Our Week with Less People in the House

I don't know who said, "The only constant is change," but it certainly seems true for our house.  Our household shrunk by 3 people in 12 hours time.

Hannah and Katie (and Paul) said their goodbyes to Sam at home.

Paul stayed home with all the small fries while the teens, the preteen, and I all took Sam out for a goodbye dinner.

Josiah was there, too.  He took this picture for me.

Then Tuesday came, and it was back to the grindstone.

Eli made another beautiful omelet, and I made a second batch of "hard boiled" eggs in the Instant Pot.  If this keeps up, Paul's going to have to start buying the huge packs of eggs at Costco again.

Katie and I were playing Connect 4, and I realized I had to pay more attention to strategy and less attention to my cell phone when she beat me!

Sam's room is all emptied out.

Paul and Josiah are working on cleaning it up and prepping it for paint.

Right now, the plan is for Josiah to move in here when it's finished.

When we moved into this house, this was Annaliese's room.  After she moved out, we shuffled Josiah and Sam in here.  Josiah later got the room we created by splitting the great room.  When Josiah moved out, Eli got that room, so Josiah will be moving back into the front downstairs room when it's done.  At some point, Paul would like to have this room as his man cave.

I just realized I never showed a "finished" picture of Jack's room.  Here it is in all it's unmade-beds glory.

The walls are a pretty dark blue.  When Jack and Eli shared this room, they had beds Paul built fastened to the walls.  Those came out when he did paint prep.  When Josiah came home unexpectedly in November, we made a trip to Ikea to buy not one but two beds for this room.  Part of me wished we would have left the old beds in there, but I realize it will be more versatile to be able to move one of them downstairs when that room is freshly painted.

I'm starting to think about Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day, and I asked Jack to look through a book basket to find any Valentine books we have.  I turned around and saw the floor covered in books!  Several years ago, when Brianna was our youngest daughter, and it looked like our family was complete, I gave away all the girly readers.  (We've obviously accumulated plenty more since then.)  It occurs to me that I should probably start thinking about passing down all the little boy readers to Brayden, since Jack will be 13 this year.

I made Hannah a (different size) dress from the same pattern as last week's Valentine dress.  I liked it so much I spent last night tracing off Katie's size so I can make her some dresses from this pattern, too.

Had a rather embarrassing moment at school involving the van, some mud, 2 pickup trucks and a tow rope.  All's well that ends well, right?

Brianna's need for a "free reading" book for school spurred us into a much needed trip to the library!

We're working on making a big book of dinosaurs!  You can't tell in this photo, but Jack and Hannah have written information about their dinosaurs on their papers already.  I still need to draw lines for Katie and write out what she needs to copy.

Chinese New Year comes soon, and we're saying goodbye to the year of the Monkey and hello to the year of the Rooster!  Today we painted wooden rooster cutouts.

I found this wooden puzzle in the girls room this week.  I think it was from Christmas 2015.  I don't see them playing with it, so I pulled it out and dumped it on the school room floor.  Voila!  Interest renewed.  There are challenge cards that go with it, but to start, Katie enjoyed just doing her own thing with the blocks.  I like hands on, brain food, type toys, so I'm glad to see it getting some use.

I'm late getting this posted because we took a field trip yesterday!  I'll share that with you soon.


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