Thea has become a bit of a busy girl lately. She starts some days by cooking.
Sometimes she then takes the dishes to the kitchen for us.
Maybe working on a sewing project is next on the schedule, she’s starting to seem a bit domesticated.
Then it’s time to see what is outside the back door.
If only she was just a tiny bit taller. Of course, that busy of a day tends to wear out a little body.
Danelle really enjoys playing games these days. She’s been known to play checkers, Jenga, Candyland, Hi-Ho Cherry-O, and a variety of others. But probably her favorite is Go Fish. The problem with this game is that she has a hard time not setting her cards down, so it makes it difficult to play a fair game with her. We either have to purposefully avoid asking for what she showed us, or we win way too easy. She understands the rules well enough to play without help, so we decided to build her a tool, modeled after one I remember using as a kid. The first step was of course a block of wood, which she helped me sand down some of the rough spots on.
I then pulled out the saw and cut a couple of slots into the block at a slight angle. I did this with a handsaw, so it wasn’t too bad having the two girls climbing around when I worked.
She was not only excited about the prospect of a card holder, but what we were going to be doing next. You see, we needed to paint the block.
The string was attached to a nail that was hammered into one of the slots so we could hang it up to dry after painting. It seems I put it in a bit far, as it eventually took a lot of work to pull it out without dinging the final paint job, but overall it really seemed to work well. Yeah, that looks like trouble, doesn’t it. But it ended up looking pretty good.
If you ignore the fact the other side wasn’t painted that is. Turns out we ran out of paint. So at the next trip to the hardware store we let her pick out a color from the ‘Ooops’ selection, which was quite a bit of paint for a couple bucks. We were sure we wouldn’t run out this time.
After painting it, we had to test it out.
It worked pretty well.
For the record there are 22 pairs in the deck we use. It’s possible there are 15 pairs on that side of the table. Since then, I think she may have won every game so far… We play Jenga more often these days. It’s at least an even match.
One of our summer projects this year was to fix up the deck. This included two parts, a new step and staining. Anyone who has been in our backyard in recent years has probably noticed a slightly to very wobbly step off the back deck. This typically depended on how recently I had put in a screw or made sure the support blocks were in the right place. Finally admitting that there was too much rotted/broken wood to do much good, a new step was built over the course of a few days. After attaching it, we had a new step!
The second job was to restain the back deck. I was pretty sure after pressure washing and prepping it this could be done in an hour or two one evening. An hour and a half later with it only half done, it was too dark to see what I was doing. Luckily the forecast gave me one more day to finish and have time before it rained. After finally finishing, it seems to have been a success. At least the beading water leads me to believe that.
Sometimes Thea helps dry the deck off since then.
Other times she uses the broom to help sweep it off. I’m not sure which is more effective to be honest.
Today was Danelle’s first day of preschool. She will be going three days a week this year and has been looking forward to it for a while.
She was very excited to wear her backpack.
Of course while Danelle was away from the house, someone else was a bit sad to not have her sister around.
She waited at the door for a while before finally moving onto playing with other toys.
As some of you have probably heard in passing or otherwise, Danelle has a song she requests every night before bedtime. The interesting thing about this song is it is one she and I came up with over the course of many nights. It started when one night she wanted a giraffe song before she went to bed. From that first version, it has changed a little bit over time. In particular this past week she insists on there being 2 giraffes and zebras. Zebras? In a giraffe song? I guess you’ll have to listen to find out about that. As for a reference to Jesus at the end, that was new for this rendition.