Baseboards: check

Except for the kitchen, which has a different style of base trim, all of our baseboards are now complete, so we can consider the floor job basically done. Dom's room was saved for last for logistical reasons (when can I work on it? how to keep him out while I'm painting?). Ultimately we decided I would do the prep work and painting on successive mornings while Mike entertained Dominick elsewhere in the house. Dom did burst in a couple of times, so I moved the doorknob cover to the outside. Ha!

Yesterday morning, I was sanding the baseboard in his room, which was a bigger job than it should have been because of the gross incompetence of the previous owners. I have never seen such a bad paint job in my life. Unbelievable. Even though I sanded until my arms wanted to fall off, I didn't manage to eliminate all of the glops, drips and carpet fibers from the baseboard. Of course this was not obvious until I started painting today. Still, it's a massive improvement. Anyway, my point is that I was struggling and getting very frustrated during the sanding when Dominick came in to cheer me on. He told me, "You can take it off. You can do it!" Sweet, right? I didn't realize until later that he wasn't actually trying to encourage me: he was just mixing up his pronouns again. He was talking about himself, how he'd just removed the masking tape from the floor in the study. I should have known.

With today's nicer weather, we got outside a couple of times. The four of us went for a walk this morning, and Dominick was moving sooooooo slowly. It was actually excruciating. This afternoon, we went up the street to a neighbor's house to feed the goats. Yes, we have goats and chickens in our neighborhood. Dom fed some euonymous to the goats and got very excited, then he tried to feed a worm to a chicken, but it fell. We were there with a neighbor, her two boys, and the two boys of another neighbor, so there were six boys altogether. As you might expect with boys, they found the goats' bodily functions most fascinating. Not so much my boys, of course, but two or three of the others, who are older. I can't imagine what things will be like around our house in a few years!