You got a detailed look at last Sunday, in this post. So we'll move on to Monday . . .When we had our "nature afternoon" a few Sabbaths ago, Karin mentioned that her father-in-law, who also attends our church, loves showing people around his butterfly gardens, so we talked to him on Sabbath and arranged to go visit his garden on Monday. What a TREAT!!!! I was expecting him to kind of point us to the garden and tell us to enjoy, or maybe stay close by to answer questions, but he had a whole "tour" planned out for us, it was awesome! Lina was restless, mainly because it was too close to lunchtime for her liking, and of course, details about which kinds of butterflies land on which plants is still abit advanced for her. I'd love to go back another time and plan ahead to bring something for her to do. There was a lovely bench in the shade and I think if I came armed with her own little tote bag filled with a water bottle, some snacks, and some activities she can do on her own, she'd be pretty content to hang out there while we toured the gardens.
Monday afternoon my parents got here to spend the week helping with fix-it projects around here.In going through stuff in their garage (where we still have stuff stored from when we moved from MD to PA 5 1/2 years ago), Dad found our easel, that I had actually looked for 3 or 4 times, both in his garage and in our storage (before we moved last winter) and hadn't been able to find. When I confirmed for sure that it wasn't in our stuff when we moved last winter, and I THOUGHT I'd looked through Dad's garage enough to confirm that it wasn't there, I'd decided that I must have gotten rid of it, so it was an exciting surprise for Dad to message me before they came up and ask if I wanted the "standing chalkboard thing" he'd found in my stuff in his garage. Woo-hoo!! As soon as Ashlyn saw it, she HAD to try it out. She set it up on the front porch (with our step-stool for a seat, not sure why she chose that instead of a chair) and got out her paints and went to town. :)
Mom's big project was to help Lexie and Ashlyn sew their colonial costumes for Williamsburg in a few weeks. After trying on colonial clothes at Paul Revere's house in Boston this summer, we decided that we wanted to try our hand at making them "authentic" costumes. So we pretty much made up the whole thing from scratch. AND the girls did most of the straight-seam sewing, with mom doing the more complicated parts.The picture at left shows things "in progress" when the girls decided to give a "demonstration of colonial dress". Ashlyn's wearing everything they had done at that point (they now have aprons and the vest/shirt thing has ties to hold it shut). Lexie is showing the "nightwear" that is also the bottom layer of their daytime clothes. So, they each made a shift (what Lexie's wearing), a drawstring skirt, the vest/shirt that Ashlyn's wearing, and an apron to go over all of it. The mob caps, we actually had in dress-up stuff, so we didn't have to figure out and make those.
The girls are soo thrilled with it all, but it occurs to me that I didn't get a picture of the completed outfits when they wore them, and now they've been washed and the girls ironed them (proof that anything that is a novelty is "fun", since I make a point to not buy clothes that have to be ironed, they've never ironed, or really even seen anyone iron, so now they think it is GREAT FUN to iron, silly kids . . . Anyway, they've carefully set the outfits aside to take with us to Williamsburg, so I guess you'll have to wait for the pictures from Williamsburg to see what the complete outfit looks like. I did snap some pictures when they were wearing just their skirts and shifts outside, I love how it looks with the neighbor's cornfield for a backdrop :) The straw hats are the hats they got in Williamsburg the first year we went, when they were 6, hard to believe that Little Bit's closer to 6 than they are now!
Little Bit was less than thrilled with Mama being here, but spending so much time with the big sisters. The saving grace was Mama's new smartphone, that we set up a whole folder of games just for Little Bit, Lexie snapped this picture when Little Bit fell asleep on the sofa one afternoon, playing games on Mama's phone LOL.Meanwhile my dad was busy doing all kinds of awesome projects around here. When he put the shower in our bathroom last winter he had to take out the existing heat vent in the bathroom because that was the only place the shower would fit. So, with the summer almost over, we figured it might be important to get a heat vent back in the bathroom, so that was one of his projects.
For awhile now I'd sometimes hear a "buzzing" (like bees) that sounded like it was coming from the window frame of the kitchen window when I stood there to wash dishes, but I'd looked around inside and out and never been able to find a wasps nest or anything else to explain the sound, so I had "help me figure out teh buzzing sound" on my list for Dad. He determined that teh windows hadn't been caulked around to seal them off so the wasps were getting into the walls by going into the gap between the top of the window and the house wall. So, he caulked the windows to keep the wasps out AND that should help with cooling and heating as well.
The steps going up to our back porch were starting to rot away. Dad had thought he'd just replace the worst one (top) for now, but once he pulled it off, he decided they were all bad enough that it made more sense to replace them all, so that was a pretty big project. It's sure nice to not have saggy steps anymore! :)
AND one of the . . . interesting . . . features of this house was that in the closet in the girls' room, there were some rather odd "stairs" that went to nowhere. When I asked the former owner (when we looked at the house) what they were, he said he thought someone had put them in to be shelves for shoes in the closet. It seemed like inefficient use of space to me, but since the girls have another closet that we use for clothes, and this one is just for toys, I figured we'd give the shelves a try. What we discovered, however, is that because of the way they "step" back as they go up, even I have a hard time reaching toys on the top shelf. So I asked Dad if he could PLEASE rip those out, even if it left the walls looking torn up and unfinished. he did, and discovered that he could tear them out w/o messing up the walls. So now the girls have a much more functional toy closet. Eventually Dad will build shelves into the closet, but for now I have a shelf i had in teh bathroom sitting in there and that's working quite nicely.
Friday was my birthday, and all month long Little Bit has been antsy to go buy me birthday gifts, so Rodney took all 3 girls birthday shopping on Wednesday. When we got home, the lady at the chocolate shop had given Little Bit a bow for her hair, as well as the one she put on the box of chocolates, so Little Bit told me SHE was one of my presents, can't get a better present than that, now can I?!?! :)She was SOOO excited to have me open my presents right away that I opened them that night even though it was "early" :) Since she couldn't convince Daddy to buy me the motorhome she REALLY thought she should get me for my birthday (ha!), she settled on flowers and chocolate covered strawberries, and a lamp. The big girls were confused as to why she was so insistent about getting me a lamp, but she explained it when she gave it to me. It's for my bedroom so that when she sleeps with me she can use it for a nightlight instead of my phone. During campmeeting in June, with the big girls sleeping at campmeeting with Mama and Papa, Little Bit slept in our bed, and when she complained that she needed a nightlight, I told her that my phone (set so it couldn't "sleep") would work as a nightlight. Apparently she remembered that and decided to solve that problem for next time LOL.
Friday was my actual birthday so we headed to a YUMMY Amish smorgasboard for lunch (it gives a free meal to anyone on their birthday), YUM!! And as a bonus, after a HUGE, late lunch there, nobody was hungry for supper, so I got out of cooking TWO meals!
So that was our week last week, sorry I was so late getting it posted :)
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