Max the Halloween Cat says:
Mom, while I approve of you decorating our home with replicas of me (and question why you only choose to do so one month out of the year), I feel compelled to point out that I DON'T SMILE LIKE THIS. EVER.
Photo above was not posed - he sidled up to his likeness on his own - and I would have missed it if Big Kid hadn't pointed out the photo op.
I subsequently ran across another "Max at Halloween" photo, dating back to that first Max Halloween, when the Little Kid was barely three and the Big Kid was soon-to-be eight. I believe that this may have been taken on Max's actual "gotcha day":
He seems genuinely interested in the Little Kid's Matchbox tutorial, doesn't he? Probably because he had only been an indoor cat for, like, twenty minutes, and everything about the indoors was fascinating. (He has since gotten over the indoors and decided that, just maybe, the outdoors is the place to be. Thus, we have to be ever-vigilant when we open a door, lest an escape plot is in the works. Fortunately, almost-seven-year-old Max is dense (in body mass - well, also in the other way, if I'm being honest) and not in great shape, so he only makes it a few yards before he pulls up lame, and then it's just a matter of hefting his weight like a sack of so many potatoes and transporting him back into the house.)
You can see a bit of the old, horrid kitchen in the background. Yes, the walls were painted roughly the same shade as PJ's Halloween shirt. And that restaurant shelving that you see represented half of the storage space in the kitchen, on account of how no one prior to us had figured out how to use that wall. (Said wall now features a counter-depth side-by-side refrigerator and a floor-to-ceiling, shallow larder cabinet that supplements the ginormous pantry occupying the footprint of the prior fridge. BECAUSE I FIGURED OUT HOW TO USE THAT WALL, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. It just took me thirteen years of living in the home and a major insurance casualty to get there.)
Here's another lovely photo of the kitchen, from the same batch of pics:
Maple cabinets with barn-door hinges! Stark white appliances! Martha Stewart-green laminate countertops with silver racetrack trim! (Okay, truth be told, I kinda liked the racetrack look.) Lowest common denominator stainless steel sink! That weird wooden vent under said lowest common denominator sink!
Where have I seen this before? Oh, on a rerun of "Kitchen Cousins," rebroadcast a few days ago. SAME WEIRD WOODEN VENT - and same piece of useless scalloped wood trim over the sink. I'm guessing that this kitchen was a kit, because in looking for a "before" photo of the KC kitchen (yeah, they didn't publish one - guess it was deemed too horrible), I located this doppleganger:
I'd like to tell you that I only found ONE doppleganger, but no, I found several - one of them identified as a "fifties Cape Cod kitchen." Yeah, it makes sense that a prior owner would put a fifties Cape Cod kitchen in my twenties Tudor because - oh, correction, makes no logical sense at all.
I'm guessing that said prior owner allowed herself to be seduced by a slick piece of advertising like THIS:
Hey, THAT'S where I went wrong - shoulda gone with the YELLOW laminate countertops, matching appliances and loud red wallpaper. Or, you know, not. All I'm sayin' is the June Cleaver wannabe in this ad looks way happier to be in my kitchen than I ever was. (But I do approve of her wedge sandals.)
I find it funny that in the real-life photo above, you can see a sliver of yellow paint on the walls. That seems to be the first phase of trying to learn to live with a fifties Cape Cod kitchen - or, at least, it was my phase one. Why? Honestly, because I saw an "inspiration" photo similar to the one above, and figured, "Well, no other color's gonna work, might as well go with what others have tried." After going through several shades of yellow, I decided that if you can't beat orangish cabinets, you might as well join 'em and paint the entire sucker orange.
That didn't work, either.
If the kids cooperate, I'm going to pose them in the same location in the new "old kitchen," with the same mixer and rolling pin. It's going to look a bit different - and not just because the Big Kid is now taller than I am and there's a Keurig machine in the corner.
Yay for (some) change.
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