Boxes unpacked, and a good number of Angels smiling as a result of their removal from our home. Now we move on to the slightly more exciting part of
painting. You are probably thinking: hang on a minute, what about the building work??!! Yes, that will come, but as you will see in the next post we are doing yet more waiting (this time on quotes). Meanwhile, our feet are itching to do something in our new home and we have daily pleas from our children along the lines of: "Are the boxes unpacked yet?" and "When can we start painting?"
So yesterday we took the first step by deciding
which room to paint first. This is not as simple as it sounds. We thought that we would be able to paint the children's rooms fairly soon as there is no major work to be done on them. However, there is then the question of fairness and equality! Often a big issue in our house, especially with their Dad being a Professor of Politics specialising in ideas of equality and a Mum teaching and writing about equality in the criminal justice system. I guess it's inevitable that our children are growing up to feel quite strongly about their rights, and having firm ideas about what is fair! Chris and I came up with what we thought was a democratic way to decide the order of painting:
names in a hat. Ha! There will always be at least one dissenter! Felix went off being very enthusiastic about this idea and put his creative hands to work to produce not scrap pieces of paper with their names on, but neatly drawn out squares - two pieces for each child, plus some blank pieces to fill up the hat a little which quickly became known as "fake snakes" (don't ask me why)! Yasmin (aged 3) was asked her opinion and seemed happy enough with the lucky-dip system, but Leo was not. He announced that we should paint all of them simultaneously, even if it meant getting a man in to paint the third room ! This seemed logistically very difficult and expensive too!!! But he was placated a little by the thought that they can have sleep overs in each other's rooms while they're waiting for the paint to dry...
Today I started the process of putting sample squares of paint in all three of the children's bedrooms for their final approval. The outcome of the lucky dip was that Felix will have his room painted first, followed by Yasmin and then Leo (the dissent became before the result, interestingly enough!) Now to PAINT!
