how to argue with a seven-year-old

Kaes is lying in her bed, at night, lights off, reading a book.

Me: Kaes, what are you doing? It's dark.

She leans over and pulls back her curtains.

Me: Not outside. In your room.

She looks at me as if I am in fact an idiot.

Kaes: It is too dark outside.

home improvements

The swatch of color that looks coral in the store is actually pink when painted in the bathroom. And it glows. Into the hallway.

However, washing walls is even better than painting them. It has the benefit of giving your home a new look, without the devastation of realizing that you bought the wrong color. And it doesn't cost nearly as much. And if you don't like the color you find under all the fingerprints, just wait a while and it will disappear again. I fully admit washing walls is farther down my list of household chores I engage in than washing windows. And dusting. But when forced to wash walls so that pink paint will stick to them, and looking into the hallway at the no-way-did-anyone-pay-money-for-that-color-and-the-walls-did-not-look-like-that-when-we-moved-in walls, I can be found to wash walls instead of painting (that didn't get going until after 10:00 later that night). I spent an afternoon magically turning my walls from black to white and the water in my bucket from clear to...not. And when I was done, my disbelieving eyes told my disillusioned brain that our walls looked great. Like they had just been painted. Better, even, than the freshly painted pink bathroom.

(Duncan's reaction the next morning, as he tried to walk past the bathroom, was stop in the hallway, his face awash in the pink glow, and say, "Whoa.")