their noses still runneth

(Today's picture is an oldie-but-goody. I haven't taken any new pictures of the boys lately.)

So finally the fevers are gone, but oh the Kleenex we have gone through. Of course, I, too, now have a cold. The really attractive kind where my nose has turned bright red, and I have to coat it in Vaseline several times a day to keep it from cracking open. It is a super cute look for me, especially when you add into the picture the newly sprouted gray hairs coming in at my temples. What!? Aren't I too young for Nice 'N Easy?

One bonus side effect of the funk that is going around this house is that twice this week Everett has slept FIFTEEN hours at a stretch. We put him down for a nap at 4:00 on Monday, and Mark actually had to go in and wake his confused little still-in-his-clothes self up at 7:00 the following morning. I was totally convinced that he MUST have died in his sleep, but on the off-chance he didn't, I didn't want to go into his room and run the risk of waking him up. After about an hour of mental turmoil at 4 in the morning, I finally sneaked in to see him sound asleep, feet propped up on the side of his crib. There is no sound quite as good as baby snoring.

Mark took a week of vacation this week, trying (once again... how many years in a row is this?) to see if he could work on the house some to get it ready to sell in the spring. We've hired a handyman to fix some rotten siding and repaint that and some of the peeling trim. And now that I have all of my business stuff out of here, we actually have a walk-in closet again. The idea of going through the selling/showing process is about enough to give me heart palpitations. The house would have to be CLEAN (like real clean, not shove-it-in-a-closet clean) at just a few minutes' notice. With three small children, one of whom is a 20-something pound human tornado, I just don't know how it will be humanly possible.

The studio space is coming along... last weekend my parents and brother came up for the afternoon so they could see it, and what started as a quick little job for my dad to fix some sagging gallery shelves turned into a holes-in-the-walls massive spackling ordeal for moi. (This is the same man who, at a family dinner when I was about 7, was showing my grandparents something with our dining room wall, and by the end of the night the wall consisted only of studs... he had knocked down every last piece of plaster. My mother was thrilled.) So the fix-the-shelves project suddenly mutated into a paint-the-whole-room project, which actually isn't really that bad because now I can paint it a color I've never gotten to use in my own house, but have always loved. (THIS color.) My sassy red sofa was delivered yesterday, and hopefully in a little less than two weeks the rest of the furniture will be delivered. I've ordered prints for the walls and am having a coffee table book made as a sample. I feel crazy and behind on my work and totally freaking excited all at the same time.

Off to bed with my box of Kleenex and some Benedryl.