Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Christmas at the Cannadays....

We have this bad habit of putting things that need to go down to the basement on the washer and dryer.  It's lazy, it creates clutter, but Kev and I both do it frequently.  Case in point, last night, after Kevin touched up the red paint (this is key....RED PAINT) in the kids' room, he put the paint can on the washer to bring downstairs.  Now I have this bad habit of putting things that were previously piled on the washer and dryer onto the stairs to bring downstairs.  At no point does it occur to either of us that it might just make sense to put shit away in the first place.

So last night, as I'm doing laundry, I put said red paint can on the top step.  I considered that, if anyone knocked it down the stairs, namely my three year old tornado, it would be an epic disaster.  Now, you know where this is going, but let me take you there....

We had neighborhood Christmas here last night.  Four families, six children, mine with a strict 8:00 p.m. bedtime, gathered at 9:00 p.m. to exchange gifts and enjoy our other "family."  I was drinking by 8:00 because I made the mistake of telling the kids at 6:00 that we were having company three hours later.  They were driving me nuts.  They were also tired, slap happy and maniacal.

So, as our company trickled in and more children arrived, my kids got SUPER nuts and the other kids weren't far behind.  Kevin had the wise idea to send the hyper kids into the kid-friendly, leaving the upstairs adult-friendly, basement.  And that's when it happened.  Red. Paint.

One of the girls comes to find me and tells me.  The paint had gone down the stairs, opened as it had in the nightmare scenario (perhaps vision?) I had considered when I put it down, and spilled all over the landing.  I'm not sue who all walked through the paint on the floor, but there are tiny red footprints all over the basement.  There were big red streaks all over the hallway until we captured the cat culprit and washed his paws (this is during a party, I remind you).  There was a time when one could find all of the men of the party scrubbing red out of the upstairs carpet, where we cared more that there was paint and we had a chance in hell of getting it out of the carpet, unlike the basement landing....

Mad props to my husband for not murdering me on the spot.  Ha!  Actually, when he wasn't terribly angry at me for my bonehead move putting the paint on the floor in the first place, I made the joke that he probably wasn't going to murder me after everyone went home either, but that if he did, he'd probably do it at the bottom of the stairs where there was already a big red paint splatter.

At 12:30 a.m. I ran to Walgreens to replenish our supply of carpet cleaner while Kevin scrubbed diligently at the footprints.  I can't imagine what the clerk thought of my red stained shirt, my raw, red hands and my four bottles of carpet cleaner, plus coffee.  When he asked what I was up to, I explained what happened. "Sure, lady," I'm guessing he was thinking.

My wonderful neighbors took it in stride.  They helped clean, they laughed at us, and we enjoyed our night nonetheless.  Whoever is hosting our New Years party, though, should probably take note.