September 13

Jack woke me up in a really weird way this morning.

"Mandy!" he whispered, as he poked me. "Wake up! I did something cool!"

I groaned and rolled over.

"What?" I asked, not quite awake and not really in the mood to humor him.

"Come see what I did in the bathroom!" he said, excitedly.

"Um. What did you do in the bathroom?" I asked, quite sure that whatever he had done in the bathroom was not something I wanted to see.

"Just get up! I did something cool in the bathroom!" he said.

I slowly got out of bed and followed him down the hall, thinking that nothing "cool" happens in the bathroom.

I walked in the guest bathroom, and Jack held a large piece of wallpaper that he had peeled off the wall up like a trophy.

"Look!" he said, as he pointed at our now half-bare bathroom wall. "I took the wallpaper off!"

"Um... okay...I guess we're not going to church today," I said, as I tried to process the situation. "Why did you peel the wallpaper off our guest bathroom wall?"

"Because we've been wanting to remodel our bathroom, and I saw a piece of wallpaper, and I just wondered if it would be easy to pull off. It was. Look how easy it came off!" he explained happily.

"Yes, I see that. Do you know how to put texture on a wall so we can paint in here?" I asked, knowing that he didn't plan on doing any such work without the guidance of his dad, a professional carpenter, who lives three hours away.

"No, but we can pull off the wallpaper now and then when my dad comes in, he can help us with the wall texture."

His dad has no plans to come in town any time soon.

"So you're saying that you want to remove all the wallpaper in our guest bathroom, then leave it like that for a few months?" I asked.

"Well, yeah! I thought you'd be happy." he said, his smile beginning to fade. "You said this was our winter project."

"It's not winter yet," I said. "It's Fall. Our Fall project is painting the outside of the house."

Nevertheless, half of the wall didn't have wallpaper any more, and I had no choice but to help him finish taking the rest of the wallpaper off.

Fortunately, it did indeed come off easily, and we even took the mirror down to get all the wallpaper off the wall, so now our guest bathroom has bare drywall and no mirror.

Winter's coming early this year, I guess. My apologies to our guests.