Weekly Recap: 7/24-7/29/11

This week involved home improvement and preparing for the school year.  I finished painting the walls for S9s Star Wars room.  It looks great and once the stickers are up I'll take pictures and post them.  I still have the closet doors to complete and plan to finish those this weekend. 

K14 and H12 were so inspired by the painting of their brother's room that they decided to paint their own room.  I taped the trim for them and gave them a lesson in using  a roller and some tips on painting and left them to it.  By the end of the day they had a beautifully painted room.  Frankly, I was surprised.  The mess that they made while helping paint their brother's furniture made me wary of turning them loose with paint and brushes again.  I suppose my ranting and raving after the last episode had it's effect and while there was paint on clothes and skin there was no paint on floors or furniture. 

As a family we cleaned out the upstairs closet and rearranged things, decluttered and organized the laundry room, moved seldom used items to the attic, found a pile of things to donate to the football league yard sale and hung a bunch of  pictures. We also cleaned and organized the school room and all our supplies.  The shelves are tidy and in a few weeks we'll be ready for the start of the school year.

To celebrate successful completion of the summer reading program our library sponsored a pool party at the community pool.  We all completed the program but only S9 and M6 were interested in the pool party and they both had a great time swimming last night.  We'll be writing thank you notes to the library for such a fun way to celebrate their accomplishment.

S9 started football practice this week.  I'd forgotten how that throws our family time off.  He doesn't get home until after 8:30pm.  M6 loves to go play with her friends while their brothers practice so practice ends up involving half our family which makes it impossible to eat a family dinner or spend time as a family except on the weekends.   Once school is in session he'll only be practicing two nights a week but our weekends will be totally tied up with practice and games.

I mailed M6's registration for soccer today.  She'll begin playing mid-August.  Thankfully, football and soccer are held at the same school on neighboring fields.  At least the practices and home games are.  The away games will have us traveling far and wide.  M6 will have her games on Saturday and S9 will have his on Sunday.

Finally, I ordered our materials for the last two subjects for the coming year.  I'd been debating over the best route to take for H12's math and Bible for all of us.  After much discussion, H12 decided that she'd like to try algebra and that a teaching DVD might be a good way to go.  I purchased a 36 week Algebra class from The Great Courses.  We both liked that each class was 30 minutes.  We envision watching the class on Monday then spending the remainder of the week reinforcing the learning before moving on to the next lesson.  It's wonderful that my math hating child feels confident enough in her ability and understanding to want to tackle algebra this year.  Frankly, I figured she'd take it in 9th grade when she started high school. 

Bible was another tough choice.  We are all missing our Community Bible Study program.  The only similar thing here is Bible Study Fellowship but it is a day class and BSF doesn't offer a day program for school age children so that wasn't a good fit.  Community Bible Study doesn't offer their materials for sale outside their class setting.  I've been looking for something similar.  I value the Bible study and the way we were all learning the same thing at the same time.  The kids liked the straight forward nature of the materials.  I'm hoping that the Explorer's Bible Study programs will satisfy all of us.  We'll be studying God's Wisdom this year.  I thought Job, Psalms and Proverbs was a great place for us to go after our last two studies.

I got our homeschool letter and test scores sent into the school system last week so now it's just a matter of getting the acknowledgement back and waiting for the first day to arrive.  I'm happy to hold onto these last days of summer and hope they crawl by.

M6's Lost Tooth

Today I have a guest author.  This story was written by M6 describing the loss of her first tooth.

I was in the hallway and I started to wiggle my tooth.  Then I began to whine about how my tooth was so loose that it hurt.  H12 told me to sit down.  She twisted my tooth so it cracked.  It hurt so bad and I yelled.

It was so loose that I could just wiggle it, wiggle it, wiggle it.  I went downstairs to get a glass full of water.  H12 came downstairs and put some salt in it.  H12 pulled my tooth so it was only hanging by one root. She pulled again and it was out.

There was blood all over my face so we went over to the sink to wash my face.  We went upstairs to show Kady.  Kady asked, "Are you going to sleep in here or what?"

I said, "Yes!"  I crawled into my bed on the floor and I went to sleep.

The End.

True Confessions of a Reluctant Stripper

It started as a project to give my nine year old son a Star Wars room. I've spent the last few weeks studying the Star Wars web site and searching the internet for ideas and bedding choices.  I thought that the most complicated part of the room was going to be making it look like the inside of a space ship.  Unfortunately, the only room in the house that had wallpaper in it was my son's.  Having dealt with wallpaper in several other homes, I knew the danger of painting over it.  As tempting as the idea was, I couldn't stand the idea of creating more work at a later date by painting it.  So, the stripping began.
S9 is at 4H camp this week.  I thought I'd have plenty of time to strip, paint and create the perfect Star Wars room.  Today was day three of the project and I still have several hours of stripping to go.  After the stripping is done, I'll need to wash the walls, repair the damaged parts of the dry wall and then, maybe on Friday, I can start painting.  Obviously, the room won't be done before S9 is home from camp.  I'm hoping it won't be too disappointed.

The conclusion I've come to is that wallpaper should be illegal.  I've only tried to put it up once.  Several years ago, my husband and I put up a wallpaper mural in my son's room.  It was a jungle scene and it really made the room.  After we complete the project, we were able to agree that the results were worth the effort. While we were gluing and hanging, we were certain that wallpaper had been invented by divorce lawyers.

After three days of stripping, I'm inclined to believe that wallpaper was created in the 5th circle of hell.  Now that I've been forced to reevaluate my time line, I'm confident that the room will be done by next Friday.  I am also confident that no matter how reluctant I am to strip, I will be glad that I've done this project well rather than getting it done quickly.

Wordless Wednesday - The Louvre

Waiting to meet the lady.

The lady herself.

Hammurabi's code

Colossi from Sargon's palace.