You've no idea what we have to do! Busy! Busy! Shockingly busy! Much, much too busy for... well, not really. ;-) But we have been quite busy this week. It's been a good one.

We've been in high gear remodeling our first room in this new house of ours: the master bathroom. It's a strange place to start, I know, and I'm still not sure why we picked it first (James had reasons, but I can't remember any of them), but it feels good to be getting SOMETHING done! I'm anxious to post some before and after pictures (I actually remembered to take "before" pictures this time!), but we're not quite done yet. Even once we do finish it's going to look a little weird for a while just because this bathroom is so BIG (8'x12', to be exact) and I have no idea what to do with all of those great big walls! In any case, it's going to be fresh and clean and... well, very, very cabin-ish. :-) James started on the bathroom several days ago, but I only got involved yesterday. I cleaned up all of the nastiness (it took quite some time!), then started at the ceiling and worked my way down. Three colors of paint, some wallpaper and a border later and ~voila~ it looks like a new room! Today I painted the cabinets in there and tomorrow I hope to get the cabinet doors painted. We took them off so it would be easier--especially since they will be two-tone. Anyway, that's what we've been up to! Pictures soon to follow. :-)

I've also been playing around with some different paint combinations to use on my kitchen cabinets. They are going to be sooooo great! I'm so excited!!! I'm especially excited because...

Mom is coming!!! The tickets are so cheap through Southwest that James decided to fly her out here to help with some of the big projects we're going to be diving into. So she'll be here for a little over a week in the first part of April. It's going to be so fun!!! And this house is going to be soooooo great once we start getting some of these ideas of ours actually into effect. (Or is it affect?!) Wa-Hoo!

The kids are doing well. They spend a whole lot of time outside nowadays. Every now and again I'll see the top of a little black cowboy hat go bobbing past a window, usually with a long stick bobbing along, too. That's Sam. He's still short enough that all I can see is his hat. He and the dog rarely come inside--they were both made to run around the side of our "mountain." Katie and Joe spend plenty of time outside, too, and they really like the trampoline. (Sam likes it until somebody gets on and actually starts jumping--then the fun is all over!) Katie has been making crafts and Joe is doing great in math and Sam is finally kind-of-sort-of learning something in school. He's finally begun recognizing the beginning sound of each word. He still doesn't know his letters and which ones make which sounds, but if you tell him "'F' says, "fffff" he'll spend the next 5 minutes saying, "F-f-f-f-f-fish! F-f-f-f-f-fan! F-f-f-f-f-fun! F-f-f-f-f-freak!" And so on. This is a great accomplishment for our resident dunce. Ha! No, Sam is anything but a dunce. The kid is just as sharp as the others, he just doesn't have any interest in academics at this point. And that's okay. I kind of like the cowboy hat bobbing past the window. He should be outside exploring and finding bugs and catching bad guys right now--that's what God made little boys to do. There will be plenty of time for learning him something later on. ;-)

Speaking of dunces... James took Joe for a father-son outting today. He was going to take him out to lunch, but that's a bit of a problem up here. There aren't just a whole lot of restaurants here in the mountains! We've got a Subway (which Joe isn't crazy about) and Burger Boy--that's closed on Tuesday. And there are two Chinese restaurants. So they went to one of the Chinese places. Joe found "mixed vegetable soup" on the menu and decided to order it. (He's not a Chinese fan and this sounded safer than everything else.) It sound like there wasn't a single vegetable in it that he recognized! It was full of mushrooms and crazy beans and broccoli and those little corn-on-the-cob looking things. He sipped a little of the broth and really tried to be a trooper, but James said it was hilarious watching his expressions as he spooned through and picked up some strange and unknown object each time! Ha! Anyway, to the dunce part...

When they came home, James decided to show Joe how to open the gate for the van. Our entire yard is fenced and you have to get out and open a gate to be able to drive up to the house. Very inconvenient. Anyway, the gate doesn't swing open, it has a little wheel on it and you can push it sideways (parallel to the fence) to open it, then pull it back and "latch" it. James said the only real problem was that Joe couldn't figure out how to close the gate and be on the inside of it! Ha! He was on the outside when he opened it, so he just stayed on the same side when he slid the gate closed again. "Hey, Dad? Now what do I do???" It took some explaining and example before it finally occurred to Joe that he could step into the yard before he closed the gate! Ha! I can just picture him standing outside the gate, looking in with that befuddled look of his. "Now what???" That kid cracks me up!

Well, that's about it from here. I'm going to try to get to bed at a decent out tonight. I didn't finish up with the paint and wallpaper until after midnight last night (I did, however, stop long enough in the evening to make a nice meatloaf dinner for my family--I'm SOOOOO happy to have a real kitchen and a working oven again!!!), then I had to take a shower because I was covered in paint (I'm an even sloppier painter than I am a cook!), so it was after 12:30 before I got to bed. I hate that! I've been doing so much better at going to bed early since we moved here. I don't want to get into a bad late-night rut again! G'night!!!

~Becki~