Interior Design

**Update**I know I sound like a broken record here, but I’m still searching for that All Powerful Answer to why my baby won’t sleep for longer than four hours at a stretch. There’s something I’m not getting, and though some nights are better than others, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of pattern. The only other thing I can think of is teething. My little guy is grabbing at his mouth constantly, jamming anything he can find into his gums. Today I felt like a walking chew toy as he proceeded to stuff my t-shirt into his mouth and gnaw on my shoulder. Hey, whatever makes him happy. If it would make him sleep for ten hours, I would consider letting him gnaw the entire arm off.
And, good news! My editor accepted the revisions on Her Warrior Slave, so my next book will definitely be out in November. :scream: **

Today, we enjoyed walking through the Parade of Homes in a local luxury neighborhood. I’ll admit, I love looking at houses. I love to dream about living in a fabulous home that looks like the pages of a catalogue. I think it’s because I have absolutely zero talent at interior decorating. My mother is amazing and she knows just how to put a particular lamp or a certain picture in the right place to make the house inviting. I tend to shy away from buying pictures, because I’m slightly afraid of having to live with them for twenty years and what if they don’t look right? On the rare occasions I got hammer-happy and started putting up pictures, almost inevitably I took them down later because they looked as if my four-year-old hung them up.

But then, when I look at homes done by designers, some of them strike me as too frou-frou and overly complicated. I saw a lot of random bird cages in these houses. Maybe it’s a mystical subliminal message that in this house, you’ll feel free and uninhibited. More likely, I’d trip over the darned thing and go flying down the stairs.

I also saw a lot of chocolate-colored walls. Darker tones seem to be the trendy thing right now. I’m just not into that. My walls tend to be softer, shades of blue and green for the bathrooms, a light sand for the den. Okay, and I’ll admit there happen to be some hand prints that belong to a certain few toddlers. I think that will be my own nod to interior design. Instead of sponge painting and glazes, I’ll have my children dip their hands into chocolate and milk, and just touch everything. And maybe I’ll artfully scatter newspapers across the coffee table, combined with the stacks of coupons that I really should cut out. The carpets will have trails of graham cracker crumbs and crushed goldfish crackers, along with jelly beans from Easter two years ago.

We’ll call it the Realistic Look.