Today my daughter turns 9, and last night, as I peeled her pink-framed glasses off her face and scratched her back at bedtime -- her favorite ritual -- we calculated that she's half-way to 18, the age of independence. 

"I hate being a kid," she says often, angrily, when facing the firm directives of two parents, especially when it comes to her homeschooling.

She also talks a lot about what she'll do when she grows up, probably because we tell her often to aim to be good at something she enjoys and persevere until she can make a living at it.

A few months ago she informed me that she might 'open gates' for her work, since she's learned to do it so well, helping out around the farm. Yesterday, with a tangle of embroidery in a hoop in her hands, she asked me if some people make money sewing. 

"But I'm not sure what I want," she says with a sigh today. "I might just want to live here with you."

Outside, in our part of Iowa, the bur oaks are flush with chartreuse leaves, still small enough and curled at the edges so that they don't yet obscure the delicate skeleton of dark branches. They're turning that deeper green that tells you their tender newness is toughening up, as they unfurl into the elements.

Half-way already. Holy shit.
I might just want to live with her, too.

My dad was a painter. When he was in college, he and buddy found they could make a year's tuition slathering barns in iconic red-red oil-based paint, and the habit stuck.

When he became a junior-high band director in real life and had summers off, my dad continued painting everything my small hometown would hire him for: spare bedrooms, giant Victorians with color palates of six shades, rental apartments, pig barns.

In nearly 40 years, he painted some homes several times -- often a mundane job but one he enjoyed for the ability to wash his brushes and be done with each day. The work was good, the pay (though he almost always bid too low) was fair, and he could toggle between several jobs at once, which suited his multitask-icity. Both my brother and I worked nearly a decade alongside him as teenagers and young adults -- he'd save big jobs for those odd weeks or weekends when we'd be home, even after college.

For this reason, I'm a really good painter -- and especially at painting trim. I once spent two solid weeks applying three shades of buttery beige to just the spindled wrap-around porch of one said Victorian mansion, using brushes no wider than two of my fingers together. 

Anyway, I realize I really do carry with me the 'life skill' he was always fond of touting as we sweated in the Nebraskan summer heat. Here are some lessons worth passing on. Thanks, Dad!

On Choosing the (Damn) Colors

1. Men: Let your female counterparts do the picking. You may voice an opinion, but always defer. Always. 

2. With few exceptions, paint will dry darker than it appears when wet. DO NOT PANIC if at first your window shutters do not appear the exact shade of Moroccan Mint that the Pratt&Lambert swatches promised you.

3. Have no idea? Ask a friend who dresses better than you do, on average.

On Having Reasonable Expectations of Your Housepainter

1. Don't change your mind about the colors mid-project. And if you do, don't do it more than once. Please?

2. Don't leave a list of 'don'ts' taped to the front door, such as 'Don't let the cat out,' or 'Don't damage the hydrangeas.' Having your cat in the house with fast-moving painters is a greater liability than you might imagine. Do not be surprised if, confined to a drop-cloth-enswathed house, it rolls in the roller tray to get the painter's attention. And, if your hydrangeas are pressed firmly against the siding you've hired a painter to paint, they will get damaged. Expect some misting of the leaves (with paint) and possibly some light pruning if a ladder can't be safely placed over or around them.

3. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. First, do not call to check on the prospect of getting a house painted within days of your first attempt, in order, say, to freshen up the place before your son's graduation. Most whole-house projects are scheduled months in advance, if not a whole year. And let's face it: you've known about this graduation since tuition started on ACH withdrawal.

Interiors (if you're a DIY-er)

1. Paint the ceiling first, if required. Use a light roller. No use killing yourself hefting a monster roller and splattering yourself heavily with the excess paint you'll spin off it. Wrap the ceiling color a few inches down the wall. When you come back to do the trim painting, stay just below the actual intersection of wall and ceiling. Trust me. It will look way neater.

2. Use those handy 6" and 4" rollers with the felt wrapped around the end. You can roll right through corners and within just centimeters of the edges, saving trim time. If there's one thing my dad wished he'd invented, it's these little beauties. 

3. Paint from the top down. This helps your eye catch 'runs' or paint that drips. 

4. Look for drips! There will be several, no matter how good you are! If you let paint drips dry, they look tacky, and may have to be scraped off and repainted.

5. STOP and move your ladder. Don't over-reach. You'll just hit the ceiling.

6. STOP and get more paint on your roller. Going over the same spot with too little paint only pulls what's there off and mucks it up. 

7. Let the first coat dry completely before applying the second/final. Yes, a second/final will be necessary. Don't throw out that little bit of paint left in the last can -- it will come in handy even years down the line for touch-ups.

Exteriors

1. Having to scrape or sand several layers of crappy and possibly lead-based paint from your home will up your bid substantially. If you're doing it yourself, expect to spend weeks. If you can still chip it away with the corner of a hand scraper, you're not done.

2. Anticipate spray drift from the paint sprayer. Move vehicles, cover windows and landscaping, and work before the wind picks up. Then uncover the landscaping before you broil it under plastic.

3. STOP and move your ladder. Don't over-reach. You'll just hit the trim.

4. "Don't fight the bushes. They will always win." I think Dad meant that shrubbery will knock you off balance if you try too hard to stuff a ladder's feet down into them. Or, maybe that you'll just get snagged on them and drop your brush or can. Still not making any sense? Please disregard.

On Spills

1. Keep a clean, wet rag handy to wipe spills on the floor or a brushstroke of white that got onto the proverbial red. Has it already dried? Wipe it with a solution of PineSol cut lightly with water, then scrub again in a few minutes.

2. If you drop a whole can of paint. STOP EVERYTHING and get on it. Wipe up what you can before trying to wash it away with a hose/water.

3. If you can't clean it, blend it.
There is, in my hometown, a certain large, double front door made of heavy brass that, upon close inspection, bears a certain shade of gray, suspiciously similar to the home's exterior color, in its patina.

On Having the Right Attitude

1. Just plan for the going to be tough until you're over the hump. For interiors, the 'hump' is the first full coat of paint, with trim. Once that's done, you'll sail through the second coat and touch-ups. For exteriors, it's when you've finally got the whole house prepped (sanded, windows covered, storm windows and doors freshly caulked for trimming, primer applied, holes and cracks puttied, rotten sections of siding replaced). When that first surge of actual paint comes through the sprayer, you'll feel like a minor god.

2. Good enough is often good enough. Spend your time on the spots people actually notice -- like the trim around the window above the kitchen sink or the corner where the toilet paper holder is attached to the wall. And maybe the whole wall opposite the toilet. Just saying. That tricky spot on the back of the garage is not going to make or break your resale value.

3. Whistle while you work. Show tunes will take you a long way around a building, even in scorching heat.

Here's to you, Dad!
May the jobs be easy and zero-VOC, evermore and evermore.

As the mother of an only, my grippiest fear is that my child will be cheated of companionship, without siblings around.

And beyond that, I sense my daughter lacks practice approaching other kids and everything that comes with that skill: negotiating, SHARING, forgiving, and trusting that the uncertainties of the social fray are normal, healthy and fun. 

How do I know this is an issue? Consider that in three years of public school she's been invited to so few birthday parties and playdates I can count them on my fingers. When she runs onto the playground before school in the morning, it's common for the first kid she approaches -- or even a couple -- to turn away from her, quickly buddy up with someone else to exclude her, or ignore her completely. I thought I was nuts until I saw it happen multiple times. She seems to recover OK, just wheeling on her heels and walking away, but it f-ing breaks my heart.

Am I doing something to suppress her instincts, as the only 'friend' she interacts with regularly? Or worse, as her mother-friend, am I thwarting her interest in sharing plain old kid-ness with actual kids? 

I know I should be more grateful for everything that goes right in my daughter's world: her health, her positivity, her perseverance even as I pull my hair out. But this thing about sharing herself and her life with friends sits heavy with me.

I'm familiar with going it solo myself, and habits I cultivated as a painfully introverted kid are currently biting me in the ass.

Of many questionable traits, I'll stick to: stubborn self-reliance. I grew up on the fringe of a college campus, where the neighboring houses were owned by the college and rented to students or faculty. Hint: no other children. (And lest he read this and feel slighted -- I do have a younger brother, whom I love dearly and who is an awesome man and father now himself. BUT, he and I grew up four years and five school grades apart -- so far apart that we didn't have much social cross-over until we were both young adults.)

Instead, I got pretty good at doing things by myself, for myself and discovered, academically and otherwise, that I am driven in an underdog kind of way. I might not be flashy or fast-moving, but if I put my mind to something, chances are pretty good I'll make it happen.

I actually told a college admissions rep this once, in my college search. At the time, I was turning down his offer of academic scholarship because I had my sights set on a more lucrative program at a competing school. Luckily for me (or maybe unluckily, in the sense of faulty experience of effort and success), I won that scholarship: a full ride. 

But the downside is that today, I'm so good at doing things for myself that I have a very hard time trusting that anyone else might know how to do them better. At its worst, this lack of compromise makes me a terrible partner -- and no example of cooperation for my kid.

"Why do we always have to do what you want to do?" she says, rolling her eyes and slouching. 
It's true. My agenda is a force to be reckoned with.

So you can imagine how I nearly vomited with relief when one recent spring day my daughter called out casually to a girl we passed on the sidewalk in our neighborhood.

"Wait," I stammered. "You know each other?"
Turns out we'd lived for two years across the street (and down a block) from a girl her age -- a polite tomboy who was itching to banter with another goofball her own age, rather than try to get a word in with her older sister and her tween friends.

"Yeah, Ashley," my daughter drolled. "Can I go play at her house?"