need all the practice we can get. Especially since I missed last week’s practice and P reported that he’d basically spent an hour being beat up by a bunch of six year old girls. To which I replied, “Oh, that’s too bad. Did I tell you that I chose a color called Bubblebath for my toes during my pedicure today? Wow, I’d love to hear more about soccer practice but I’m on my way to eat delicious sushi with grownups at Nobu. Love you.”

We checked the radar around 5:00 because we are big meteorology nerds and determined that practice could go on as scheduled even though there were definitely some showers to the south that appeared to be heading our way in the next hour or so. But we decided a few measly showers wouldn’t stop the Cheetah Girls. The Cheetah Girls are warriors who may or may not occasionally cry when one of them falls and scrapes her knees.

After about twenty minutes of practice (insert picture of P and I herding a very cute group of feral cats), the skies opened up and the rain came down. Most of the girls’ parents were there so we called practice and everyone ran to their cars to head home.

But there were two girls left whose mothers weren’t there yet because they had to shuttle other kids to other various practices all over town, so we told those girls to hop in the car with us and we’d just all wait in the parking lot until their mothers arrived.

A little over seven years ago, I was pregnant with Caroline and P was in Colorado chaperoning about sixty high school students on a ski trip. Normally I would have been on the trip with him, but I had a host of issues with riding a bus for seventeen hours with high school kids before I ever got pregnant so there wasn’t really even a remote possibility that I was going to attempt that kind of torture while carrying a child. He’d arranged to have a few other female chaperones on the trip, but they’d all had to cancel at the last minute.

P, bless his heart, ended up being the chaperone and small group leader for ten fourteen year old girls during that trip. He’d call me every night after he got back to his hotel room and report that they’d put gel in his hair or that they’d used something called a “straight iron” on him. On the last night of the trip he called to tell me that someone had a pair of scissors and he wasn’t sure what happened but the girls all started cutting each other’s hair and, the next thing he knew, three of them were crying in the bathroom while the other girls gathered outside the door and tried to console them with loving statements like “it will grow back” or “it doesn’t look that uneven from the left side”.

In short, he was slightly traumatized by the whole experience.

He arrived home from the trip on Wednesday afternoon and I was scheduled to have an ultrasound the following Friday. It was the big ultrasound. The ultrasound that can tell you if you’re having a boy or a girl. And if you think I was going to wait to find out that piece of information then you don’t know me at all. Of course it wasn’t like I really needed the ultrasound to tell me I was having a girl because I’d known that for a long time thanks to the science of peeing on some Drano Crystals and seeing them turn a lovely shade of seafoam green. Not to mention that I felt that God was speaking to me through Neil Diamond every time I heard “Sweet Caroline” come on the radio.

On the way to the doctor’s office that Friday morning, P looked at me and told me he knew we were having a girl. I thought maybe Neil Diamond had been speaking to him too, but he said that he knew when he was on that ski trip surrounded by all the chaos and squeals of those girls that God was preparing him for life with a daughter. And as much as he didn’t understand all the drama and the high pitched voices and the nail polish and why they thought it was a good idea to cut each other’s hair, he knew that it was exactly what he wanted.

Fast forward to a rained out soccer practice seven years later. We pile in the car and we’re all soaking wet. The girls are all squealing in their high pitched voices and I put some Taylor Swift on my iPod because I know the love language of six year old girls. And from the backseat, all three of them start singing “Our Song” as loud as their little voices can sing. The fact that they didn’t know the majority of the real lyrics didn’t dim their enthusiasm and confirmed why I never realized that “Greased Lightning” was a really dirty song until I was in my twenties.

They sang their hearts out and laughed and tickled each other. And in between they were all yelling “COACH P! COACH P! DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME THAT MY MOM TOLD MY SISTER SHE WAS GROUNDED FOR A WEEK BECAUSE SHE STAYED ON THE PHONE TOO LATE?” and “COACH P! COACH P! DID YOU KNOW THAT I HAVE AN IMAGINARY FRIEND NAMED ZUM ZUM?” and “COACH P! COACH P! DID YOU KNOW THAT ‘WHITE HORSE’ BY TAYLOR SWIFT IS MY VERY FAVORITE SONG IN THE WHOLE WORLD OR MAYBE IT’S ‘PARTY IN THE U.S.A.’?”

At one point he asked me if Taylor Swift had been a contestant on American Idol and I replied, “No, she was just a seventeen year old girl who got struck by lightning.” (Because I like to mix metaphors.) And Caroline yelled out, “MY MOM JUST SAW SOME GIRL GET STRUCK BY LIGHTNING!” All the girls screamed and I had to explain that no one got struck by lightning, I was just using an expression that ultimately didn’t even make sense.

P just looked at me in amazement that so many different conversations and activities were taking place all at the same time in the backseat of our car. It was like his official welcome party to GIRL WORLD.

And I don’t know if anything has ever made me happier in my whole life.

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While I was on my tour of the United States, P and Caroline headed to the ranch to do a little fishing.

I think they had a pretty good time.

We won’t talk about how long it took me to get all the tangles out of her hair when I got home.

Because what’s important is the size of that bass.

And the size of those smiles.

*Caroline’s shirt says “A bad day huntin’ with Dad beats a good day shoppin’ with Mom”. Personally, I think that’s debatable.

Does anyone remember that I painted Caroline’s room at some point last summer?

Yeah, me neither.

I mean, I knew I painted the room but I couldn’t really remember when it actually happened. Fortunately I have a blog that has taken the place of my long term memory and I was able to find the post where I wrote about painting her room a delightful, if very bright, shade of dancing green.

Too bad the blog couldn’t remind me that yesterday was school picture day before I sent her to school in a huge, oversized tie-dyed t-shirt that she made in Brownies. My little first grade hippy.

Most of the room has been finished for some time now, but Caroline announced early on in the room redecorating process that she’d like to have her monogram painted over her bed. I think we all know that brought me much untold joy and made me wonder if it would be too much to have my own monogram painted over my bed.

So last fall I told P that we needed to figure out how to paint Caroline’s monogram above her bed. I was envisioning some scenario that involved me needing to buy some stencils at Michaels and I was afraid. I was very afraid. But P looked at me and announced, “Shorty can do it”.

I was a little skeptical. Shorty works for P in the landscaping business. You want some geraniums planted? Shorty’s your man. Have a fence that needs to be built? Shorty can do it. Monogramming? Seemed doubtful.

But P pointed out that Shorty paints his name on all his jackets and hats. He doesn’t even own a pair of work gloves that don’t have a fancy “SHORTY” drawn out in some kind of calligraphy. And he spent some downtime on a job site last summer inscribing “El P Landscaping” on all of P’s work tools.

So, yes, Shorty is an artist. Although I’m not sure he paints things as much as he tags things with his name. I felt there might be a 50/50 chance that her wall could end up with SHORTY scrawled across it. And while she is short right now, she’s only six and chances are good that she’ll continue to grow.

I bought the Razzleberry paint I wanted to use for the monogram along with some paintbrushes and then had to wait another two months before Shorty finally had some time in his schedule to paint the wall. Finally, after months of anticipation, P called me in the middle of the day last week and asked, “Do you want Shorty to paint the wall tomorrow?”

Well, yeah.

Later that night, P and I talked about the monogram and I showed him the monogram on Caroline’s lunch box and explained that I wanted it to look JUST LIKE THIS. I should have known I was in trouble when I walked out the next morning and he was measuring the lunch box monogram with a ruler. So that it could be measured out on the wall. To scale.

Heaven help me.

I dropped Caroline off at school and came back home so we could measure it all out on the wall before Shorty began to paint and I knew I was in trouble when P began lamenting that he left his power leveler (I’m not sure that’s the right term) on the job site. But we pressed on. We marked where the center of the headboard was on the wall and he told me to measure out how tall I wanted the middle letter.

So I did.

But then he asked me how I determined that’s how tall the middle letter should be and I answered, “I don’t know. It just feels right.”

The next ten minutes were filled with pencil marks and rulers and drawing straight lines across the wall. I didn’t like how small the C was going to be, but then he said it was to scale. So I wanted to change the whole thing and couldn’t really base my decision on anything more substantive than “because I want to”.

It’s hard to remember exactly where it all went really south, but if memory serves it was sometime right after I was holding the measuring tape and he asked, “Does that look like it measures 32 5/8?”

And I responded, “Let me answer that by asking you this, how long have we been married?”

I am the same woman who has to ask him what 3/4 cups plus 3/4 cups equals when I’m doubling a recipe. Why on earth would I know anything about some 5/8? If the education system had really wanted me to hold on to a knowledge of fractions then they should have never thrown Geometry and Algebra II in the mix.

P looked at me and questioned, “How is Shorty going to know how to paint this if it’s not measured out?”

I just assumed he’d do it like I do all my home improvement projects. It’s a little method I like to call eyeballing it.

But thanks to P, Shorty had some very specific parameters. Which was probably for the best. I showed him the lunch box to make sure that he knew what I wanted and then we left him as he went to work.

Four hours later, I returned home to this.

Seriously. How cute is that? I feel that Shorty is wasting his gift and should start a side business monogramming people’s fences and decks or something.

I also have to add that the furniture in Caroline’s room belonged to my Me-Ma. Words really can’t express how happy I am that it’s in her room because it was such a part of my childhood. I just knew she must be rich to have such beautiful bedroom furniture.

In fact, before it got delivered I was worried that the bedposts might be too tall for Caroline’s room and hit the ceiling fan. I had to laugh when it arrived and was so much smaller than what I remembered. Like so many memories of my grandparents, it was huge in my mind.

Here’s another view of the room.

I’d had those letters in her nursery when she was a baby, but I switched out the pale yellow ribbon in favor of the hot pink.

And then this is my favorite piece of all.

I spent hours as a little girl and an awkward adolescent and a college student sitting at that little chair looking in that mirror as I tried on all of Me-Ma’s jewelry and makeup while she sat with me and listened to all my stories. I never could have imagined a day that it would end up in my own little girl’s room while she looks in that mirror and tries on makeup and pretends she’s a princess.

It makes me smile every time I think about it.

You may also notice the bulletin board on the closet door. I found it at TJ Maxx and was so excited because it was the perfect shade of hot pink. However, when I went to hang it, I discovered that her closet door was too thin for me to hang it with nails so I asked P if we could just hang it with some of those 3M sticky hook things.

I believe his exact words were “We can try it but if it doesn’t work and the bulletin board falls, it could be catastrophic.”

Which caused me to laugh hysterically for the next fifteen minutes because catastrophic seemed like a stretch.

But it served as confirmation that we really aren’t meant to do a lot of home improvement projects together. As if the whole “32 5/8” incident wasn’t reason enough.

**Edited to add that the wall color is Dancing Green by Sherwin Williams and the monogram is Razzleberry by Benjamin Moore**