Week 11 ~ Paint, Cow's Eye, and a Birthday Girl!

On My Mind ~ We close on the other house in two weeks!!  I have to start packing for real ~ but when do I have time?  We had a slow week of showings and then two Friday, one scheduled for today and an open house tomorrow.  We dropped the price this week and hope that will trigger an offer.  We are also busy painting the most offending rooms a neutral color.  I am so tired of painting already, and I have an entire house to paint on the other side!  We are going to go with less colors in the new home.  A huge point to this move is to simplify our lives.  I am considering only painting one wall in each child's room their preferred color and the rest of the walls in each room a neutral color such as antique white.  No more two walls pink with two walls purple, such as in Goldilocks' current bedroom. LOL

Family Fun ~ We had two extra fun events this week.  The first was a fun day at the nature center's fall festival.  The kids made lots of crafts, watched the animals reactions to pumpkins, and met the nature center's newest arrivals ~ twin mountain lions.  The mountain lions are really cute and big (for being not yet a year old)!

The second fun event was Little Red Riding Hood's 9th birthday!  Oh my, where do the years go?!  Little Red Riding Hood's birthday happened in a day with two showings, plus painting rooms, and general chaos!  We had to be creative to keep her day special.  We started the day out with a nice breakfast at a local restaurant.  I will miss having places within walking distance that Tom Sawyer can get safe food.  This side of town has lots of local businesses and lots of health conscious restaurants.  It will be one of the few things I miss about our current neighborhood.  The side of town we are moving to has chain restaurants, fast food places and big chain retailers.  After breakfast, we returned home and cleaned the house like mad while Grandma and Dad painted one of the offending bedrooms.  Then in the evening we had Little Red Riding Hood's best friend over for dinner, cake, presents and lots of play.

In Our Homeschool! ~ We finished up On the Shores of Silver Lake.  We decided to dissect a cow's eye this week to go along with our study of blindness and the blessing of sight.  The kids did great with the dissection.  We also kept up with all of the basics.  I am hoping to keep up schooling for two more weeks before taking an extended break.  We shall see whether we can keep schooling, despite packing and moving.  Yikes!  Once I feel like our school days are becoming poor quality for two days in a row,  I will stop.

Counting Blessings ~ So many blessings to count this week.  We seem to have everything complete for closing on the other house.  We have been blessed with a really caring lender who is very hands on.  She is such a kind yet aggressive woman.  We got tons of packing boxes and a gorgeous 8x10 rug for our new home off of Freecycle (thanks, Mom, for watching Freecyle so closely).  Our family survived another crazy week with love and some grace.

I am joining HomeGrown Learners.

Blessings, Dawn