Day 35

Saturday school! We went over to our empty house we're selling and started a project today. We have paneling on the bottom half of the living room, and we decided to paint it. Pulling it off and resurfacing the walls is way too much work, so painting it is. We sanded it and put primer on today, and Tuesday we're going over to do the painting. Also, a carpet guy is coming to measure the room. The floor is hardwood, but it doesn't look very good; and we're not going to resurface that either. Our time and ability to do that sort of thing is extremely limited. The kids learned a lot about fixing walls and painting a couple years ago when we took a couple months and remodeled the entire kitchen. That was ridiculous, since we've never done anything like that before. We all learned a lot actually. But since we don't live there any more, it's really not that fun. We're just trying to get someone to buy it.

Yesterday (I neglected to post), Jeff took Sam and Sarah down the street to play basketball before school. Rachel doesn't like to go first thing in the morning. She doesn't feel terrific when she wakes up sometimes because of allergies. They laugh about playing with Jeff because he's like a rock, and they just bounce off of him. He always played everything growing up, and the kids and I aren't so much like that; so he's always beating them at anything physical.

After basketball, we had to try to fix a little chip in the van window that we got on our long road trip. It was quite a process, but we followed all the instructions to the letter. You can still see it though. We've never done that before either. Stuff like that never works exactly right for us. Kind of like science experiments!

Rachel's Math U See was delivered yesterday too, so she got going on that right away. Actually, she had listened to at least 3 lessons online, but hadn't really done many problems until she got her book. I think she'll be able to blast through quite a bit of it.

Last night right before bed, Jeff was showing the kids an app he got that shows the stars and planets if you point the iPad anywhere, basically. You don't even have to point it at the sky. If you point it at your feet, it shows what's one the other side of the earth. It's pretty cool. I told them they had to learn a lot about observing the sky since it's so easy. They saw Mars and Saturn. They looked like stars in the sky, obviously; but when you point the iPad at them, they look like themselves on the screen. Jeff said there are 5 planets you can see with the naked eye. Mars was actually red in the sky when we knew what we were looking at. Very fun! Next time, I'm going to get the telescope out and see how much we can see that way.

See you next week!