A Little Bit of Everything

"In cleaning out your basement, you will find great and necessary things!", said No One Famous.

We've been on a warpath to attack some of the projects on our Master List during the last few months.  Me and my husband-who-never-sits-down.

Plans around here are always tied into, well, everything else, and we can't get one thing actually finished without starting or ripping out something else that is somehow necessary to completing the first thing.  I'll give you an example - the basement (which is really more of just a lower room, halfway under the ground in our split-level home) has been slated to become a family room for years now.

But first, we have to address the water problem.  The one where water comes in the bottom door and the crawlspace in copious amounts when it rains a lot, or the snow melts a lot.  And that means digging a trench and laying a pipe and having stone, and etc, etc, etc.  So, in the middle of Frozen January, when you all of a sudden want to get hot-to-trot on your new Family Room, well, it just ain't happenin'.

Then, we also know that the crawlspace will be less likely to take on water if the back addition gets walls and a roof.  Can we borrow some TIME from you?

There's also the minor issue of how the basement is filled with CRAP.  Okay, maybe not CRAP.  Stuff.  Stuff that is mostly needed on some project, either at our house, in our garage, for our newly planned outdoor living space, or for the farmhouse project, all of which will likely save us lots of money.  So, not stuff to get rid of.

Yeah, we've been moving (slowly) on that.  The trench is mostly done, with a little help from a small man with a red shovel.

We've been cleaning and clearing that ole' basement.  We bought an enclosed trailer to store stuff in for now, which will eventually serve its purpose in the business.  We managed to find, in the process, a whole bunch of useful things that we forgot we had.  There were some leftover or extra (i.e. FREE) cabinets from some of our vendors that I absorbed into the homeschool room and my new laundry area.

So we took out Indy's old Pirate Ship themed bed, love it tho we did...

...and of course, the walls were ruined, so we spackled and painted... 

...and then put those cabinets to good use.  

The best gift a man can get for his wife is STORAGE!

We found the brackets to fix the fence panel that got whacked down by a tree limb a few weeks back.  We found the tub of Easter eggs and buckets in the basement, too - ha, right?!  Just in time!  And what the heck was it doing down there, anyway?  We (finally) moved the big filing cabinet up to the office where it belongs.  It's like a whole different house in here!

Beyond that, our winter can be summed up like this:

It snowed.

It warmed up.

Snow melted.

It rained.

It snowed.

It warmed up.

Snow melted.

It rained. 

REPEAT.  

We ping-ponged between snow and mud.  My washing machine groaned and moaned at the increased laundry from all that Splish, Splash, Splooshin'.  I got smart and added screws for hooks in the exposed ceiling joists in the half-cleaned out basement above the fireplace to dry the snow gear that continually got soaked from the wet, slushy, muddy, sort-of, almost snow.

The children delighted in the mud and I delighted in them.  For the few and far between snowstorms that actually produced anything worth writing home about, we decided that Snow Blowers were SO 2014, and Roger helped cleared part of the road, too.

But Spring is FINALLY here.  I can tell because my head is chock full of snot every damn morning.  This is normal for me, unfortunately for like 3/4 of the year, and I don't bother going to a doctor about it because they'd probably either recommend meds (which I don't want), or a head transplant, since this one causes me so much trouble.

My spring bulbs out front have burst through.  Our early crop seeds have turned into little shoots sitting on our windowsill.  We are outside (without MUD) more and more.  Baseball practice is in full swing, after many weeks of drowned out or snowed out practices. We are thankful our league starts at age 5, because Riley wanted to play this year, but she has to wait.  Next year we can run around on 3 different teams...

Riley plants more seeds for the kids' flower garden this year.

The farmhouse has a back wall and a REAL DOOR.  This is huge.  :)

Homeschool is going well, we are in our groove more than ever.  RJ is starting to nearly, almost, maybe normalize, or perhaps I have just learned better ways to manage him (it sometimes takes A LOT), so we get out more to homeschool meetups and events.  We are doing some cool side stuff with school, like making Stop Motion videos, and the kids are writing and illustrating their own books.  We sort of float back and forth from sit-down learning, book-learning, and hands-on learning and it works really well for us.  Indy has been doing charcoal art projects from here, and she's actually pretty good at it.  Musical instruments continue, with the big two taking lessons and performing with the local district kids, and Riley practicing making noise on her trumpet.

Don't mind the spackle in the foyer and downed curtains... this was probably one of the last days that our living room was bright orange.  I can't tell if RJ is singing or crying...

RJ demands often to be included with school, and we've been learning about Steam Trains and Steam Engines so in-depth it makes my brain hurt.  I never really thought trains were that great.  Ever.  And I still don't think they're that great.  But RJ does.  And so, I know more than I ever cared to know about trains, tracks, train parts, and train terminology in general.  But it is really fantastic to see him so excited by something he loves.

Since we are still living without that family room, sometimes triple-table train set-ups end up in the Master Bedroom.  Thank You, Craigslist, for  connecting me with all those people who darn-near GIVE AWAY really cool train stuff.  More spackle in the background and a ladder waiting for us to get in the painting mood again.

So that's about it.  Business is good, Rog has been out doing estimates like crazy and the phone rings often.  Customers are concerned about getting on our schedule, as they've heard about us and know that we are busy.  This is an excellent sign of Roger's workmanship quality, since we don't actively market the business.  We rely almost solely on word-of-mouth referrals, and it also seems to help that people see him literally all over the town working on local jobs. I don't know for sure exactly what it is about him, but people get REAL excited when they see him... "Hey! Roger!  Yeah, I see your truck all the time!  You were working on my neighbor's house!"  Local vendors love the crap out of him and even share their company lunch with him.  The one guy working at the T-Shirt place nearly falls out of his chair when he sees me coming in.  Me.  Not even Roger.  He just knows I'm married to Roger.  So excited, I tell you.  And Rog deserves it, because he really does put his heart into every job he does.  No half-assing, no short-cuts, no trying to rip people off because he thinks they can afford it, and no taking on anything he can't handle.  He's genuine, with an excellent work ethic and a knowledge base that is rarely matched, and I'm sure those are reasons why everyone from the town to the customers to our vendors loves the crap out of my Roger.  But for small Roger, well, we'll need to work on his motivation and work ethic a little bit, because as of right now, he still sleeps through lunch...

The Most Busiest Time of The Year

Riley asked us in the car last night, "How many days until Christmas?"  I thought for a second, and answered, "39."  And then my eyes popped out of my head, and Roger nearly drove off the road.

Yes, it's true, folks.  The Holiday Freight Train has reached top speed, it's coming, like it or not.

So to avoid that for a while, let's talk about something else.  My hair is the last short thing (get it?  Short....haha) I posted about, so let's revisit that.  I chopped it.  About 10 inches gone.  It felt GREAT, because it needed to.  You see, my hair was so damaged and broken from not taking proper care of it (think impulsive grocery store color dyes and cheap shampoo), that the only thing left to do was a fresh start.  Like a lot of women, I've always wanted to try short hair.  So I went and did it.  A lot of things the internet said were true.  You love it for a second, then get home and hate it, then spend the next two weeks flipping back and forth with how you feel.  You take about a week to stop pumping all that shampoo in your hand in the shower.  Everyone says they love it and you don't believe them.  It's grown in for about a month now, and I do actually love it.  It's so freakin' easy.  And I need easy right now, that's for sure.  Being a Mom, a Wife, homeschooling the kids....... is actually nothing compared to trying to keep up with my husband's business!

In October, the big kids took the Terra Nova Survey Test, a test that satisfies PA's requirement that testing be done in 3rd, 5th, and 8th grade for homeschool students and included in their portfolio.  Testing locations were set up by PA Homeschoolers, an organization dedicated to, you guessed it, homeschoolers in PA.  We were a little nervous, testing the kids in fall for the grade that they were currently in.  I warned them that we were just doing this to fill a requirement, there might be some things on the test they didn't know or hadn't learned yet, etc, and not to worry about it.  We had the 6th grader take the test, too, just to give us an idea where he was.  Apparently, we had nothing to worry about.  Both kids scored in the 99th percentile nationwide.  Which led us into doing some further placement tests (many placement tests are offered free from curriculum sites, in hopes that you will then buy their curriculum).  The placement tests showed a couple of things.  That they both are well ahead of grade level in reading and comprehension, which is not a surprise.  Indy placed into 5th grade language arts, but we're going to do 4th grade, just because this is our first experience with moving them up.  It's a little scary, honestly, because with public school you just go with the flow.  Chase tested a grade level up in language arts, but only after he was given the definitions of all the vocabulary.  This is the second public school (PS) deficiency we've found so far, he wasn't taught the vocab in a way that he retained it (but of course got all A's).  We've sucked stuff off the 'net and are reviewing all the vocab before moving forward.  The other thing we've found is that all of his 3-digit and greater multiplication is wrong.  The method is wrong, meaning he does the same wrong thing every time.  So it sort of screwed us, because that's the only reason why he didn't test into 7th grade math, last year at school and in a home placement test.  We purchased 6th grade math curriculum due to those tests, which he's flying through because he knows everything except correct multiplication.   So we're remediating the multiplication errors, and he'll most likely start 7th grade math in early spring.  But again, he got all A's last year in math... hmmm.  There was nothing that indicated to us that he was unable to do written multiplication.

Also in October, we attended the elementary school's Monster Mash and the kids got to see lots of their friends.  I had the urge to make a sign that said, "Homeschool Weirdo" and wear it on my back as my costume, but I resisted.  And actually, once there, we didn't feel so weird.  Everyone was happy to see us and made us feel included.  The little guys and I went on a Hayride to the Pumpkin Patch trip with her old Preschool.  They are so considerate of us, they invited us along with their whole school, knowing that Riley was doing homeschool this year.  She had a blast connecting with friends and teachers.

We won our short, but time-consuming, mini-battle (not really, it stayed friendly) with the district over whether or not Indy could join the Strings Ensemble.  We had originally been told that she could not join since it was "an extension of the curriculum" and the law supports inclusion on extracurricular activities only.  I spent hours researching PA homeschool law, put calls in to the Department of Ed., spoke with lawyers at HSLDA (Homeschool Legal Defense Association), speaking with the Director of Student Services and educating him about all I was learning.  I hadn't set out to be an advocate, but I became one during this process.  My Mom and my awesome neighbor encouraged me throughout, which I needed.  I had letters typed and ready to go to the school board and the local paper to bring attention to our issue... but I didn't end up needing them.  I woke up from a half-sleep one night and shook Roger awake to excitedly inform him that I had figured it out... I had it.  "Had what?" he asked, sleepily.  "If Strings is an extension of the curriculum, and in PA, school districts are required by law to lend home ed students the curriculum, then all I have to do is ask them HOW they plan on lending us the Strings Program?"  I was so proud of myself for coming up with that - Ha!  But it turns out I didn't need that, either.  The very next day I got a phone call that said she was invited to join, that the Director had spoken with the superintendent and other administrators to clarify what we could do.  And that was it.  We drove and got her a rental violin that very day.  She started lessons 3 weeks late, but since she had been a Suzuki student for a year, she caught up in 2 days.  Her BFF also joined Strings, so they have violin playdates now.

Grandpop came up for Halloween, and we had a great weekend with him.

Dr. Who, Mickey Mouse, Vampire, & Scooby-Doo

Dr. Who costume - $10 total for pants and jacket at the thrift store plus some hemp string to tie down his Red Solo Cup fez hat, Mickey - borrowed from sis-in-law, Vampire - $6 dress from thrift store plus $1 make-up kit, Scooby - $5 thrift store find.  We no longer purchase cheaply made kid costumes to celebrate Halloween, as they always tend to disappoint in some way.  I am not a sewer, so making them myself is out.  We happened upon the dress and then Scooby in the thrift store one day (thrift stores, clean ones of course, cannot be beaten for kids' knockaround shoes!) and that settled that as the girls fell in love, we went back for Chase's Dr. Who outfit.  We were impressed at the options for Halloween in our local thrift store, and we loved that we bought something used (repurposing) instead of contributing to the excessive amount of new "junk" being produced just for this fun holiday.  

Mickey rides in style.  He was quite serious, riding to the foot of each driveway, then running to doors to collect, and never letting go of that bucket!

That is one happy Puppy!

We finally got the girls sort-of, kind-of moved in to their new room (beds and dressers, waiting on a closet organizer), and we got the toilet installed in the hall bath about an hour before Grandpop showed up.  We figured he probably didn't want to walk all the way up to the Master Bath to pee.  We finally have two toilets again!!  This is so exciting, you have no idea.  We have learned A LOT over the last 8 months sharing one bathroom with all of us plus everyone who comes through our home.

Roger puts the bathroom door on, while Indy grabs some shims.  

A sneak peek of the new laundry area.  Bathroom tile in the background.  

Old room in progress of moving STUFF.  Why do girls have so much STUFF?!?

 Indy's new loft bed goes in first.  The mattress on the floor is for Grandpop to sleep on. 

Some stuff moves in

Nice, big 8 ft closet.  Dresser goes in the middle, and we'll custom build the storage around it. 

In the meantime, the kids play with old toys and jump from slides onto beds.

Moving the girls over finally meant repurposing the old room, and although over the many months we had tons of ideas, it was obvious that we needed homeschool storage, badly, and the big kids also needed a space to able to go to work quietly and independently, without the distraction of the little guys.  So that's what we did.  And, bonus, I can see the office floor again!

Office Before... Homeschool Everywhere

The Office - De-Schooled

$90 in IKEA bookcases (BILLY bookcase) in the new "Homeschool Room"

We kept Indy's custom Roger-made loft bed for a reading area, on top and underneath

So that's a wee bit of what's been going on.  

B is for Busy

Well, the title says it all.... we've been BUSY!  All over the place, really.

A lot is going on with the business right now, jobs wrapping up, jobs starting, a new round of about a zillion phone calls and estimates to put together.  I have a lovely friend who's been coming and helping me with office work so that I don't drown in paperwork, so, so helpful!

In our own house, we opened the doors and blew the dust out of those two rooms we gutted back in FEBRUARY.  Yes, February.  We've just been ignoring them, and have even learned to ignore and walk around the tote bins sitting IN the hallway, IN the way, that were placed there strategically to keep kids OUT of dirty, gutted, insulation-dripping rooms.  We started back at it and got drywall up and even painted.

The girls both picked blue for their new room color, Riley picked a dark blue (duh!) and Indy picked more of a sky blue.  When we to the Depot to hammer down a decision, we checked the Ooops paint section, and lo and behold, there was a color in between that everyone loved (score - $7 a gallon!).  Cornflower Blue.  Kiddos helped, of course.  

Then we got to the bathroom.  Not so easy.  Our paint color has rested squarely on which cabinets we are getting.  They were picked, not liked, a different kind ordered, and then the guy in the warehouse disappeared.  So nothing was actually ordered.  Roger tried to convince me that this Purple was "close-enough" to the charcoal I thought I wanted... but I vetoed it.  We went to the Depot and I changed directions completely... and went with Prelude.  Which is a blue with tons of gray in it.  Meaning our gray stone tile, black cabinets and white marbly-looking shower tile will all flow together.  Hopefully.  Riley stayed up till 11 painting with us.  She's a trooper.  

We were busy with other stuff, too.  Cool weather rolled in HARD and FAST for a few days and threatened a perpetual lock-down kind of winter, so we got outside a lot and tried to suck up as much remaining nice weather as we could. Riley is learning to ride on her balance bike, but found this gem at a yard sale for $5 and bought it with her chore money, so we let her try it out down at the middle school.  

The kids used all sorts of yard goodies to build a fort and spent days trying to make it waterproof.  They had flashlights hanging from the "ceiling."  They loved to eat snacks in there and tell stories. 

This guy?  He's just cute.  

Speaking of cute?  Look at this adorable little chica baking cakes for her brother and sister's birthday party.  

And speaking of cakes, here's RJ's 2nd (and better!) Thomas the Train cake for his family birthday party. 

And.... we spent so much time and effort on the Thomas cake, that I had to throw together Indy's Frozen cake in about 20 minutes.  I combined the leftover cut-offs from the Thomas cake and added some blueberry muffins, drizzled the blue icing down (going for an icy look) and added white sugar "crystals."  She loved it, but I know I can do better!!

Little girls learn hard lessons when they don't listen well all day.  Here's Riley eating her brought-from-home PB&J sandwich with her training chopsticks at our favorite sushi restaurant while everyone else enjoys the good stuff.  She only cried for the first 5 minutes.  And the next day she listened much better.

And on top of all that, school started.  Well, for everyone else.  We had 3 weeks of logged school already prior to "Day 1" of the district.  So we went mini-golfing with our homeschool group instead.  It was insanely HOT but FUN. 

Here's some school.  Chase has really taken off with computer programming, he's learning a coding program online and surpassed me after just 30 minutes.  

Math and science combined... Comparing and measuring units, fractions, and volume with plastic beakers and lentil beans.  They really love this and the littles like to get play time with the beans, too. 

We sort of fell into a brief electricity unit.  I'm a visual and kinetic learner, and I guess that makes me a visual and kinetic teacher, too.  Its just easier for me to show things rather than talk about them.  So I handed them a flashlight bulb, a dry cell (D battery) and two tin foil ribbons.  After some experimentation, they figured it out.  They still push back a little when I hand them some paper and say, "Ok, now write about it, describe it, draw it, show what you did."  I'm trying to teach them that putting it down on paper not only means they can reference it later but it's the only PROOF they have to show someone else that they are learning, and in our state, we do have to prove it. 

I think the fan favorite "unit study" this past week was the Chicken Nugget experiment.  It all started when RJ was running from the car to the house and dropped a nugget.  Yes, we sometimes eat nasty Mcdonald's... the horror, I know!!  Well, the nugget stayed there.  Indy came across it the next day.  Whole, complete, intact.  We started talking about how insane that was, with the amount of animals around here, something should have eaten it.  Except we came to the conclusion that even the ANIMALS didn't want the nugget because it's NASTY.... lol.   We watched it for days.  Not only did it not get eaten, it didn't even start to break down until day 6.... ewwwwww, right?  Ants finally decided there was nothing better around sometime after that, but they didn't stick around to finish the job.  And Chase took note that there were dozens of dead ants around the nugget.  And millions of people feed this crap to their KIDS???  Yikes. 

And finally, can I just say... my husband is AWESOME...!  Look at this gorgeous kitchen he just finished in a 1725 farmhouse.  Please excuse the crappy lighting, it was at night and there are shadows everywhere, and its way more amazing in person.  But darn, he is good!!

And All The Blogs That Pass...

Today's Blog will a passing tribute to a few of the Blogs that went through my head... and never quite made it to the 'Net.

He-Man & Friends - 

I should have been super excited the other day, when I saw the Real Live Skeletor - you know, from He-Man?  That show from the 80's that my brother and I watched probably way too much?  Skeletor was the bad guy and he looks like this:

Unfortunately, the Skeletor I saw was a woman who lives up the street from me, most likely in her 40's, with a young child (I know because she walks him to preschool across the street from me).  She was out running, and it's obvious that she is really into losing weight.  She seriously looked TERRIBLE.  She had on running shorts and a sports bra thing, and her ribs were quite apparent.  She was not running fast, so I could see her facial features, which were bony, too.  Honestly, it is ridiculously sad that there are people like her too far into "thin is in" to see that they have gone way past their personal attractiveness.

Birthdays - 

This 3 yr old:  

Turned into this 4 yr old:  (Overnight, do you even believe it??)

And 17 days prior to that: 

This guy turned 11.  Eleven!  

He is a mere 5 inches shorter than me, and we trade shirts and shoes ALL the time.

This is the time of year that I stumble over their ages if anyone asks.  Since all 4 birthdays are within 3 months' time (a June, July, August & September), I really get tripped up during that time. But the good news is that once September 23rd is past, the update is complete, they are all a year older, and I can catch up my brain.

Homeschool Update - 

We started.  Early, I know. Just to make sure it's really for us, and that all the people we know aren't actually right, to see if my kids' ability to talk to people their own ages disappeared, things like that.  

We're only doing a little, as it IS still summer.  Chase is actually doing the Math packets that were sent home by the school for summer review, plus a cursive handwriting program that is free on the web, and of course his spelling words every week.  Indy is doing a wee bit of every subject from a BrainQuest curriculum supplement book (clearance rack score!) plus her words and Riley is doing Kindergarten Money Math (education.com), along with a Scholastic Grade K activity book and her sight words.  The problem I continue to have with her is that her ability is well above her age, and so the concepts she is ready for are in a format that doesn't fit her age or attention span.  

House Renovation Update -

The girls' room and our hall bath MIGHT actually get drywall next week.  Maybe.  The drywall crew is scheduled for another job, and if we can swing it timewise, we'll have them come over and bang out our much smaller job.  Here's what we gutted back in February:

Old Master Bath - 1958 original? 

Hall Bath w/leaky shower, tiles falling off, ceiling peeling and a hidden empty old chimney slot just waiting to be repurposed...

Same ugly tile as the old Master Bath....

So we turned it into this.  The two former baths plus the chimney space will become a laundry room that leads into the new hall bath.  We had a lot of thought on how to use our space, two toilets?  two showers? how many sinks? We decided on a bathroom with a double vanity, one pooper and one tub/shower combo, as eventually the house will have a basement bathroom and possibly one by the garage.  So yes, we went from 3 crappers to two, but hopefully not for long.  The laundry area will also have its own sink, so you have to brush your teeth in the stench right after someone bombs the can.

Old Master Bedroom, had become a playroom. 

Gutting in progress.  

All this gutting meant I had to give up the water connection for my second washer downstairs.... :(  So we just decided to keep on gutting and rip out some dividing walls in the basement.

And this is what you get when you start moving stuff around and gutting rooms and have NO WHERE to put anything.  There's an air hockey table sitting on top of a pool table somewhere in that mess... 

 So anyway, yes, we MIGHT get drywall next week.  We found a really great paint color on the Oops rack (paint that was not the right color or has been returned unused, sold at a super low price!) at Home Depot yesterday, which was one color number away from the one the girls picked out... how friggin awesome is that! Giant savings. The girls are pretty excited about moving into their new space soon.  And I am ready to have another bathroom for people to use besides the Master Bath... 

So that's it for now.  The small boy is awake, some amount of children are hungry (I've borrowed some nephews for the day) and the wee-ist one (7 months) is upset because I'm not looking at him...