... another pleasant valley sunday...

... or, "if I'm doing your nails, you're going to have to listen to the Monkees Greatest Hits with me.*"

Index finger, with too much polish

(see below for proper corrective measure)

Sunday morning M went to the gym.

Which normally is not worth noting in a blog post, but this time she went just as the girls were agitating for some new nail polish. I've never done nail polish before and in fact am not officially qualified to do. But as M was leaving she called back reassuringly to K&L that "Daddy will do your nail polish." And that was that.

This left the girls and me staring dumbly at each other, all trying to figure out how we'd gotten ourselves into this pickle, and wondering how we were going to get out of it.

After a bit of staring, there was nothing left for us to do but get to work. They got me the nail polish (St. Patrick's Day green) and I had L sit down on the window seat with her little fingers spread out on the kitchen table. I armed myself with a kleenex, and was unnerved when L chortled: "A kleenex?!? K, Daddy is using a kleenex!!!" I refused to let them know how clueless I was (what should I be using? a paper towel? a mop and bucket? a haz-mat suit?) and just plowed ahead, ignoring all doubts, at which point I realized I was going to need my reading glasses if I wanted to be able to see what the hell I was doing. They make little girl fingernails very small these days! Plus, we probably didn't have good lighting, due to living in the Pacific Northwest and all. I'm sure it was raining and gray and dreary....

After I got my glasses, I opened the polish and took a whiff, just to prime myself, and then we got down to business. And overall, it went... fine. In fact I discovered that I was much more of a perfectionist about it than the girls were.

L wanted both fingers and toes done. K only wanted fingers. The biggest problems we ran into were L's impatience with the drying process, and K's desire to wear my glasses. We had to redo several of L's fingers (and one toe), and in the process I learned that adding polish to polish doesn't always fix a problem (see photo above).

When M came home and found L in tears about .... something, I don't remember what because we were running at speeds of up to 3 breakdowns per quarter hour... she looked at L's index finger and said, "Let's take that off and redo it." One problem solved!

I did manage to get a couple of pictures to prove that there were moments of not-tears:

In fact, K was in a good mood the entire time. (She's still in that stage where she seems to believe I can do just about anything. Foolish her!) It was her sister who found reasons to doubt me and an endless variety of catastrophes about which to wail.

But I didn't take any pictures of that. Instead, I asked the girls to pose so I could document our successes:

*At some point, K asked if it was a girl or a boy singing, and I told her it was all men. She put up with a few more songs and then wanted me to change to some women singers, so we switched to ABBA, and danced our way through the rest of her fingernails.