We Did What?!?!

It seems like this week we've done a little of just about everything here! The two week long oddessy of Peanut's room is almost 100% complete (and will be by this evening)!

Looked horrible didn't it?

This looks white but is a pale pale pink.

On the home improvement front we've spent almost two full weeks on just re-doing Peanut's room! I can hear most of you now, "It's one little girl's room. How much work could it possibly take?" Well, I'm glad you asked. We started by emptying the room and fixing all the cracks in the walls. And repairing and re-insulating a hole Mommy somehow put in the floor right by the heat vent (Daddy took out all the weak flooring to fix the problem). Our friends from Learning Life with 3 Sons came by last Friday to help us get some paint on the walls (you can check out last week's weekly wrap-up here , there was way more that happened on that visit).

 This week we got two coats of paint on the wall in our pretty pink paint (Peanut's favorite color) and decided to do most of the trim in the room purple because it was a TON of pink! We remembered to paint the trim around the mirror purple as well. That was pretty much finished Wednesday night. Thursday one of Daddy's good friend's came over and helped Daddy lay the new floor down. They were finished in just a couple of hours! Peanut was very excited that she could now "skate" in her room.

After Younger Cracker Jack (YCJ) and Peanut went to sleep Elder Cracker Jack (ECJ) stayed up to help us get things finished because we promised Peanut she'd be sleeping in her room Friday night. He was helping to sand some of the "shiny" off of the bed frame so that it could be painted pink and purple to match the room. All of the base board trim was painted as purple as well. ECJ stayed up almost all night with Mommy to get everything finished. Daddy got some rest and will be finishing up the room as soon as he gets up.

Tried a new faux finish and absolutely
love how it came out!!

Added a few pink details to YCJ's TV stand.

 You can't see it very well but those pink "blobs" against that purple is a moon, a cloud, and a bunch of stars, right at Peanut's eye level. This will all be put together by this evening with all of her belongings back in place. Of course I'll be sharing a picture of the completed project on Homeschool Camper's Facebook page.

In our homeschool this week we ended up taking an extra day off because we chose to take a field trip (more on this in a moment). This put us behind a day (although Peanut's caught back up and will be finished later today), which means that we'll do a bit of school this weekend either before or after we see Santa.

Third grade was a particularly interesting grade this week. YCJ spent a lot of time this week on her English lessons, really enjoying the fact that the little bit of green paper is helping to keep the letters in order. English is her LEAST favorite subject and yet she's doing very well in it. She also took another math review/test and aced it! Yay YCJ!! 

Sixth grade and ECJ are still getting along well. No, my book report on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy STILL isn't in. I'm sure it's a stall tactic now to attempt to avoid reading Little Women. While he stayed up with Mommy working on painting, he took some time between coats to do some of his Apalogia science. He breezed through two whole lessons and quizzes and completely aced them!


PreK/K has Peanut really enjoying her days. We've got it down pat now, as she says. She is almost completely finished with her Caillou PreK computer game and has moved on to some of her Caillou K computer game (though she does admit some of these are much harder). She's also more than a third of the way through most of her books! Mommy ordered her first "real" science book on Amazon.com last night. She really likes it when her big brother helps her out, in the picture to the right she's connecting the dots and he's praising her highly.

In religion this week we began our first year truly celebrating Advent as a family. The children are really enjoying this part of our lessons and look forward to it each day. We've discovered that no matter how busy our day is that we can find time each day to celebrate the advent right after supper. Our Jesse tree is much fuller now than it was on Sunday and Peanut loves that she can touch the "flame" of the candles on our homemade Advent wreath.

Loving the wagon ride

She was so happy she got to finally
hold the saw (upside down)

Our field trip (the first of a couple this month) was to a local tree farm to cut down our Christmas tree for this year. This was Peanut's first time getting a real tree and she really enjoyed it. She even picked out the tree. We got a nice, round, fluffy Scotch Pine. What we didn't know until we'd cut it down was that the base of the trunk was badly twisted. Still, we didn't think it would be too much of an issue, and we'd already cut it down, so home with us it came. Daddy trimmed it and had to cut a lot some of the trunk off so that it would fit right into the tree stand. When it was lifted up and we all looked everyone had to giggle. Our 6 foot + tree had shrunk! Peanut will have no problem helping to decorate it this year, and we all love it just the same!

On the non-yelling front (check out The Orange Rhino for more details on the challenge we chose to take) I have to admit that I had to restart this week. It's been a long week with errands, home improvement, decorating, field trips, and birthdays of deceased loved ones. It was on one of those birthday's (there were 2) that I lost it and yelled. That same night Peanut decided to melt the "evil yelling witch" with the "power of orange". There on the brim of the witches hat (found misplaced in our Christmas decorations) is a small square of orange construction paper, which our cat was highly confused to find in our hallway in the middle of the night. It wasn't until after I'd moved the hat that I looked down to find two little feet sticking out from under YCJ's bedroom door. I guess that Peanut had remembered a certain scene from The Wizard of Oz. From now on when I need to "think orange' these pictures are sure to come to mind.

We decorated the front porch and part of the house this week. Of course, even with yucky cold weather, we spent some time outside as well. Peanut even made a new friend with a little girl from the street behind us (both girls are redheaded ... I'm not sure how well this bodes as I'm a redhead myself). Not all of our decorations are up yet, though we're hoping to have them up tonight. We'll be busy tomorrow you see ... we have an appointment with Santa!

My tip of the week is to make sure you dedicate a pair of clothing just to painting. I hadn't as I "never" make too much of a mess. Now a pair of jeans I've only just begun to fit in are splattered with pink and purple paints.

Posts you might have missed:
School, Holidays, Outside and More (last week's wrap-up)
First Day of Advent and More
First Week of Dec. Menu
 When Orange Turns to Pale Peach
7 Changes Happening to Our Homeschool



 Who we're linking up with this week:
Homegrown Learners
Faithful Mom...
Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers
(though I reserve the right to edit and add more to this list as they come up ;-) )