August was jam-packed with what felt like more work than play. Here is Will off to work as "King of the School" as Lucy tells people. He is really enjoying his new position and we are hopefully riding the tail end of the learning curve as we adjust to Will being gone more.
This King has another kingdom to run when he gets home, and he will be the first to admit that behind every great King is a marvelous Queen. Ahem, ahem. Here he is below changing the breaks on his Queen's chariot.
He also put in a new royal bathtub for the princesses.
Finally, he installed a built in dresser in our bedroom to save on space. Our upstairs is actually built into the roof and has dead space in the walls where the roof slopes down. There are three more "dead spaces" in our upstairs that I am excited to create more built ins as time and money permit. Here is Will below prepping the space for the dresser. First, he cut a whole in the wall in our closet between the studs to make sure there were no hidden skeletons.
We were relieved to find out it was empty. We found two pennies, one from 1981 and another from 1995 so the wall hadn't been closed up as long as we had thought. Next we had to move the new dresser up the stairs. This was the most difficult part of the entire project and I prayed fervently as my brother helped Will get the solid oak furniture up our narrow and winding stairs. I kept promising them that they would never have to bring it back down!
The dresser made it up with only a couple of nicks on the wall and some sore muscles for Will and John. It fit quite nicely into the wall, so that was a huge relief! We designed the dresser through the mail and over the phone with an Amish furniture producer in Indiana who had never seen the space himself.
Below is the before and after. If you look really close, you will notice that my toe is finally better! From the fourth of July (when the before picture was taken) to Labor Day it was badly infected despite various efforts to help heal it. After the last official holiday salute to summer, it is finally better. But I digress.
Will is very thorough in his demolition and installation but has a hard time remembering the clean up. He didn't tarp anything when he cut into the wall - which was a double layer of plaster and drywall - and as a result every stitch of fabric in our room had to be washed - all of our bedding, and every piece of clothing we own. After I got over my anger about the work Will had created for me, it became a really good way for us to weed through a ton of clothes to donate when the question came down to not, "Will I ever wear this again," but, "Do I really want to wash this?"
The most exciting project we worked on this past month was for our new educational poster business. We had our first shipment of posters come in and were faced with the job of collating 7,000 pieces of paper into 1,000 poster sets. We hired my teenage brother and sister to help collate and my parents came along and volunteered their time to the cause. It took two solid days and several serious paper cuts, but we got the job done. Lucy and Emma had fun helping as well - their job was to put caps on the mailing tubes. Only mild panic set in when I realized that they were capping ALL of the tubes and we had to go through each and every one of them to find out which had posters in them already and which ones did not. Minor set backs! We are feeling very fortunate for the over sized garage and good weather to house our assembly line and inventory.
By the end of August we were feeling quite burned out and forced ourselves to make some time for relaxing. Fortunately, our time spent in the garden is fun for us. Below is a picture of our garden this past month, the rhubarb bed we planted this summer, and our peach tree.
Below are the sunflowers Lucy and Emma planted this past spring. They really make the garden beautiful and the girls are so proud of them. Next year they want to plant even taller ones!
Lucy got a little creative the other day when she found herself in the garden with lots to harvest but no basket on hand.
August's harvest included a dozen peaches from our peach tree, the last of the season's blueberries, pounds and pounds of green beans, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and pears. Oh, and of course eggs.
I suffer from a disorder that sees baked good and other processed foods whenever I look at fresh produce. I wish I could just eat the produce unprocessed and be satisfied, but my mind immediately wanders to the pancakes and muffins fresh blueberries will make, the cheesecake and oven-puffed pancakes and sauces the pears will enhance, the three bean salad and dilly beans the green beans were made for and of course the peach cobbler God clearly intended peaches to be used for. Not to mention the zucchini that should only be eaten in muffins, the kale that can only be eaten as chips and the plums for plum buckle. Oh, and I almost forgot about the luscious strawberry rhubarb cobbler! If I could just get over this disorder, then maybe I could lose these last 15 pounds! Below is a picture of the blueberry pancakes and muffins, ginger pear cheesecake (heaven!) and a mason jar of my first batch of freshly brewed kambucha (a fermented sweet tea drink stocked full with beneficial probiotics).
Lucy has been very helpful these days. In the below right picture, she stocked the toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom for me. It reminded me of a quote by George S. Patton that says, "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
In the above middle picture Lucy is helping me babysit a friend of our's baby. She absolutely loves helping me with babies and is looking forward to the day when she is old enough to go babysitting on her own. The left bottom picture above is of Emma putting her finger in the ringlet of curls cascading from Lucy's forehead. At least someone looked good in the humid weather we had this past month!
I bought some beads and string on clearance at the local craft store this past month. Lucy and Emma were excited to try their hand at jewelry making and did an amazing job. Lucy made patterns all on her own and Emma was able to string the tiny beads with no problem. It was fun for me to sit back and watch their little minds creating.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment