Lemony Webbles

slow construction but happy children

The rate of progress on the new bathroom construction has slowed from a trickle to an occasional drip after a row (pronounced rahoo- meaning a fight) between Billy and the dry wall guys over shoddy workmanship. One got 'fired', one got another chance but he only comes to work on it in odd moments (he has a full time job already and an eight week old baby to boot). That means we're still sleeping in the basement while Billy tries to get up the energy to put up a piece of drywall or two late at night here and there. I've come up after the girls are asleep a couple of times to try to help and I actually got to cut a piece of drywall all by myself with a hole for an outlet and everything. That was fun. But then Teresa woke up and nursing her back to sleep in the dark kind of interfered with my momentum.

I've also unpacked a good deal of the mass of boxes taking up most of the basement. We still have tapes and books to go through and decide what needs to be out on shelves, what we want to keep in boxes for later and what needs to go away. I don't think we've gone through our stuff this thoroughly before. It's really good but very emotionally tiring. The girls like to grab onto my legs these days and have me drag them around and that's kind of like what it feels like to comb through all of our accumulated stuff. I've already got my stuff from ages 0-18 down to one box. It's the 18-32 that's so hard to cull. I used to be really into making mix tapes (back before CDs) and I seem to have quite a few tapes collected in boxes that I never listen to any more but they meant so much to me when I was struggling through college. And Billy's got boxes and boxes of taped talks by House of Justice members. How could we get rid of those? I guess that's what our storage room is for. Little by little I can see more of the floor down here. Slow progress.

The cousins, however, haven't wasted any time getting into great adventures, especially with two of them around the corner now. Here are a couple pictures of their last foray into the woods across the street:

Havin a good time

We've got a dishwasher. We've got laundry going. We're still in a construction zone but I think the plumbers are about done so we can start unpacking the mountain of stuff in the basement. We've had lots of wonderful visitors this weekend. Hooray! I've been looking forward to that through all the stresses of this week. Nothing like friends visiting to make me feel like everything's going to be ok.

Happy girl

You can see two of them there, but she's got top teeth now too! Four on top, two on the bottom. She's shifted from solid food being a novel snack and nursing being her main staple to the opposite- solids are what she goes for when she's hungry and nursing is something that makes her giggle (with happy anticipation) when it's naptime or bedtime.

a loooong transition

House changes continue, slowly, slowly from my perspective. We've got all the basic services (heat, hot water, etc.). No dishwasher yet though- that's basic to me! Construction of the upstairs bathroom is in full swing. Zivar and company got it all framed and lots of the wiring done Saturday. There's insulation and boards with nails sticking out of them and plastic-ed off areas all over the place. It makes me kind of anxious, safety-wise. My kids are pretty good about not messing with construction-y spaces though. That helps. But we may need to find other places to play this week. It aslo makes it hard for me to continue unpacking. But I could use a break from that anyways. I'll just flow around it all a bit longer. I ordered some training books for me to learn how to teach drawing and painting and just education in general from a Waldorf perspective. That should help me in figuring out how to set up my homeschool area and what supplies I'll want handy, etc. I've got so much crafty stuff but I'm not sure how to organize it all and I feel kind of stuck about how to proceed. Time to learn more and take more steps on my homeschooling journey. Whee!

Ooo! And Khalil (my brother) moved in with us last night! Yeah! More grown-ups! We're not outnumbered anymore. By kids, that is. Not that it's a competition or anything. It just really helps get things done when there are more grown-ups around.