salt and pepper

Every once in a while I'm due for a heart-lightening surprise. A couple of months ago it was the comment left by designer Nancy Wolff on the post I'd written about her fabric. Yesterday it was the comment by My First Jenny as she will be henceforth called by me. Forever. I told her I would like to wrap her up and put her in my curio cabinet so that I can walk by her all the livelong day and wave sweetly - HELLO MY FIRST JENNY! Of course, such a course of action is both terribly inconvenient (the cabinet isn't so much sized to fit an actual human person) and also impossible, seeing as how she's way over there in the middle (Oklahoma). Also her family might object since they probably like having her around. (Though seriously: I think she'd enjoy my curio cabinet. It's filled with tiny antique salt and pepper shakers. And that's a story that I think I've told before so I'm not going to go into the why. Only the joy of having such strange objects around my house fills me with an unspeakable pleasure. A thrill, you could say. And I think you should.)

salt and pepper shakers beyond your wildest dreams - perhaps we need to have a Salt and Pepper Shaker of the week?

(As of this writing I have just consumed 2.5 oatmeal cookies and I'm feeling very sassy. And sugary. Can you tell?)

The curio cabinet. I love it, even in its perpetually undone state of RAW WOOD. I need to paint it. I want to paint it. Chip says I have an addiction to painting things. He's probably right. I was going to paint it RED but was diverted from that choice by my dear husband. He didn't want red. I'm thinking I might have to go with a really dark stain. Which would look nice, but I'm afraid it would make my living room look dark. Darker than it already is. I have an issue with the lack of light in my living room.

(I think I could be deleting this entire post any time now. It's that full of nonsense. Though maybe I shouldn't delete it and instead use it to tell My First Jenny and a few other bloggers that I love them and would gladly leave comments on their blogs, but there is a particular Blogger comment format that HATES me (the embedded comment form - it's the default comment set up on Blogger and I RUE THE DAY they did that). For some unknown and EVIL reason, the embedded comment form won't ever let me comment. I write NOVELS of comments on these things in the hope that this once, just this time, it will work. But when I hit Publish it goes POOF and is gone. I try. I have tried. In several different ways and it never works. I think it's just me because I've never heard anyone else talk about it. I feel a little like Blogger doesn't want me to show the love. That's just mean. And this paragrah is one long parenthetical and so I should treat it as such. ...adding parenthesis! And italics! Now!)

Perhaps I should ask my new best friend My First Jenny about the cabinet. What do you think? Dark brown stain? Black? Continue in the current raw wood state for another few years?

The doors of the thing are covered in Toddler Spit. And Toddler Spit is actually what this post is about (five paragraphs in, I'm good). Toddler Spit runs in one long connected line around my house. Like a ring around the bathtub. Except with spit. On the walls, furniture, windows. I don't notice it anymore, except when I take a step back and really look. A grimy motif of smudges, finger prints, lip marks and goodness knows what else--- decorating my abode for the first 14 inches.

It's one of those changes that I never anticipated about having a kid. Though I should have anticipated it: the subtle shift in priorities that seeps down into the most basic levels of your life, like how many finger prints and face marks you'll tolerate on your furniture. The answer for Whimsy: quite a lot, actually.

There are still a lot of things that I don't tolerate, things somewhat out of the norm, but honestly I can't remember a single one of them right now. I'm just happy about the ring around my living room. I wear it like a badge of honor.