I am still printing out the last twenty Christmas letters. I just can’t quite get it together and my newish printer is recalcitrant, and now, low on black ink. You’d think it would be simple to print out 90 Christmas letters (with three full-color pictures), but the printer has balked from the start at printing more than three pages at a time.
In the meantime, I started painting my family room. I had painted red stripes on one long wall six years ago when I was pregnant and I am so over the red stripes. I painted my family room bright gold a few years back to match a bright gold couch (the theory being that if the quite ugly couch matched the walls, it would disappear). It did work, the couch is long gone and the walls remain gold. Soon, those walls will be a sedate shade of “Wheatfield.”
I bought a “PaintMate,” which is an ingenious syringe-type device. You suck the paint into the handle and then the paint dispenses into the roller as you’re painting. No paint trays, no fuss, no muss. If only it were capable of taping the baseboards and edging along the ceiling.
I made the mistake of giving my 14-year old a digital camera and now it’s as if we are living with the paparazzi. I may go stark raving mad and shave my head if the constant hounding does not stop and stop soon.
By the way, I am sick to death of hearing Britney Spears referred to as a “young mother.” She is twenty-six years old! Twenty-six, people! Since when is twenty-six a “young mother”? The media makes it sound like a baby of twenty-six years old should be excused from being a good mother on the basis of her youth alone. How utterly ridiculous. When I was twenty-six, I . . . walked to school . . . uphill . . . both ways . . . ten miles . . . in the snow.
Well. Anyway. Twenty-six is not “young,” if you ask me, nor an excuse for irresponsibility.
Kids have arrived to play, making me think painting a second coat on my formerly striped wall now would be a mistake. Nevertheless, I am going to start that project right now because the sooner I finish, the sooner I’ll be done. And a little latex paint never hurt anyone.
Actual Unretouched Photo 
I love the paint story! My living room has also had some interesting paint problems. We had a interior designer tell us what to paint our living room to match a couch that is now down the basement. It was supposed to be a brown-ish mauve, if you get the idea. It turned out to be a pink-ish mauve and I am so tired of it.
I want to join the “when I was 26” rant…
When I was 26, I had 3 children, I had been married 5 years, and we had just moved into our second home. People often mistaked me for being 5-10 years older than I was. Which was OK. At least it meant I was mature.
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Pft! Hey, if twenty-five feels old(I’ve got one who’s 6)then 26 isn’t old at all! Of course some of my friends still poke fun at my age. I can’t wait to have the prestige and (hopefully) credibility of being an “adult” at 30.
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I guess if 60 is the new 40, then 26 is the new 16? Nothing makes any sense anymore, eh?
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27 with three kids an awesome husband, two dogs and a muffin top. I’m not a young mother.
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I can tell you I won’t be the one to paint our living room again. We had to get an 18 foot ladder and I had to climb it to reach the tippy top point of 3 walls. Which have got to be at least 25′ foot tall–I was up on my tippy toes and straining to reach the stupid points. This is why I know next time it gets painted (if ever) I will pay someone to do it or else it will remain the same color until after I die.
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I’m with you on the Brittany thing. I was 26 when my second child was born and most of the people in my class at school already had kids in grade school! I was a single mom too, BTW, and I didn’t party all weekend, run red lights with my kids in the car (as a matter of fact, I didn’t HAVE a car), wore my underwear when going out in public, and took care of my kids when they were sick. Without any help from my mother by the way, who took care of my kids while I was in the hospital for a week for gallbladder surgery (under protest), took me home to a sweltering apartment with no food, put my 18 pound son in his carrier on the floor and left. (I wasn’t supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds.) And she wonders why I don’t like her. But I digress… Brittany is not a “young mother”. She’s an idiot who never should have had children. I pray for those kids daily, they’re going to need a LOT of divine intervention to make it to adulthood unscathed from their mother’s life.
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Painting? I leave it to my husband and daughter, the artistic folk in the family.
Youth and motherhood? I was 26 when my first was born — six years older than my mom was when she had me.
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When I was pregnant the first time I was 24. One of the first OB’s I visited could not stop murmuring mournfully, “So young, so young.” while taking my history. She was probably 35 at the most and I told her to shut up, my mother started having babies at 19.
I had two babies by the time I was 26.
Young mother is polite euphemism for what they want to say, which is immature, inept, self-centered, clueless, and ignorant. She gives real young mothers a bad rap.
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