Saturday, October 24, 2009

Life Lesson: Doing Things Right the First Time Makes Life Easier in the End!

If you take the time to do things right the first time, you won't have to come back and spend time fixing mistakes later. At least, that seems to make sense and that is a life lesson that is coming back to haunt me OVER and OVER the last few weeks. First it came in the form of my wonderful husband, who kindly pointed out how the kitchen could look better. I *kindly* pointed out that I didn't have time, and he in turn showed me how yes, I did, if I chose to wipe up spills as they happened and didn't have to be chiseled off with a power tool later. Yeah, that was not so much fun, but I admit that I needed the reminder...just do it right the first time and get it over with!

At least I felt a little more credible by the time I was able to pass the lesson on to Nic. He had patiently waited for Transformers II to come out onto DVD and I rented it for him (yay Redbox) but schoolwork had to come first. That seems to be when his patience ran out. His math work suffered and he got almost half of the answers wrong. Um, the kid was suddenly doing addition when we were working on multiplication, his concentration had went right out the window and to land of Autobots and Deceptacons I guess. I kinda felt bad when his face just about fell as I erased the incorrect answers (we use a dry erase board for a lot of our math) and reminded him that we were on multiplication and not addition. That's when I told him that if he focused he would get through his work with fewer mistakes, and that by rushing he actually cost himself more time because now he just had to do them over again. Instead of getting upset, you'll never believe, he turned and hugged me and told me that I am a GOOD TEACHER!!! He said that!! Unprompted, all his idea, when I was giving him what could have been a lecture! And yes, a couple of tears came up on my end, it was so nice hearing that, you have no idea.

If only everyone thought doing things right was a good idea. Apparently the people who built our house didn't. We had rain water come in through the ground, then into a crack in a cement wall, then under the laminate flooring in Sydney's room. Jeff and I got the floor removed and when he knocked out the drywall to get to the cement wall, we got a lovely surprise. Not only was there a crack, but the builders had only smoothed like 3/4 down the wall and the framework looked like a bunch of kids with not enough nails had done it with no adult supervision. The vertical boards were all varying lengths, as in not even touching the horizontal framework in some cases, and one board was nailed in with exactly one nail, with in my non-professional opinion I deem very much insufficient. It looked like shit. We are lucky that this late in the year Jeff still had some vacation days to use up, so he took off 2 days and got to work, and my husband fixed all that. I didn't know he could do so much! The flooring will have to wait until the next paycheck, and in the meantime I will get to work on painting the brand new wall and Sydney will have a rockin big girl room. For now, my kids are doing an awesome job bunking in their seemingly never-ending sleepover party.

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