Another Productive Day

We got so much done today! Well, not a lot, domestically speaking. The kids mostly ran amok in and out of the sawdust, played billiards, and ate Chrismtas candy remnants. But on the project front, we did accomplish a bit. It's going to be horribly dull when Zorak goes back to work Wednesday. The kids and I just do normal "stuff" during the day - but when Zorak is home, it's all an adventure! I have thoroughly enjoyed this time with him.

Today he put two coats of stain on my new coat rack. I want to fondle it and touch it and whisper things to it, but it's a bad idea to manhandle the wet stain. Not to mention the whole fumes-while-pregnant issue. We won't even discuss the concerns surrounding Mommy talking to the furniture. So. I stand back and oooohhh and ahhhh, and inwardly stomp my feet like the impatient six-year-old I am. You know, deep down inside. :-) He got the stain on the rails of Claudia's toy bin, too. Different stain. Just as pretty. I didn't touch or talk to those, either. (I've been so good!)

I did, however, while feeling a bit guilty for sitting on the futon chair (again), reading (again), and doing absolutley nothing (erm, still...) decide I needed to clean up our old coffee table. This is the table James and John helped me make the top for, way back when I was pregnant with Smidge. We didn't want to strip it, but after two and a half years in storage, it needed something more than Murphy's. Zorak found a product today at Home Depot called "Restor-A-Finish" - wow! You can't use it with polyurethane, but since we don't polyurethane *anything*, we figured it would work well for us. It did! The table looks as good tonight as it did when we first refinished it. Ahhh, what a great feeling. (And how little work! LOVE that stuff!) Anyway, that little project turned out so beautifully that I've decided to tackle the big office desk chair and an old end table tomorrow. If we somehow manage to get enough sunlight into the basement, I'll get pictures of the progress.

We have only two days of vacation left. In that time, we've got to finish the small desk and haul it upstairs, pick up mattress bags and haul the guest room bed downstairs, hang the coat rack, finish Claudia's toy bin rack, make a new step stool for the bathroom (one that will fit beneath the sink and remove the toe-eating feature of the bath - not a big selling point, really) and... and I'm forgetting something. There's more on the list, but this is the stuff I need Zorak's help with (well, I *could*, technically, just let the boys maul the mattress down the basement stairs, but I have nightmares that they'll one day try to *ride* something down those stairs... those stairs that end at a cinder-block wall... it's worth it to ask for help from a grownup). We also want to get into town and visit Me-Wa and Me-Tae - we haven't seen them in almost a month, and we're all Jonesing for a visit.

Sometime between now and Wednesday, I want to review our lessons and goals for the Winter Term. We've only got January, February, and March before the baby arrives, and I'd like to be all caught up on our more structured academic work, poised with plenty of good literature on hand, and be able to spend our Spring on the back porch, enjoying the new dynamics and the daffodils. :-)

Kiss those babies!
~Dy