Scaling Obstacles

I am a short person. Most of you already know this, but I often forget about it until something happens that reminds me "Hey, you're short." I got one of these reminders this week.

Daniel's "playpen" is our living room. I re-arranged furniture, installed baby-proofing stuff, and blocked off the only exit with a baby gate. Josh climbs over the couch to get in and out, and I only have to get over the gate. This is done by swinging one leg over at a time. Not difficult, just awkward.

Then.

We are installing new flooring in our dining room and the removal of the old flooring required a lot of scraping, which in turn kicked up a lot of dust. Our house is so old we weren't sure what was in the dust, so we judged it best that the kid's primary play space should be blocked off from the dust clouds. We secured plastic draping across the entire house, leaving a small slit at the entrance to the living area for access in and out. This meant I had to do some serious maneuvering to get over the gate and through the plastic, which was flush up against the gate. Access moved from "awkward" to "extremely uncomfortable."

Then we had to level the floor. This involved putting down a leveling concrete that was then left to dry. Unfortunately, the area directly on the other side of the gate turned out to be very uneven and in need of the leveling. The concrete required 12-20 hours to cure and naturally we were not able to step on it.

So...now there was a two-foot area directly outside the baby gate that I couldn't step in. I therefore had to stop two feet away, get one leg 30" off the ground, insert said leg through the plastic, then leap up in the direction of the gate and hope for the best. (It's worth noting here that it was also important to peek through the plastic first and make sure my tiny little boy wasn't standing on the other side of the gate in the landing area.) Eventually I found it was best to do this backwards, but the results were never very good. Adding to the fun -- because the dining room was ripped apart we fed the kids in the living room. Therefore all the aforementioned acrobatics had to be done three times a day with plates, glasses of water, bowls of soup, etc. After twelve hours the plastic was shredded and the leveling had more than one Croc print embedded in it.

So it's not an exaggeration to say I'm absolutely ecstatic that our floor is finally done. Not only do I have a lovely floor, I'm also able to get to my children without risking a shattered ankle.

My dining room is now so, so pretty. New walls, new floor. Yay!