Archive for the ‘Home Renovations’ Category
A Labor Day Update
Monday, September 6th, 2010
Well, hello there. It’s been awhile. Yes, it’s me…Mel! I’ve come out from under piles of laundry and first trimester haze to wish you a happy (un)Labor Day! I wanted to give you a little update about what’s been going on around here.
Yesterday we had a big church cook out with lots of friends from everywhere. It was a lot of fun! We had close to 50 people come throughout the afternoon and there was pretty competitive volley ball playing going on.
I’m pretty tuckered out today but it was worth it!
I had my first prenatal appointment and ultrasound in the past week or so. Everything looks good!
Here the first picture of my “Sweetie”.
The quality of the picture is not so good but if you were to look at the original photo you’d be able to see the baby’s little head and two teeny arms and legs. We got to see a nice strong heart beat. Everything is exactly as it should be. I’ll be 11 weeks along on Wednesday! Almost past my first trimester! Can I get a what what??
I’ve been having some neck pain that is causing me some pretty bad headaches so I’m hoping a good adjustment and possibly a deep tissue massage will take care of it. I’ve been sleeping in in the mornings(well, until the girls get up anyway) so I haven’t been blogging. I have a hard time blogging after everyone is up. I’m hoping to get back to a semi-normal routine within the next couple of weeks and ramp up my blogging again.
Speaking of routines, ours will be changing soon! Now that we’ll be homeschooling our daily schedule will be changing a bit.
Katelyn’s Kindergarten books have come in and I am SO.EXCITED. I don’t know what public schools teach Kindergarteners but this curriculum seems a bit hard! I am inpressed with everything she will be learning, however, and I’m chomping at the bit to get started.I love how each subject is infused with the God’s word and there are new Bible verses to be learned with practically every subject. In case you’re wondering we’re doing the CLASS system. (Christian Liberty Academy School System.) I’m not at the point where I feel comfortable picking and choosing curriculum from various places. They have a standard Kindergarten curriculum and an advanced Kindergarten curriculum and I trust their judgment on what books should be in each kit! And, as it so happens, we did the CLASS system growing up and it worked great for us!
Here’s a picture of the books and subjects she’ll be doing. I’ll write a more extensive post about what she’s learning, the activities we’ll be doing and the homeschooling schedule we’ll be following once I have it nailed down.
Mike has been busy the past several days creating a nice homeschool room for us in our basement. It’s been the laundry room/guest room/playroom so far. Now the play room/guest room area is turning into the homeschool area too.
This is what the room looked like right before Mike started construction. This is also in the midst of moving things around and organizing toys etc. You can see our walls down there are made of field stone which makes putting anything on the walls impossible. Mike is putting drywall in front of the field stone to make me some nice walls down there. I’m so excited! I’ve wanted “real” walls down there forever!
A different angle….
The walls….ugh.
The progress being made! My poor hubby suffered a two by four blow to the head the other night but thankfully he’s ok!
Last Friday was my birthday (ahem) and we celebrated by going to the beach on Thursday. (Another post in and of itself too!) But here’s a sneak peak at the fun we had…
Katelyn made an impressive (if I do say so myself) sand castle by herself. She worked long and hard at it (which is not always common for her) and did a great job. Future engineer??
So that’s what’s been going on around here! Thanks for reading!
Happy Labor Day!
Defunkifying
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
I find it funny that my sister wrote a post recently about” defunking“. And then the next to last episode of “Glee” was called “Funk”. It seems that a lot of people are in a funk here lately. Is it in the air?
I would hate to trivialize real depression but I think I was suffering a little bit of that as well. Many things were getting to me. I found myself to be totally unmotivated to do anything, sad and just…. blah.
Thankfully I’m getting past all that now. I think the more I didn’t do anything, the more it bothered me and the more it put me into a slump. I received some great encouragement from a couple of friends that really helped me start to snap out of it. I’m starting to get back on track with some things and it feels good.
Here’s a random list 0f what’s been going on in my life the past few weeks:
~I’m back to getting up early to read my Bible and pray. It makes such a huge difference in my day.
~Summer is here! Woohoo! Most, if not all, of my commitments are done for the next few months.
~ We finished all of our floors! We still have a few more projects to finish but everything is coming along nicely. I do have pictures,for those of you who have requested to see the results. We’re having a yard sale soon and I can’t wait to get rid of some of our stuff and get some money for it.
~We finished Financial Peace University! 13 weeks of hard work on our budget and changing the way we handle our finances. The good news is that we’ll be debt free (except for our mortgage) at the end of this month!!
~I started getting back on track with my healthy eating and exercising. Granted, I haven’t actually exercised yet but I’m getting my mindset headed in the direction. I was super discouraged about that for awhile but I know the longer I go without exercising and overeating the more discouraged I’m going to be about that area of my life!
~ The pool is open!
~Katelyn still sees bugs in her bed every now and then. We’ve noticed a pattern, however. When we have, crazy, busy days where our normal schedule is thrown off and she gets overexcited and over tired that’s when she sees bugs. Days where she eats junk food, goes to bed late and has a ton of extra coming and going seem to contribute to her seeing bugs. I’ve really tried to keep her schedule consistent. We also moved her into the bed closest to the door. She begged for that and said it would help her not see bugs. That also seems to have calmed her down a little. She still has at least one episode a week where sees and feels bugs in her bed. She did end up getting MRSA (which was completely unrelated to the bug episode) Mike also got it too. Thankfully we’re all healed up now!
~We’ve had the pleasure of getting to know our neighbors behind us the couple of months. I wish we had gotten to know them a long time ago. They have three adorable girls that my girls love playing with! The girls ages are close ( almost 2, almost 3, 4.5, 5.5ish, 7.5ish) and they are so cute playing together. My neighbor, Jess, snapped these pictures of our girls playing together at her house a couple of weeks ago.
(The youngest little girl is not in these pictures. She’s just as cute as her older sisters. I may have to steal her one day. Ssshh… don’t tell her mom.)
Jess took this awesome picture of Katelyn that I just love…
and another awesome picture of Madelyn!
Seriously, it’s they’ve been a huge blessing to get to know.
Have you ever been in a funk? If so, what do you do to get out of it? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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UPDATED:
Alli from Alli ‘N Son just told me about her new blog carnival called “Thank You Journal Thursday” where you can link up your post about stuff that you’re thankful for in your life. What a great mood lifter. Talk about defunkifying! So, I’m linking this post up to her carnival.
Top Ten Ways Our Life Is In Disarray Right Now
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
This week for Top Ten Tuesday I’d like to show you how our life is in a bit of disarray right now. Mike decided to sand and re-stain our bedroom, dining room and playroom floor.
Top Ten Ways Our Life Is In Disarray Right Now
1. EVERYTHING is covered in sawdust. Everything.
This is Mike sanding our bedroom floor. We tried( to no avail) to get our dresser out but it won’t round the corner in our tiny upstairs hallway. It was either leave it in the bedroom or carry it all the way downstairs. And there was no where to put it in our living room! So Mike is doing our bedroom in two steps to work around the dresser!
2. Sleeping arrangements tight.
We’re sleeping In our girls bedroom. We just finished the floors in there so we hadn’t moved them back in there yet. It’s a very messy, over filled, tight squeeze. You should see the room the girls are sleeping in! Then again, it’s probably best that you don’t. There’s no where to walk!
4. Our stuff is crammed into odd places and we can’t get to any closets!
5. Our living is now the dining room and play room as well.
6. Stuff is stacked everywhere and we can’t find anything.
Even our poor birds have something stacked on top of their cage!
7. We can’t get to our basement (where our laundry room is located) from the inside of the house because, yep, there’s stuff stacked at the top of the stairs too. So I have to go outside and go into the basement from the side entrance. It’s been real fun carrying laundry baskets in and out like that. Not!!!
8. I have no convenient “office” to speak of right now so I have not where to put my laptop with our excel spreadsheet on it. All of our bills and paperwork is spread all over the living room and it’s completely disorganized. Our tracking for spending is not up to date and we’re going to have to catch up on all of that.
9. The girls have no where to play! Other than the living room and their bedroom. And you’ve seen the living room. On nice days I send them outside. Thankfully we haven’t had a lot of rainy days. The floors should be finished this week. Mike was supposed to put the last coat of polyurethane on the floors last night but he got home from work at almost midnight so that didn’t happen! The gall!
10. Oh, then there’s this:
But this has put our lives in good disarray! It’s a huge blessing!!
Head over to Oh Amanda for more great Top Ten Tuesday posts!
