The reality was that we didn’t really need the calendar to tell us what our daily chore was since it followed the same pattern.  My older brother and I each had a set of dishes to wash.  Either breakfast or dinner dishes (lunch dishes were put into rotation during the summer months).  Along with dishes we had another chore.  Wednesdays we each had a bathroom to clean.  Tuesdays and Thursday rotated between vacuuming the front room/hall or the kitchen.  Friday was changing your sheets and dusting.  (We loved Friday.  So easy.)

Saturday morning we’d wake up to a list on the kitchen counter with our name on it.  On this list would be all of the chores we did earlier in the week.  Basically we had to do all of the vacuuming and bathroom cleaning again before we could do anything else that day.  Be assured there was never a Saturday, not one single one, where we didn’t have our “Saturday Chores”.

I’d been doing chores since I was pretty little so this arrangement didn’t seem odd to me.  My mom worked a full time job from the time I was in middle school.  I wouldn’t have thought it was fair for her to do all the cleaning.  There were four of us kids messing up the house, there might as well be four of us cleaning up too.

Pretty much the day I turned eighteen (two weeks before I graduated from high school) I was no longer required to do chores.  It wasn’t discussed it was just understood.  I moved away to college, got married, divorced, and moved back in with my parents.  A chore calendar with my name on it was never again hung inside the pantry door.  I cleaned my own room and did my own laundry, but that was it.  I’m pretty sure I never did any dishes or vacuuming.  And I know I didn’t clean a bathroom.  Maybe my mom felt bad for me since I was 23 and divorced, living with my parents.  Whatever her reason, NO MORE CHORES!

The King never had a chore chart growing up.  His mom didn’t work outside the home and there were only two kids.  While we’ve never discussed it I’m pretty sure he never had to clean bathrooms or vacuum.  And I know he didn’t do any dishes.

What I’m saying is that The King and I were raised very differently in regards to working.

The first few years of our marriage The King and I lived in a studio apartment and slept in a twin size bed.  There wasn’t much to clean.  We didn’t have a chore chart.  We just did our part to keep our little place running.

We knew we had to move out of our tiny studio eventually, and so The King decided to build us a house.  With his own two hands.  We didn’t have any kids at this point so he expected me to help out.  It became clear, quite quickly, that I didn’t know how to build a house.  It was more then that, it became clear that I really didn’t know how to work.  At least not like The King.  Boy oh boy, that man knew how to work.  And he didn’t hate it.  Or complain about it.  Or try to come up with excuses to get out of working.  Nope, he just went and worked on the house every single day after working his full time job.  On Saturdays he woke up at the crack of dawn and started working on the house and didn’t stop until it was too dark to work.

And really, he never complained.

Be assured I complained enough for the both of us.  I didn’t want to go to the house after work.  I definitely didn’t want to go on Saturdays.  Work…blah.

I hated the work.  HATED it.  And I’ll admit that I held it against The King.  I was tired all the time and just didn’t have the energy to do even half the amount of work The King would have liked me to.  He wasn’t asking too much of me.  But it sure felt like he was.

By the time we started to build our second home Babboo was around, so I was given a free pass on working on that house.  I think I only worked on the house one day before we lived there.  Phew.

Even after we moved into the house there is stuff to work on.  Mostly it’s been things outside.  The King continues to wake up every Saturday morning and head outside to dig dirt, or lift rocks, or cut wood.  He also works most evenings around the house.

Thankfully I’ve recently shed The Tired that used to rule my life and have felt good about joining in and working with The King.  We’ve been working our butts off to get the majority of our yard done before Rerun is born.  It’s exciting to see the progress.

I was out with some girlfriends a few weeks ago and, as it does, the conversation turned to them complaining about their husbands.  One woman said she feels like all she does is nag her husband to get stuff done around the house.  She said it never gets done.  Another woman said that the knob on her front door had been broken for two months before she finally just figured out how to fix it herself.

I started to think about my husband and how The King would never let a door knob stay broken for two months.  And I’ve never had to nag him to get something done around the house.  Heck, I don’t think I’ve ever even had to ask him to do something.  He just does it.

I sat there in silence while the other women joined in. They weren’t being malicious towards their husbands or anything.  They just didn’t like how they never got things done.

I had nothing to say.  There wasn’t one single thing I could add to the conversation.  My husband was the exact opposite of all of their husbands.

I realized right then how lucky I was to have such a hard worker for a husband.

I had never really thought before about how much other husbands worked.  I guess I just assumed that most husbands woke up on Saturday and instantly went out in the garage to get the tools they’d need for the day, or made the first trip of the day to Home Depot.

I remembered that while visiting my family in Utah last month The King spent one of the four days we were there installing a new kitchen floor in my sister’s house.  He completed the entire kitchen, happily, in a few short hours.

Last summer he spent most of our vacation out there building my parents a new pergola in their back yard.

It might have taken me a while, but I appreciate what a hard worker The King is.  A damn fine one at that.

And he does it all because he loves me.  He loves our family.  Every nail he bangs into the wall, every shovel full of dirt he lifts, and every push of the lawn mover he does because he loves me.

Happy tenth anniversary baby.

Here’s to an eternity of working together.

The main thing that we’d like to get done before I pop out this kid is to finish our back deck.  We’ve spent the last few summers trying to get our yard in order so that we can, at some point, actually enjoy it.  We figure this might be our last summer for a while to work on it hard core.  We pretty much finished up the front yard earlier this summer and have been focused on our back yard.  And by “back yard”, I totally mean “the dirt hill behind our house that will never be considered a yard!”

After much thought we decided the best (and possibly only) way to utilize the mound of dirt behind our house would be to turn it into one huge deck with multiple levels.  Yep, our back yard won’t have a single blade of grass.  This is actually a great plan because we’ll be able to throw send the boys out on the deck to play and we won’t have to worry about them.  Especially once the fence in finished.

If you’re new to my life blog then you might not know that The King is the epitome of a hard worker.  He lives for work.  He thrives on work.  He, pretty much, just basically enjoys hard labor.

(Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one confused at how he and I wound up together.)

What I’m saying is that The King has planned to do all of this work himself.  You know, while working a full time job, being a husband and father and donating his time to our church.  This whole deck business is huge and The King can’t physically do all of it in the amount of time we have left.

Enter me.  His pregnant wife.  (And maybe some others.)

The plan for the deck is to have it be three levels.  The first level starting at our back door and the subsequent levels going up to the back alley.  The first level of deck was completed last summer, as well as the framing for the second level.  Each level is to be divided by a gabion wall.  (Have you ever seen a gabion? They are pretty cool and you should check them out.)  Anyway, I think the average person hires someone to come in and put together the wire gabion baskets and then hires someone else to come in with a backhoe and fill each basket with rocks.

We’re not “average”.

And so The King and I (and a few friends, who we’ve happily paid) have spent the last few months taking rocks from a pile of rocks we bought and had delivered and dumping them into the gabions.

By just looking at the gabions you might not think they have that many rocks in them.  If you think that…YOU WOULD BE WRONG.

There are a lot of darn rocks.  Lots and lots.

Take my word for it.

At this point in the project we were all “we should just look into paying someone to finish the second level.”  We hemmed and hawed and finally decided to fork over the cash to pay someone else to do something that we could do, but just didn’t have the time to do.

The second level was finished in two days.  It would have taken The King a few weeks of evening and Saturday work to get it done.

It might have been the best money we’ve ever spent.  It looks beautiful!

Level three will be a flat area filled with gravel for the time being.  Next summer The King will build a shed and a sauna with a shower area.  (I know you want to come and stay at my house, right?!)  The third level will have to wait until next summer.  Sad, but true.

Another thing of our list of “Things to do before the baby is born” is for me to sand down all of our teak deck furniture (that we bought a few years ago AT A SUPER DISCOUNT) and have The King restain it (I probably shouldn’t be messing with stain and paint at this point in my life).

It isn’t the fastest task, but it’s going good.  So far I’ve sanded two chairs and one chaise lounge chair (and half of the other).

Our new table umbrella was delivered last week (thanks Overstock.com) and we’ve managed to eat dinner outside EVERY SINGLE NIGHT since its arrival.

The fence should be going up soon.  SOON!  The pile of unused wood will be sold online soon.  SOON!  And the deck will be finished.  FINISHED!

Then we’ll be able to cross it off the list of “Things to do before the baby is born”.

Speaking of the list, I crossed something else off the list on Sunday evening:

“finish boys room”

Yep, the wall art has been updated (with super cute pictures of old pirate ships) and….

…new curtains have been sewed by ME, WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO SEW.

(The “before” pic of the fabric and the existing sheer curtain that will go behind the new curtains.)

And the “after” of the curtains, all sewn and hung up on the rod.

What was The King doing while I was cutting fabric and cursing my sewing machine?

He was working on crossing something off the “Summer of Fun” list:

“Climb to the VERY TIP OF MT. RAINIER“

(He’s been training to do this for a while.)

Thankfully he (and the guys he climbed with) was safe.

And thankfully I didn’t go into labor while he was gone, thus cursing me to naming my child something like “Rainier” or “Muir” in honor of giving birth while my husband was on the mountain.

Next up; crossing even more things off the “Summer of Fun” list!

I looked out the window by the front door and saw two twentyish super cute gals. One was texting on her pink iphone and I couldn’t see the face of the other one. I thought it might be our single female next door neighbor. I thought maybe she was locked out of her house, or something. So I opened the door, with The King behind me.

The girl who’s face I couldn’t see saw me and CLEARLY looked freaked. She was all “we have the wrong house”.

“Yeah you do.”

And they turned and walked away. And The King and I walked back upstairs to bed.

As if this isn’t odd enough there is a twist to this story. A huge twist.

One of the girls had a live parrot on her shoulder.

A PARROT.

ON HER SHOULDER!

*

So many questions.

First off, our house looks very different from any house on our block. There is no mistaking our house for another house. No way. And yet, how did they mistake our house for someone else’s house?

Didn’t they notice our two cars in the driveway and realize they weren’t cars that belonged to friends of theirs?

Why didn’t they think anything of the fact that it probably took The King and I a couple of minutes to actually get to the door to open it? This gave them plenty of time to figure out they were at the wrong house.

Who rings the door bell of a completely dark house at 11:45? Even if you think you know the person?

Could this be a Craigslist Escort ad gone bad and how does the parrot play into that scenario?

The King and I sat in bed trying to figure this out for way too long. We just couldn’t get what the angle was on this. Were they scoping out our house to rob it later? Were they running a screen for someone else to sneak in the garage and steal all of The King’s tools?

Seriously…it’s crazy!!!

Mostly because they were two super cute and totally normal looking girls.

But really mostly because there was the whole “live parrot on her shoulder” element.

So tell me, seriously, what do you think this was all about?

*The girl was much cuter then this lady (although not as happy looking). And she wasn’t wearing a Bird Shoulder Cape that is available for purchase for a mere $16.99.

He started by taking his favorite picture of my Sweet Babboo:

Then he broke the picture up on tphotoshop into small squares and assigned each square a shade of black from 0%-100%. Next he took the canvas and divided it into 1″ squares with a pencil and then I helped him write the black percentage inside each square.

(That process took a bit of time. I kept asking, “dude, when does the actual PAINTING begin?!”)

Next The King started painting each square individually, depending on what percentage of black they were. He held a mixing tray and brush and just figured it out as he went. He taped a smaller version next to what he was painting to help guide him.

Over the next few weeks The King would spend an hour or so a day filling in squares. Last Sunday night he figured it was just about done.

Of course it is better appreciated from afar, since it’s so freaking huge.

The King hung it up in our bedroom last week.* That way the people out on the street will look up into our house and see this huge painting of our awesome kids face.

We’ve got a few more canvases, that are even bigger. The King has yet to decide what the new painting swill be of. I’m thinking one of each of us.

*The King and I have both admitted to waking up in the middle of the night and being completely 100% freaked out by the ultra large Babboo looming over our bed.

Or something like that.

Anyway, it’s fixed now.

(Thanks to all the awesome readers who sent me worried e-mails.  Have no fear, holaisabel.com is still here.  And it will be for at least another year, since I just prepaid for a year of service!)

The King has yet to find a job.  He continues to scan the internet for jobs and he’s submitting his resume like crazy.  He’s also still interviewing (and wearing his suit, yummy)!  During this time sans full time job he was able to finish up a lot of the little things at our house.  He totally cleaned out our office and got it all set up.

This was our office in the middle of the project (yes, it was even worse then this):

This is our office now:

He installed a coat rack (above the radiator, so our coats are always warm).

Once he got done with all the projects around our house he started helping some of our friends finish their house so they can put it on the market.  Our friends were nice enough to offer to pay The King, and he gladly accepted it since he has not other income right now!

Three weeks ago another friend of ours asked The King if he could help him install some new windows at his house.  Since he doesn’t have too much to do during the day he agreed to help the guy out, for trade.  (The guy is going to help The King with a bigger project at our house.)  While installing the windows it came out that these friends wanted to totally remodel their kitchen and bathroom.  They started to ask The King his opinion and blah, blah, blah they decided to hire him to do all the work.

This time for payment.

The King then met the neighbor.  Apparently he has a house that he’s remodeling.  But he doesn’t have the time.  And so he hired The King to remodel his bathroom.

Again, for payment.

We realized last weekend that The King now has a full time job.  It just isn’t the job that he ever expected to have.  He’s totally gone from being White Collar to being Blue Collar.  He’s never worked a day in construction, but he’s designed and built us two houses.  So he knows what he’s doing and he already owns all the tools.

This is the perfect time of year for us to be having The King bring in some money.  He’s actually making more money doing this remodel work then he did at his real live work-in-an-office job.  Interesting.

Of course The King is still interviewing and putting out his resume.  Now he’s just doing it in between demolishing bathrooms and making trips to the Home Depot.

Who knows, maybe this will turn into a career. We aren’t against the idea.

So tell me, anyone need some remodel work done?  I can totally refer a super dreamy guy to do the work.