Our Week with Household Projects and Sewing

Is it seriously Friday again already?  How did that happen?  What all happened this week?  Let's see...

Since it's summer, Bri has been staying at a friend's house, soaking up all the time they missed out on while she was in school.  Paul has been wanting to take down the bunk bed in her room since we moved Hannah into the panda room with Katie, and the "throw all your junk on the curb for us to pick up" day was sufficient inspiration for him to get to it.  He made this bed from odds & ends, hence the different colors of wood.

Speaking of making, Paul recently finished the right half of our front yard.  I've added some flowers to the middle terrace since taking this picture, so it's a little more colorful now.  Looks a lot better than the plain dirt and weeds we had going before!  I'm sure the neighbors are pleased to see progress.

While we're talking about household projects, here's a neat one.  In April, Paul "rescued" some old cabinets that a coworker was ripping out.  He brought them home, installed and painted them.

It turned out really nice!  He added some pegboard, and his garage is looking really good now.

One of the "side effects" of the big kids not being in school is that Hannah has time to play for a little while in the morning before she leaves for school now.  One. More. Week.  She'll be done with school in one more week, and then I'll only have Sam's football practice on the schedule most days.

Katie and Brayden share their sticky block creations.

Speaking of Brayden, the need has come up a couple of times this month for him to have different clothes than the ones he arrived in.  This was never an issue when Luke was here, because he could borrow from Luke's ample wardrobe.  Now that Luke and all his clothes live elsewhere, this presents more of a logistical problem.  He was sporting a pair of Katie's jeans with flowers embroidered on them recently.  I decided maybe I should come up with a couple spare outfits for him, so I sewed this one up to test pattern size for him.

Josiah and Samuel, 2005ish

It makes me a little nostalgic, since I used the patriotic camo fabric for Josiah and Sam when they were younger.  Sigh.

While I was in the sewing room, I finished up with Minnie Mouse set for Hannah.  The dress fabric was pre-shirred, making that part really easy.  I made black & white polka dot shorts for underneath, although you can't see them in this picture.  I should have gotten a close up of her hair bow, but she was dashing out the door to school.  It's Minnie ribbon.

The last nightgown set that I made for Hannah was starting to fall apart, and the last PJs that I bought her were getting that crunchy, washed too many times, feeling to them, so I made her 3 new nightshirt/shorts sets.

This one is princess fabric on the top and crowns for the bindings and shorts.  I believe my friend Meg gave it to me when she was cleaning out her sewing room at one point.

Here are the other two sets.  The fairy fabric on the left, I'm pretty sure came from Sewbaby.  I had the perfect blue binding to match the fairy dresses... but only enough to do the sleeves!  The neck binding is a little brighter than the lime fairy dresses, but perhaps it will tame down with time.  Oh well, it's pajamas, right?  The Asian fabric on the right, I bought from another sewing mama.

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that we took a trip to the library this week.  I picked up a few books for Hannah while we were there.  She's becoming quite the reader.  I'm looking forward to her joining our homeschool adventures in the fall.

The boys pitched a tent in the back yard.  Funny story... we used to have a tent.  I bought it for Paul when we lived in Santa Rosa, thinking we'd go camping as a family.  Never happened.  It sat in the box.  Time marched on.  I loaned it out a couple of times to friends.  On one of these vacations the tent took without us, it got eaten by a wild animal.  My friend offered me cash for the loss of the tent, which I was thrilled to get, because we were in process to adopt Hannah at the time, and cash was in short supply.

Last summer, when we went on vacation, the kids loved sleeping in tents.  And let's hear it for family who says, "Well, you're welcome to come visit, if you don't mind the kids sleeping out in the yard."  They had a blast!  So, as we get ready to make the same trip again this summer, I decided to get a little tent to bring with us.  The boys have it up in the back yard now, and have already asked if they can sleep in it tonight, and if they can use the lantern we reviewed.  I said yes, but I'm not sure if they'll actually make it through the night out there when there's real beds in the house.

Happy to see summer fun commencing around here.  Even sibling relationships are changing with the season.  Sam and Eli have been hanging out and playing on the Wii together.  Life is good.


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