Nursing Your Kids

I finished painting the former storage/new guest room and the plan was to move all of the stuff from the old guest room/Sam’s new room into it so Bob could get some wiring done. In the old guest room they didn’t wire the ceiling fan through the wall- they threaded it through a metal chain and attached it across the ceiling and down the wall to an outlet where you had to manually plug it in. To wire it properly Bob had to put two or three holes into the wall.

I asked if he needed help moving all of the stuff out of the room and into the new guest room. It was packed with all of Sam’s old baby gear, furniture, lamps, things we’re selling on craigslist, and a ton of other things that haven’t been moved to the basement yet. a big 9x 12 area rug was on the floor. Our friend came over to help him. I moved the painting supplies out of the new room and finished cleaning/sweeping up. I didnt’ mop, but I wiped down the dust along the corners of the room and cleaned up some spilled paint. We moved the bed into the new room. I left to deal with Sam who woke up from his nap.

About five hours later the wiring was done. Holes needed to be patched and the room needed to be cleaned. I asked if they’d moved the stuff to the other room and they said no, but they covered everything. With the rug. The porous, woven, rug. Bob assured me everything was fine and nothing was covered in dust. The next morning I went up to help him move some furniture. He moved the rug, picked up a bag of clothes causing a huge dust cloud to fill the room.

All of the bedding, all of the clothing, all of the furniture, the rug, everything was full of plaster dust. He asked me to grab an end of the dresser we had to move. It was still covered in dust. I told him that we weren’t moving anything into the clean room until it was dusted. He didn’t understand why. He didn’t understand that moving dust from one room to the next would cause MORE DUST. He didn’t understand that the very act of transferring dust would send the dust down the open stairwell to the floor below. He didn’t get that he’d just caused me several loads of laundry, at least $50 worth of dry cleaning, and hours of dusting that could have been avoided. I told him, “This is very distressing to me.” His response was, “It’s plaster dust, not poison.” I burst into tears and didn’t calm down for close to an hour.

He said he’d clean everything (and he did, more or less) but he sucks at cleaning and I almost always have to clean up after him if I want things to be clean, not just look clean. Most of the stuff is now cleared out of the room and it’s cleaner than it was, but not clean enough to paint. If I’m going to start the room it’s going to take hours of prep work in addition to the hours of sanding and scraping we learned is necessary. I am feeling very overwhelmed right now.

(Yes, that’s the international image for “I have hit the wall.” Please let this room be finished and this pregnancy be over soon.)