His personal style is rather easy to maintain. Shorts and tee’s in the summer.  Polo shirts and jeans in the winter.  He’s a nicely fuzzed kind of guy so he’s usually not needing sweaters or anything beyond a long sleeve tee shirt in the winter.  And tennis clothes are easy to mix and match for men.  Simple, not flashy, but looks great on him.  When I met him he usually dressed in very neutral tones and could blend in with the wall color but, as soon as the relationship police would allow, I brightened up his tee shirt selection with some colors.  I never really knew how seriously lacking his knowledge was of style and fashion.  I just assumed he picked his wardrobe out of comfort and not because you can’t mess up tee shirts and jeans. I also now wonder if, before he met me, his closet was also added to by previous girl friends and not really himself.  Now I understand why when I ask him how something looks on me or which shoes he thinks I should wear he gives me some noncommittal answer that only upsets me, and makes me want to change clothes 5 more times.  It’s not because he’s doing the “guy thing” and trying to stay out of trouble.  He really, truly, honestly doesn’t have a clue. 

Where am I going with this you might ask?  Well, we now have a daughter.  A small, beautiful, growing person of the female persuasion.  An American girl and God forbid, one day a grown up woman.  Someone whom I’m looking forward to teaching about makeup and clothes and all those girly things. Oh, and SHOES! Dear Hubby and I have split the duties of when we take care of our little bundle of joy.  I’m more of a night owl so I get bedtime which includes the evening ritual of her last bottle and sometimes waiting and watching while she burns off her extra energy, which can take sometimes several hours.  Dear Hubby has mornings since I usually still have my head stuffed under a pillow when EJ is ready to greet the world for the day.  What that means is she is dressed by Daddy most of the time.  Do you see where I’m going now?  I may have taught Dear Hubby how to match colors ok, except for the day he put her in hot pink pants and a red shirt, but I forgot to teach him about prints.

Dear EJ, I’m so sorry your Daddy is lacking in the genetic tissue to be able to dress you like the rock star that you are.  One day when your all grown up you will appreciate the effort he put into making sure you had warm and comfortable clothes on each day.  Even if the color combinations and the mismatching prints burnt your retinas.  I promise, when you get older and you start to care about your personal style I will make sure I’m the one up in the mornings.  I also promise until that time I will do my best to keep your “bad clothes days” inside our doors.  When we go out in public I will always try to make sure you at least have colors that blend with each other.  I love you darling, and one day you and I both will look back on this and laugh.

EJ is modeling her hot pink striped shirt with her gray pants with pink hearts all over, and her multi-colored zig-zag striped socks.

Lewis and Gilbert from Revenge of the Nerds.

I’m so glad that the only way she will remember this is from pictures.  And I’m so glad Dear Hubby doesn’t complain when I scoot into her nursery, when I hear over the monitor that its time to dress her, to pick out something too cute for her to wear when I know she going to be in public.   That way I can go back to bed knowing that I saved our daughter from another day of potentially getting the nick name of “nerd baby”.

 First, we took EJ to the doctor yesterday for her 6 month well baby check and her shots.  She was fine last night so we thought we were going to get out of the “I feel icky” screaming that she’s done in the past.   We were wrong.  She was saving it all up for today.  Running a little fever and a whole lot of cranky she was a very hard baby to cope with.   It’s a terribly stressful thing when you know your baby doesn’t feel good and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  But that wasn’t the only thing that made our day rough. Oh no, there’s more!

Since we are hosting Thanksgiving for our clan I needed to spend some time today getting things ready around the house.  I’ll be pre-cooking on Wednesday so today is cleaning day.  Mission one, mop floors.  Our entire downstairs floor plan is tile.  Beautiful  gray tile with a hint of brown.  It’s a really nice floor but with along with really nice tile comes really horrible grout.  Now I know why linoleum was invented.  All the look of tile and no grout.  I’ve been on a mission lately to get our grout cleaner.  EJ will be crawling soon and the idea of her wiggling around and touching these collection centers and breeding grounds  for every little creepy crawly, bacteria laden, gross little nastiness that you could imagine, makes me sweat.  So a scrubbin’ I went.  Dear Hubby had the cranky baby and I was cleaning the floor.  

I was half way done, and 2 hours and one blister later, I realized that if I didn’t stop to eat I would pass out so I took a break and had some lunch. Once done, and after I finished procrastinating, I persuaded myself to get back to work.  I was looking forward to checking out the now dry areas, that I worked so hard on, and I was expecting to see a nice clean floor.  What I saw was a floor that was covered in some weird dusty film.  When you ran your foot over an area it looked like I was dusting a layer off it.  WTF!?!?   

Up until about two months ago we had a house keeper/professional duster who came over every two weeks to help our household get back to a “normal” state, before we messed it up again.  She didn’t do things like laundry or dishes so it wasn’t as great as it sounds.  But it was a nice luxury to not have to clean my own toilets, I won’t deny.  Ana came with my husband.  When I met him she had already been working for him for a couple years.  I’m sure you’re wanting to throw rocks at me now but let me at least say this much.  While she was a really nice lady, and did a wonderful job on everything else, she sucked at keeping the floor and grout clean.  Ana, if you’re reading this please don’t hate me.  My shower always sparkled bright and you were the best at dog hair removal and that makes up for it all.  Anyways, she would swish the mop water around and that was it.  I never put much thought into it at the time because we never walk around downstairs without shoes on.  We also have little mutant dogs that make it even less bare foot friendly.  But now that we have a baby you know my mind went right to the idea that if my child even touches the floor with her big toe she’s going get the hee-b-gee-bee’s and I’ll be to blame for it.   

This is why I found myself scrubbing the tiles to no avail.  My question to Ana is, how could you ignore the directions on the bottle of tile floor cleaner that said “rinse with water” and the floor looked cleaner than when I scrubbed it with a brush, then a mop, rinsed it and then dried it with a towel?  HuH!!!  Ya!  I went above and beyond the call of duty and my floor should be cleaner then my kitchen counter and it turned out like crap!   UGG!

Ok, breathing…  Lets go back to what started this rehashing of a perfectly terrible day. With my frustrations flaring and Dear Hubbies ears bleeding from EJ crying so much we both finally snapped over the dishwasher and how to load it.  I’m not going to go into details about exactly what we were both saying.  That’s for our own ears, but I will say this, we both needed a good “snap out of it” slap.  

This is when I left him with a crying baby and ran an errand.  Better to flee for a little while and cool off and give him some time too.  On my way home we sent a couple messages to each other:

Hubby:  I’m sorry I said you were “_____”

Me:  Forgiven, I bought you a chicken.

Hubby:  You read my mind.

I won’t interpret what this meant.  Only Dear Hubby and I understand it and that is how it should be.  As I said at the beginning of this rant, couples can be very annoying in their communications with each other. Sometimes couples have a way of communicating that is on a whole different planet.  It’s when Mars and Venus finally combine and create a new world named Marven.  After I got home it was all love and roses again.  EJ suddenly started feeling better so all the demons that made our day kinda sucky crawled back under the rug.  Except for my tile floor.  That’s going to be a battle for a different day.  I just thought I would share with you a little of my awful day…I’m sorry, OUR awful day, and let you have a peek at the sweetness that came about in the end.

Smiles!