The Renovating Mom…

Perhaps you have seen the commercial for Home Depot in which the mother (a single mother at that) redoes her home.

All by herself.

She says at the end that she hopes her girls look at her as if she is a hero.

I hope that my kids look at me that way as well, but it’s not going to be because I’m the new Home Depot Mom.

Up until Monday, I couldn’t make a trip to Lowe’s or Home Depot, alone, with out tears.

Seriously.

I know…it’s sad.

Let me preface this by saying that up until September, I didn’t have to go alone… I had a man to do this… one who knew what he was doing… and if I did have to go alone, I had instructions or the bad part that I needed to replace so that there was NO WAY I could screw it up…i didn’t have to assemble things, fix things, make things better, etc.

We used to go together on date nights and I would point out what I liked and he would tell me if it was feasible or not in our home…

it was that simple…

the home improvement store was not my domain…and i was okay with that…

Since September, going to the home improvement store alone intimidated me…

I didn’t know what I was doing and to be honest, I went only when I had to.

Like when I found myself in need of a lawn mower and a weed eater…

(And for the record, I think that if you work in the lawn mower section of the store, you should know something about lawn mowers…she was NO help and while I did walk out of there with a lawn mower, I was weedeaterless… there were too many choices and I didn’t know what I needed and she was worthless…)

I’ve made a few trips there, but only if I had to…

Matthew’s been working on digging a stump out of the front yard… Dad told him to saw the roots after he dug around them….

The saw wasn’t cutting it… literally…

I decided we needed an ax…or a hatchet…

So off to Lowe’s we went…

I actually, kinda, knew where they were located and so Matthew and I stood there looking at the wide array of axes and hatchets….

We stood there for awhile….

…and then we looked at one another…

(talk about the blind leading the blind….)

But I was not going to cry… (because seriously, what would crying do??? I’m so pathetic….)

“Well, Matt…” I started… “You think we need an ax or a hatchet?”

Because my 10-year-old knows this…

“I think the hatchet would be better. It’s smaller and I can handle it better…” he says.

“That’s true, plus with the stump being so close to the porch, the smaller handle will probably work better.” I spout back.

“True,” he says. “We’ve been having some problems with the shovel handle.”

There’s a pause as we continue to look at the assortment of chopping tools.

“Plus, if we buy the hatchet and it turns out we need an ax, we can just borrow Adam’s,” he says, breaking the silence.

(Adam is our FANTABULOUS neighbor and our answer to everything!)

After deciding that we were going to purchase the hatchet, we then had to decide which one. I selected the Fiskar’s hatchet. (This same company makes scrap booking stuff — so why I felt that they had any credibility in the hatchet department, I don’t know… but I had heard of them and they guaranteed that the handle wouldn’t break.)

Matthew found a cheaper one and I said to him, “Cheaper isn’t always better, Matthew.”

After getting over the shock that the cheaper statement just came out of my mouth, I followed up with, “Besides, I feel confident with this one.”

It was a major accomplishment.

And while we were there, we headed over to the paint section and picked out some paint chips for the bathroom. It’s been something that we’ve been putting off but after reading this over at Potty Prayers, we decided we were going to come up with something…

And I didn’t cry. I didn’t even feel the tears come on. I was proud of me.

We came home and Matthew went right to the stump and chopped up two of the exposed roots.

And maybe, just maybe, I can be the hero mom after all… because how many mom’s buy their sons a hatchet?

(Ok, so I’m a hero to him…)

Until next time…

Heather