Weekends Are For
This past weekend was a stay-at-home-and-take-care-of-the-stuff-of-life weekend and it was wonderful.
It was just Aaron and Simon and Anna and me from Friday to Sunday. Definitely a little quieter as we moved through the days while the other kids were off on a skiing adventure with their Mom.
As our weekend started on Saturday morning I decided to intentionally take more photos with my DSLR after noticing/feeling that I haven't been taking many lately. Here's a look at some of the pieces of our weekend:
Lounging on Saturday morning. He is taller than both Aaron and me now and is almost as tall as Chris who is 6'1.
Creating at Katie's desk. I've been trying to stay out of my offie most weekends and that's been a good choice for me. To the left of this image you might be able to catch a glimpse of the new built-in shelves for my albums that were able to go in during the remodel. They should get painted this week and that will wrap up all the work needed to be done in my office and I can reposition things around once again.
Cleaning out and refilling hummingbird feeders + bird feeders. I read an article in our local paper recently about the native "Anna" hummingbirds and wanted to make sure they know we have an open invitation in our yard.
Putting Christmas away. Some onto shelves in the garage, some into a storage closet. This took up most of our morning on Saturday and I definitely feel good to have that task crossed off the list.
Rotating through about 8 loads of laundry: bedding and towels and kids clothes and my clothes. Having everything cleaned and put away to start the week is a really great feeling.
Adventuring to Target (the four of us) with a list that included things like new towels for all the kids (one color for each kid), Soft Scrub, and cereal.
Sitting with Simon while he was catching up on some classwork from the past week. I spent a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday listening to Simon read Night for his Language Arts class and talking with him as he read it and answered some study guide questions. We had a big IEP meeting for him last week that went well and I'm thankful for the frank discussions and opportunities to communicate about how he's doing and the ways in which we can all help him be successful in his own way. He also spent some time Sunday evening with Chris working no learning some new knots for Boy Scouts.
Day-dreaming about my yard/garden plans for 2017 during breaks in the fog and grey. Thinking about what I want to make sure to plant this year - right now I really want to grow some Hollyhocks (haven't done that before) and I'd also like to plant some Eden Roses. Love Pinterest for these kinds of ideas + other outdoor home inspiration (you can check out what's inspiring me in this area on my Pinterest board). Day-dreaming lead me to take some action and go outside to see what was actually happening around my yard. I found a few things to cut and bring inside which makes me so happy.
Even in the middle of winter there are things to bring the outside inside.
These are now in a glass on my kitchen windowsill.
As some of you who follow me on Instagram know, we've been underway with a remodel on our home for a number of months now. The structural work is done - we took a part of my office and a room just outside it to create a larger bedroom and a new hallway into my office (I'll share more images of this soon). Carpet will be laid in that new bedroom next month (took us a long time to make that decision) and then we will be replacing the carpet in the rest of the upstairs room by room which will give us time to paint each room and move the kids around (girls are moving into the new room, one of the boys is moving out of their current shared room downstairs so that each of the boys will have their own room). A couple weeks back Aaron painted the upstairs hallway (bring on the white) and all the doors and replaced all the hardware with an oil-rubbed bronze that basically looks black.
We held off on working on Aaron's room at the far end of the extended garage (the framing is done) while the work on the inside upstairs was happening. Now that the main part is wrapping up his room has come back up to the top of the list and we are hoping to get the drywall and a few other structural things done in the next few weeks.
Giving thanks for this special kind of slow, intentional, connecting weekend.
