Thursday, June 12, 2014

Life Lately

This week has been busy! We've had Arts and Sports Camp (VBS) at our church all week. It's always so much fun, but it's a tiring week! It starts at 8:00 every morning (why our church starts so early, I have no idea - it seems like most other churches in the area start at 8:30 or 9), and we get home right at lunchtime. I rush to get everyone fed, and then I get my kids down for rest time as FAST as possible. We all need a break by that point :) This year, I'm helping with cooking. It's been a lot of fun! Each day, we have focused on a different meal (breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, and dessert tomorrow), and we show the kids how to make simple recipes for each of those. Basically, it's just a cooking demonstration :) The kids get to sample what we make, and at the end of the week, they get a cookbook to take home with recipes for everything we cooked. Super cute.

In the midst of the busy week, it was also my turn to host Bunco on Tuesday night. I hated that most of these friends were seeing my house for the first time since we moved, and our floors were a bit of a mess (more on that in a second), but it was a fun night! I had told myself that since it was ASC week, I was going to give myself a break and do something SUPER simple for dinner. Like, order pizza simple. When it came down to it, though, I just couldn't bring myself to do that. I cooked these stuffed peppers instead, and they were good and actually not hard at all. My friend Meredith was in charge of our "activity" that night. We quit playing Bunco at the beginning of the year, and each month, a different person plans a little something for us to do (we jokingly now refer to it as "Unbunco"). So, this time, Meredith had gotten supplies for us to make cypress planters. We were going to make them by hand using wood glue and a hammer and nails. But we quickly ditched the hammer and nails in favor of David's nail gun. Ha! Some of the girls quite enjoyed the power tool :)
So, I've mentioned more than once that we had damage to our floors after the bathtub was flooded. We filed a claim with our insurance company, and we realized after we got the check that we could do a lot of the repair work ourselves (painting and reinstalling trim being the main ones, but we're even hoping to salvage some of the floor in the playroom and repair the rest ourselves). That would leave us with leftover money, so we are getting real hardwood floors installed in our living room instead of replacing the wood laminate that was already there. I'm super excited about this! Our entire downstairs (except the living room, kitchen, and playroom) has hardwood already, so we're going to match the existing wood. This is something that we probably never would have done otherwise, so this is a definite silver lining to the mess :) The floors have to sit in the room and acclimate for a while before they can be installed, so they were delivered yesterday. My living room currently looks like this:
When we were talking to the guy who will be installing our floors, he told us that he'll have to do three coats of poly on the floor, and each coat will need to be 24 hours apart. The fumes are really strong, so we wouldn't be able to live here for at least those three days. Needing to be out of our house for three days set a whole fun plan into motion. My great aunt and uncle live in Florida close to the beach, and they're out of town for a good chunk of this summer, so they're going to let us go stay at their house next week while our floors are being installed. My mom is going to go with us, and I think it will be super fun! Probably a bit stressful too... the beach with kids is WORK. But we're excited! It'll be so fun to come home to new floors!

So, that's a little recap of what we've been up to lately. We've been busy - but definitely the good kind of busy!
 

2 comments:

Nathalie said...

Great plan for getting out of the house! Have fun in Florida!!

Emily said...

Hi Carrie, I just found your blog when I was googling Hong Kong adoption and Bethany Christian Services. My husband and I have been looking into adopting through Bethany, and they recommended the Hong Kong program based on our interest in special needs adoption and our need for a short travel time. We also have three children (8,7, and 2), and we have gone back and forth on how to proceed - country, age, etc. Do you mind emailing me, so that I can ask you a few questions about how the process has been? Thanks! Emily Wingard
eawingard@gmail.com