Sometimes it takes something small to make someone happy. For Charles, it takes curtains (well, more accurately, window coverings). He dislikes having our house “open to the world”, even though we live on a fairly quiet street, and so as soon as the sun starts to set, the curtains/blinds are drawn (this is slightly at odds with my strong appreciation for natural light, so occasionally I will open up curtains/blinds shortly after he has opened them. But I digress.)

Many of the window coverings in our house are the ones that came with the house when we moved in two years ago. This is partly because we had so many expenses when we moved in – new furnace and A/C, new roof, half of the fence (with the other half starting this summer) – and partly because we just hadn’t picked a colour scheme for the rooms, so we didn’t have a base colour to start with. But when we got our new windows two weeks ago, we took down all of the window coverings and decided that it didn’t make sense to put them back up.

Which left us a bit exposed, even for my light-loving ways.

So, the very next day we did a shopping blitz and bought four curtain rods and two sets of curtains. That day we put up two curtain rods and quickly decided we didn’t like either set of curtains, so with one hour of available shopping time left, we ducked out again, returned two sets of curtains, and bought two more which promptly went up when we got home. The next day we hung the remaining two curtain rods and one set of curtains that we already owned. This still left us with one naked window upstairs, but since it was the nursery, we figured we still had a bit of time.

All of this just highlighted the fact that our kitchen window had been bare since we had moved in two years ago. We bought fabric months ago, and put up the curtain rod a few weeks ago, but I had never gotten around to actually sewing the curtains and so the window remained uncovered and the neighbours, if they chose, could see into our kitchen. And this bugged Charles.

So last weekend I finally sewed the curtains for the kitchen, and Charles has been happy ever since. Who knew that something so small could bring such happiness?

Of course, there are some things that I just won’t do to make him happy – like name our child (should it be a girl) Raindrop. Not even as a middle name.