Up and Down and Down Some More and Then Up Again

If you're wondering what preparing to move a family of five 1200 miles away is like, here's the best gif I can find to approximate that feeling:

And the soundtrack is something like, "YaaaaAAAAaaaay!" immediately followed by "NoOoOoOoo!"

Repeat ad infinitum.

"Ad infinitum" is the problem with this whole process, really, at least at this point.  We're past the initial excitement, and the weeping while you break the news to your local loved ones (well, mostly), and the brainstorming about what the future could look like.  We're solidly in the middle, where for every one task you complete, eight more pop up in its place.  

For instance:  Be sure to get everyone to all the various doctors before you go.  Congratulations, you got all your people to the doctor/dentist/eye doc- more or less.  Oh, but wait, now you need to cancel any appointments more than two months in the future.  Make sure you sign any release forms because someday very soon you really will live in CT and some future doctor will need access to your records. What about insurance?  What about when you're trying to clean the inner glass on the oven door because oh yeah you're also getting your house ready to sell and you insist on taking the oven door off yourself because hello you watched, like, two YouTube videos on this and are therefore an expert, but then the door made a scary sound amongst your fiddling so now you need Husband to come help, and he obliges but then the door makes the scary sound again but this time the sound is accompanied by lots of blood everywhere and now it's time to hustle the family out to the car to take Derek to Urgent Care because that door dang near near sliced his right thumb off.  And now you get to add changing the dressing on his thumb daily, plus multiple daily doses of antibiotic, plus finding a doc in CT to take those stitches out in ten days.  

You know- like that.

What I'm saying is, it's stressful.  It's insanely stressful.  And so I've found myself to be just the teeniest bit cranky and out of sorts lately, and feel like it's even infecting the tone of these posts.  So while I've told myself that I want to post close to daily throughout this process so that someday I have something to look back on- half of my memories of our kids' young childhood is thanks to this blog- I don't want it to be a daily whine-fest.  To help battle that back, my thought is to finish each post with a list of five things I'm thankful for on that day.  I'm hoping this will change my mindset, but also reserve the right to abandon the idea pretty much whenever I want, because changing my mind at will is one of the things I exercise with wild abandon in my life.  

Today's Gratitudinals  (Is that a word?  Probably not.  Does it matter?  Definitely not.)

1.  My vacuum.  It's a Shark that we bought maybe a year ago, and we have become extremely well acquainted whilst getting this house ready to sell/ cleaning up after all the nasty people that live here.  I include myself in that round-up.

Picture less hula-ing, heels, and happiness and you'll get the idea.  But also more vacuum attachments!

2.  The Notes and Reminder apps on my phone.  I swear I would remember nothing and everything would be late without those.  

Shopping lists, book recommendations, things I want to remember to tell Derek or do that evening, e v e r y t h i n g.

3.  This book, which I swear isn't just good because it's somewhat pertinent to our family's current situation:

Yes, it's YA, and yes, it's a graphic novel, but that just means you're not going to spend the next six weeks trying to slog through it like this month's Classics Book Club you're already regretting joining.  It's funny, and insightful, and thoughtful.  

4.  Cadbury mini eggs.  Not the cream eggs, mind you, which are positively revolting, but these small, delectable candies filled with Cadbury chocolate that is somehow superior to other, sad, American-born chocolate.  And okay, I know that Cadbury chocolate is made in Hershey, PA, but it's still so much better.  My taste buds neither care nor know why.

5.  The precious minutes it took to write this post.

News of Two Sorts

First off, I feel I should deliver an update on Daughter's performance of Lumiere, given my last post.

Sorry for scribbling out your face, girl over Adelaide's shoulder

She did so well!  She sang, she danced, she spoke in a French accent that was still understandable- a real worry of mine weeks before the performance, when I tried to gently remind her that yes, she was supposed to be French, but the audience still needed to be able to understand the words coming out of her mouth.

As for those candlesticks:  she made around 80% of them herself.  Did the hot glue drippings, the painting, glued toilet paper tubes inside so she'd have something to grip- nearly everything.  The only thing I helped with were creating the papier mache flames.  That and tailoring that blasted men's suit jacket from Goodwill.  It hung on her like a garbage bag when we first got it, and silly me thought it would be a relatively straightforward matter to extract the oversize shoulder pads, amend the lines of the opening and way it hangs, add gold filigree, and so on, and so on.  

After copious seam ripping and repeated plunges into the bowels of the jacket, however, I realized that men evidently require a lot of padding in their clothing.  Then I got mad thinking about how you would never find this in women's clothing; our fabric instead trends toward the uncomfortably sheer.

One of many fistfuls of shoulder padding

As for the musical itself, well, we listened to Adelaide wail about how poorly practices were going and about how this person kept storming off stage and how that person couldn't even be bothered to show up for the (hours long) practices- etc, etc.  Our expectations for the outcome of the show lowered accordingly each time she uttered such a critique, so said expectations were subterranean by the time we arrived at opening night.  But somehow, through seventh grade magic or possibly just lots and lots of hard work, those kids pulled it off.  It was so entertaining.  Adelaide and her friends acquitted themselves admirably, and we were so proud.

Also of note:  my sister Kelli and her family braved predictions of a winter storm, car problems, and the reality of sticking three tiny children in a car for hours and hours to make the drive up and surprise Adelaide that weekend.  I got almost no pictures while they were here, possibly because I'm a terrible sister/aunt, but mostly because I was trying to soak up every second of their presence. 

That is our giant daughter carrying all the toys Kate felt she needed from the second floor down to the first while also making sure she made it safely downstairs.  Please also see that the shirt Kate is wearing is one that Adelaide wore when she was that little.  Which was forever ago, but simultaneously three seconds ago.

Just two other details pertinent to the story of that weekend:  

One: people approached me after both performances multiple times to tell me that they didn't at first believe that Adelaide was a girl.  She was so convincing as a boy, they claimed, from the sound of her voice as she sang to her mannerisms as Lumiere!  My response to this the first couple times was to laugh, but after that I wasn't sure what the appropriate response was.  "No, please, you're too kind"?  "I bet you get that all the time, too"?  

Two:  Adelaide's dear friends got friendship necklaces, which they presented to her that weekend.  They look like matching puzzle pieces that, when fitted together, read "Always together, never apart, maybe in distance, but never in heart."  (Commas added by yours truly because why on earth wouldn't I?)  The girls gave her this because she's been struggling with the fact that our family is moving.

To Connecticut.

More on this tomorrow.

I'm Sure It'll Turn Out Fine

The roads are slick but my coffee is warm and today's high temp is several degrees above zero- no small thing this time of year. 

Let's just get this out of the way:  middle school.  I hated it the first time, and I'm not exactly pleased with it the second.  Not that I have to traverse its halls every day; no, that falls to Daughter now.  All we have to do is deal with the emotional fallout every evening, which is super.  Basically it's a continuation of elementary school:  learning how to get along with a set of diverse human beings markedly different from yourself, but now, with hormones! 

One of the good things we're finding about middle school is that there are increased extracurricular opportunities for our less than athletically- inclined eldest child.  When they're younger, around here kids can do sports, or they can do 4-H, or they can do sports.  Now Adelaide is venturing out into the wilds of jazz band and choir, the latter of which includes a school musical this spring.  This is proving to be a learning experience for us all.

These wee seventh graders are undertaking a production of Beauty and the Beast, Jr.  What makes it a "Junior" version, you ask?  Not a clue.  No kissing at the end?  Gaston doesn't swallow a bunch of whole eggs?  All of the participants freak out about having to touch each other, even while playing a part in a stage production?  I mean, pick one.  Adelaide auditioned for several roles, but we all breathed a sigh of relief when she got her part of choice- that of Lumiere- because she had gone to great pains to reassure us that her life would be OVER if she was cast as pretty much anything else.  A teeny, tiny, masochistic part of me hoped that she would get a different part as all this kind of talk was communicating to me that she has much to learn about being a gracious loser and making the best out of less than ideal conditions.  Honestly, though, that lesson has been hammered home in other parts of her life (field day every single spring, and P.E. several days per week), so mostly I was happy for her and the peace of our family's life when she got the part. 

What I didn't consider upon first hearing her joyous news, however, was the costume.

Here are five facts:  We are providing Adelaide's costume.  We do not want to pay a million dollars for it.  We do not want to pay a hundred dollars for it.  As a matter of fact, we want to pay a small percentage of that hundred.  We also do not want to dedicate every spare minute to creating this costume. 

Those five facts do not coexist in harmony. 

So here's what we have so far:  gold leggings.  A gold bowtie.  A men's suit jacket from Goodwill.  An excess of confidence in my tailoring abilities. 

We still need a bunch of things, but chief and most worrisome among these are her candlesticks. 

Are you now remembering that Lumiere is a candlestick?  Daughter Dearest has to keep her hands up by her head for the bulk of the musical, arms at 90-degree angles, which will surely make for tired shoulders but whatever, okay, that's her problem, and besides, she's twelve, she'll bounce back in right around 20 minutes, no matter how sore she gets. 

On both those hands need to be fake melting candles, with fake flames, big enough to be seen by the audience, oh, and mom, I'd really really like it if they actually lit up! 

Google returned disturbingly few helpful results.  I can either make something that takes one hour and looks like trash, or I can go to a trade school, become a licensed electrician, and only then be able to follow along with the Lumiere costume how-to YouTube videos I found.

The closest thing I found to any kind of middle ground is this:

First of all, I don't plan on making a candle for her hat, because I believe in setting healthy boundaries.  Second of all, I found this via a google image search, but the description on how to make it was cut off, and when I tried to find the original image and website, it was no longer available.  So what I know is that I need oatmeal containers, sour cream containers, small plastic plates, white paint, hot glue (for the wax drippings), and gold tape.  What I can't figure out is how they made that flame!  Papier mache? (Mentally add your own accent marks to that second word, there, I don't have time to copy and paste- I have to turn our twelve year old into a candle!  A french candle!)  Balloons?  A good old-fashioned Catholic miracle?  Who knows?!

I also don't know how she's going to keep those on her hands.  Lumiere does a fair amount of gesticulating, and as comical as it would be to me if one of her candles flew off and hit the Beast in the face, I'm pretty sure she would be mortified, so I need to figure out some kind of internal handhold.  And making them light up?  Do I mount little LED flashlights in there?  Incandescent flashlights so that there's a potential for a real fire?  (Exciting!)  Fairy lights wrapped around that flame I still can't figure out? 

I'm sure we'll finagle some kind of solution, but for now my plan is to craft something absolutely horrendous-looking in the next week, convince her this is the final draft, then let her persuade me into trying again so that whatever we actually end up with will come as a relief and look satisfactory to her eyes.  See also:  my entire parenting philosophy.

Four of Those Scattered Directions

Hello and halloo! We're all still alive, thanks for asking.  I'm posting because every few days I think to myself, "It's time to revive the blog!" Then I do a mental fist pump, but not a physical one because occasionally I am able to tell when I look ridiculous.  I usually have these thoughts of writing revival when I am in a place that is not conducive to blogging, and by the time I return home my thoughts have scattered in a thousand directions.  But I'm going to try, try again, anyway!

• Our boys' room is constantly trashed. This is not awesome (or uncommon, I know), but it often looks the way it does because of what they're creating:  on Caedmon's part, notes to leave outside Adelaide's door,

Reads, "I love you."

while Atticus likes to create things for me based on his worries. This one is a "company robot," and it's designed to keep me company any time he's not around. These are the kinds of gifts extreme extroverts give to extreme introverts:  well-intentioned, missing the mark by a mile, but good golly do I love it.

• Right here is where I would put a more recent photo of Daughter, but I'm scared to because as I scrolled through the photos she looked way too pretty and grown-up.  I could instead put the screenshot I sent to our neighbor of the sex offenders who live in our community, whose names and addresses I have memorized.  This wasn't just me being a weirdo neighbor (this time, anyway); we had a little scare where Adelaide and her friend were walking to school and a certain person could possibly have been following them. They went and spoke to the police last night.  Adelaide somehow made the recounting of this visit amusing, because while she is so bright and so brave in many ways, she still finds basic human interaction to be challenging at times.  

• I bought this tiny... espresso mug?  Earthenware teacup?  Something that holds a fraction of the coffee a normal mug does because I'm trying to cut down on my coffee intake. I'm having a bit of trouble typing right now because my hands are trembling due to a surplus of caffeine in my system; while I have indeed been using this wee little cup, in practice it's gone a little wonky as it turns out I have no problem refilling it six times. 

• When our kids were babies, my favorite photos were the ones of them crying (terrible, I know).  At this age, these are my preferred shots:

Three Reasons... (with gifs!)

... to be happy in September, one of my historically least happy months.  If you don't feel like being happy, though, that's okay too.  Go back to your Fiona Apple album and don't mind me.

• First,  a quick and slightly bossy reminder to you to read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making because reading a book with beautiful prose and a protagonist named September can help make things better. Or at least appear to be better. Appearances are all that matter, anyway, right?  I'm pretty sure Chomsky said that.  Or Nietzsche, who has a fun name to say but does not appear to have been a fun guy, like, at all.

• This is a book that exists in this world:

This book is so charming, and deals with difficult subject matter with such humor, and I just love it so much.  This is Honeyman's first book, and she has such a deft hand I want to take her, chain her to a word processor, and force her to write a book a year for the next forever, because that's how I express affection.

This is not too much to ask.

• The elastic waist trend is back in women's wear.  I haven't been this comfortable in years!  What a time to be alive!  

Like One of Those Epic Sagas but with a Bathroom

The problem with home improvement is that if you improve one thing, it makes all the other things immediately adjacent to that thing look... less than improved.  In fact, they can look downright dreadful, especially, as it turns out, if you're looking through Derek's eyes, which are terrific at seeing What Could Be.  To get to What Could Be, however, you have to destroy What Already Is.

I have a knack for living with What Already Is. Sure, the peel-and-stick tile is coming up off the bathroom floor, but so what?  It's a matter of seconds to slip it back into place with your foot.  And the finish flaking off the medicine cabinet?  It's not ideal, but neither is the reflection in the mirror right next to it.  Both speak to the second law of thermodynamics, in that everything eventually degrades and decays, so to do away with the medicine cabinet is to do away with our children's grasp of science!  Or something!  Anything that makes it so that we don't have to embark on another home improvement project immediately after finishing the last one!



I am not an optimist by nature.  I wouldn't say Derek is, either, except when it comes to this house, specifically projects undertaken on this house.  All he really wanted was to get the bead board off the bathroom walls and to lay the new floor.  The work of a day, he thought.

The house had other ideas.

As it turns out, the previous owners (rather brilliantly, I have to admit) covered half the bathroom walls in bead board so that they wouldn't have to properly finish those walls:  drywall, tape, spackle, etc.  So what was awaiting us once that bead board had been removed?

That's right:  more plaster.  More lathe.  More crazily uneven walls and problem solving and work, work, work.

Caedmon, our child who either wants to be "a professional football player, a professional soccer player, or if I can't do those things, a construction worker," was eager to get in there and help.

If you look closely, you'll see the dimple that pops out when he's hard at work.  His dad's does the same thing.  This is incredibly sweet.

Added in to all this was the fact that Derek saw a mirror a while back that had the lighting built in to the mirror.  Fact:  people who work in video are semi-obsessive about good lighting.  Mirrors with built-in lights apparently make for good lighting.  So while we didn't have to have towel warmers or a wifi toilet or fake old fixtures (you know- those new fixtures that they purposely mess with to make them appear old?), we did have to have a lit mirror.  This meant that Derek had to put in a new outlet and new light switch, which involved wiring, which is always always a good time in an old house.  And by "good time" I mean trying not to burn down the house as you discover that none of the outlets are grounded or follow any kind of modern safety protocol.

Fun fact:  Derek says the same kinds of things whether things are going well or have jumped in to a handbasket and are heading straight south.   The other day as he was yet again working on electrical stuff I had to scooch around the bathroom so that I could peer into his face in order to correctly interpret the chuckle he'd just emitted.  And don't even get me started on the monosyllable "huh."  "Huh" can mean "Yes!  It fits!  I just fixed this nagging problem," or it can equally mean, "Well, that's definitely not supposed to look like that."

But!  A million "huh"s and a few dark chuckles later, he's got the wiring done.  Did I worry about him being electrocuted at some point? Especially after he attempted to assure me yesterday by saying not to worry, he'd already "gotten a little juice" from the outlet he was working on, and that it wasn't that bad?  Yes.  Yes I did.  Is it likewise done, though?  Yes.  Yes it is.

Please ignore my poor framing of this shot and focus on that beautiful mirror.  It is so dang purdy.  And if ever you feel the need to be mirror twins with us (sounds like the premise of a ghost story... I may have just ruined this mirror for myself), let us know because the company we bought it from is third generation family-owned- just the type of thing I'm a big old sucker for; we'll happily share all the particulars.

Now, brace yourself, because I wanted to show you how well this mirror actually lights its subjects, but to do that I had to take a for-real picture of myself.

The overhead light is not on; that's all from the mirror.

Somewhere in this timeline Derek replaced the flooring.  This consisted of me laying down the moisture barrier (a sheet of a kind of foam material that had to be connected at the seams with no overlapping but also no gaps), while Derek did everything else, including cutting the flooring to fit around a large pipe that randomly runs from the ceiling to the floor right next to one of the bathroom walls.  Derek suggested taking it out but I meekly said NO NO NO WAY NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF THIS.  So he didn't.
If that workload sounds unfair to you, it's only because it is.  Now, I wasn't reclining on the couch, idly thumbing through a novel while he toiled away upstairs; we do still have those three children who require care and keeping.  I also handed Derek things as he needed them.  Please hold your applause.

After flooring came replacing the vanity, a journey which was made up of a series of small catastrophes.  First we picked out a vanity, muscled it into the van, squishing the kids into the back bench of the van, hoisted it into the house, opened up the box... only to find that the vanity inside did not match the picture on the outside, nor the model we had chosen.

Whatever, we can return it, and that one was probably too big, anyway.  Let's try this other one!

It was pretty!  The top was sleek marble!  The base color was "cloud," which was somehow important to me!

This one we managed to get all the way up the staircase- which includes three turns and two landings- and into the bathroom, where we swore up and down it worked and looked great.  Derek cut a hole in the bottom and we carefully lowered it down over the plumbing.  At that point we realized that it looked just a tad big.  Not terrible, we told ourselves.  We even lived with it for a day before we were both forced to admit that any bathroom fixture that forces you to close the door before you can squeeze past it to get to the other side of the room- well, it probably doesn't fit.  Somehow we managed to sell it on a Facebook swap shop- couldn't take it back to the store since we'd already cut into it- which included (not a little bitterly) maneuvering it back down the stairs, into its box, and out into a storm to meet the seller, who ended up being delightful, by the way.

Oh, and I forgot the drawer pulls, so I had to mail those afterward.  She was very understanding.

A bunch of other things happened- imagine a series of things going wrong, one after another, and you'll pretty much have it- but we finally got the right vanity and sink into the there.  Did it weigh hundreds of pounds and take three of us to get it up the stairs?  Does it fit perfectly in our space, as it is long but narrow, like our weird old-house bathroom?  Is it the first one Derek suggested but I poo-poo'd at the beginning of this saga?

Add baseboards, paint, wrangling a faucet into place, and a million other details, some of which are still unfinished, and we're done.  Nearly done.  Will this bathroom ever be done?

Close enough.





I'll get up a post up with more "we are so done" pictures (I like that term better than "after") soon, but for now, reward yourself for making it all the way to end of this long post by making these amazing chicken tinga tacos for your culinary pleasure and sit down with Listen, Slowly by Thanhha Lai, one of my favorite books I've read so far this year.

The Last Time I Ever Tile Something. I Mean It This Time.

I know it's been an age and a day since I last posted, but I have some feelings to process, and what better place to do so than the internet?

Never fear, we're not going through any serious family turmoil or anything; no one is dying or even majorly ill.

We are, however, in the process of some semi-major home renovations, which I know many would greet with the feelings appropriate to the situation:  excitement!  anticipation!  gratitude!

Because I am me, however, a decidedly non-Joanna Gaines kind of girl in an HGTV-obsessed country (no offense to the Magnolia empire.  Please don't have me smothered in my sleep with a perfectly on-trend designer pillow.), I am not feeling any of the emotions listed above.  I am instead cranky and teary and overwhelmed and even sending some not-so-loving thoughts to our beloved old house.  (I don't really mean it, House.  It's those Suspicious Previous Owners and their utter lack of regard to bringing ANYTHING up to code in their tenure here.)


It all started, as these things do, with a nasty old shower.  Our nasty old shower.

Because I am also apparently, um, nasty and old (?) I was more than happy to continue on with this shower of ours, as long as I had the thought of a someday-new shower to sustain me.  Emphasis on someday, which is evidently where I prefer our home improvement projects to remain.

Derek, however, is a go-getter, a doer, a today kind of home owner.  This is the kind of person every house deserves, especially a charming old dear such as ours that just needs a thing or two (OR ONE MILLION) done to keep standing well into its second century of life.

This meant a new shower.  Yahoo!  Huzzah!  Hoo-to-the-ray!

I can say with no false modesty that Derek and I are experienced tilers. You may remember that we tiled our kitchen backsplash a few years ago, and prior to that we'd tiled the floors of several rooms in a previous house. This was our first time tiling a shower, however, and that meant all kinds of waterproofing and sealing and fun, fun, fun.

Before any of that could happen, though, we had to tear out the old shower walls.

Do you remember that horror film that came out years ago called What Lies Beneath?  I don't really, either, but those are words that come to mind and I certainly get that horror movie feeling every time we set out to reveal anything that's been covered up in our house.  Hard experience has taught Derek and I that if there was a shortcut to be had, the previous owners of our house took it.  So I knew that when Derek went to rip out those shower walls,

we would not be greeted only by well-preserved, modern drywall.  And lo!  I was right!

We did find other things, though.  Like mold.  And a senseless mix of old insulation and new.

That's warm, cozy, no doubt terrible for the earth modern insulation on the left, and planet-friendly but barely-keeps-our-shower-warm lathe, plaster, and lambswool on the right.  Golly, old houses are fun.  (Okay, so they really are.  I found the lambswool as charming as I did maddening.  No wonder I flinch every time my arm accidentally brushes against the freezing walls of our shower!)

 Let's just take a quick moment and thank God for Derek's constant willingness to learn new things, and for YouTube.  After watching the appropriate instructional videos, Derek has rewired parts of our vehicles, fixed busted pipes in our basement, and now ripped out, rewired, and installed all new everything in our bathroom.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So:  DensShield went in (oh, you don't know what DensShield is?  Neither did I, a few happy months ago), and then we got to tiling.  Derek cut the tiles in the basement, I did most of the mortaring.  I couldn't very well take a picture of myself doing that, though, and didn't care enough to try and set up a shot of myself doing it, so here's a picture of Derek doing one of the sections he completed, because I know this is terribly important to you:

We went with gray glass subway tile.  You may notice we kept the tub, because it's in good shape and we don't generally replace things unless they're already halfway dead.  The fact that it likely weighs half a ton also factors in here.

We put it in shelf holder thingies, and a tile mosaic.

Better

Then we grouted, which I did take a picture of myself doing,

and then we took a break to go to church and do an Easter egg hunt, because we did all of this Easter weekend!  Jesus is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Time to undertake a home improvement project so you can question His decision not to just forego the cross and relegate us all to the fiery depths because that's starting to sound preferable to spending another minute in this Godforsaken shower!

I think this is the closest we got to family photo this Easter, or as it will no doubt be known in the future:  "2018:  The Lost Easter."

That final sentence in the previous paragraph rather precisely communicates my attitude on the down slope of any DIY project, by the way.  Derek speaks very carefully and gently to me, reminding me that we do still care about this, and that it does matter where this tile goes or how we go about finishing this row.  The Bible is full of verses about finishing strong and not giving up but I think God may have decided to withhold those traits in me because two days in to these kinds of things and all I can say to any question Derek asks me is, "I mean, fine.  Whatever.  I'm sure whatever is fine.  Yep, that looks good.  Or that way.  Any way it gets done is fine because I no longer care about anything."  

Thankfully Derek is good about keeping end goals in mind, or our entire house would be in shambles.  I did get it together long enough to do things like caulking (a duty of which I have since been relieved because it turns out one can be almost comically bad at caulking) and sealing the grout- something I wasn't exactly bad at but certainly wasn't smart about.  All I remember is lying on the floor of the bathroom, ceiling swirling above me as Adelaide reads the instructions on the bottle in a scolding manner:  "Mom, it says right here that you should work in a well-ventilated area, that there MUST be a cross-breeze, that you should be wearing a mask and gloves and to remove contact lenses before use!  DID YOU DO ANY OF THESE THINGS?"  

No.  No, I did not.  In fact, I ducked under the plastic sheeting we had up so that we could still shower but not get the tile wet while it cured for a couple days, so it was just me and my sealant fumes occupying those few inches of space, which is how I ended up dizzy and swaying and pawing my way out of my chemical tent, then laid out flat and in trouble with our then-11 year old.  But the grout is now waterproof!

And look!  We have a grown-up shower!

In the next edition of "Kristy is a Terrible Person to Work With," Derek decides the rest of the bathroom looks like comparative garbage, and something must be done about it!  Kristy wails in anguish!  Do their children even still exist?  Who knows?