The pool is blue! Paul and I can, once again, hold our heads high…well in this regard.
School is out. We got a late start, but worked hard and and finished early. We still haven’t moved our schoolroom back upstairs. Today I called every one up to help me carry the cedar shingles downstairs. Why did we have cedar shingles? Brace yourself. Just because walls of every sort of paneling, faux brick and faux rock were not enough, the former owners just had to have a wall of cedar shakes.
If I was that sort of blogger I would have taken extensive before pictures…I didn’t. Picture hideous and be satisfied. You can’t handle the truth. I certainly couldn’t. The kids and I are going to be redoing our schoolroom this week. A month ago they help me remove the shingles. Today we put them in the garage and tore out the carpet in the front of the room. Our upstairs is one giant 55 foot long room, but about a third of the way down there is a step up. We have the declared the schoolroom the first third and plan to take down the wallpaper, paint the paneling, the walls and the floor and, hopefully, have a skylight installed and call it good for now.
I want to do this with the kids, for this to be our project and to have fun working together. Paul and I were both taught that work is long, arduous and fraught with anger, frustration, bitterness and fear. We started to teach what we knew and then decided to learn something new. We’ve been working on our work ethic the last year. I want the kids to know that work is just another way of being together and that we all – oh dear I am beginning to sound like a bad corporate employee campaign – who cares.
What if I really believed that Together Everyone Achieves More? Seriously, what if my kids, and Paul and I really GOT that there is a work God has begun in us as this little family and that it will only be brought to fruition as we love and value each other, as we fully receive each other. That’s what I want. I want my kids to know that together we have a work, that only we get to do and I want us to look for it and then do it with joy.
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