Bowl the cabin fever away

Last month, when Anna had chicken pox, she was home from school for a week. By the end of that week, she was feeling much better, but she was going stir crazy from being cooped up in the house. And honestly, the rest of us were right behind her on the road to Crazyland - not because of Anna, but because of February.

So the kids and I went out for a couple hours of bowling.









We had some snacks and enjoyed some friendly competition. It was a nice break for all involved - probably even a nice break for Chelsea and Mary, who stayed home in relative quiet.





This last snapshot is the kind of picture where I would normally correct Anna's red eyes, but they are so appropriate for the picture that I'm going to leave them as is:



Program note: I'll be traveling the rest of this week to a conference, and so I probably won't get many chances to post here. Back next week!

Colonial Day

Maria had Colonial Day at school recently. The kids dressed up in colonial clothes (made by Chelsea!) and ran a "market" in which they promoted their trades. Maria was a furniture maker:





The kids also did some colonial-style dancing:







Dancing and fashion - what more could Maria ask in a school assignment?

If there's ice, you might as well skate on it

Also over the Christmas holidays, we got out for an afternoon of ice skating with some friends of ours. Your intrepid reporter used to like ice skating as a kid, but now can't find a comfortable pair of skates to wear. So I spent the session on the sidelines, taking pictures:





Fortunately, the kids don't have any trouble with skates or ice:





Chelsea likes skating, too... here she is with our friend Nicole:



I can't seem to find Maria in these pictures, so I am guessing that she was at Nutcracker that afternoon. Christmastime is like that with her.

Happy weekend!

Catching up: Cousin Night

We had our annual Cousin Night over the Christmas holidays, and it's taken me this long to hunt down all of the pictures. (Sorry to keep you waiting, Kate!)





With the cousins all getting bigger and older, the event is changing all the time. This year, my cousin John cooked a "fourthmeal" of chicken fajitas around midnight, making this either a very late dinner or a very early breakfast:







We played some Rock Band, too, which is becoming a new tradition:



We also played some Double Double This This:









This crew is now staying up later and waking up later than in the olden days. That suits us fine - sitting around eating and playing cards at 1:00 in the morning makes the older cousins feel like we're back in college again.

Sanding, priming, painting

When we last left our intrepid renovators, the girls' room looked like this:



While it was nice to be rid of the plaster cracks, No self-respecting young princess would tolerate living in such squalor for long. Clearly, we needed to do some more work. The first order of business was to sand down all of the spackle work, which created a lovely quarter inch of white dust all over everything, including me:







The vacuum and mop made quick work of the dust:



This is the kind of shine we're hoping to achieve permanently after refinishing the floor... not just after the room has been mopped:



Next, we needed to swap out the existing light fixture for something temporary while we work on the ceiling:



We also needed to cover up the floor so that we don't make extra work for ourselves on the refinishing step later... we're going to be doing a lot of painting:



It was time to start priming. Since we're making big color changes all around, and since we had done so much spackling, we went ahead and primed every surface:





After a solid coat of primer, we got ready to paint the ceiling. Now, this is not going to be any ordinary ceiling. Our girls deserve the best! As part of their Asian theme, we agreed to make the ceiling metallic gold. Yes, metallic gold.

That meant the job had a few complications. For one thing, we decided we would need to bring the ceiling paint down onto the walls a few inches, so we could do a border around the room and avoid having a difficult line to maintain between the walls and the ceiling. So you'll see in these pictures that we laid out a line about 5" (13cm) down from the wall/ceiling boundary.

We also needed to mask all of the walls, in addition to the floor, because we don't want the wall surfaces to be dotted with flecks of metallic gold from the ceiling paint cycle.



First round of the gold ceiling looked pretty cool:



After the second round, you could start to see how it was going to look when finished:



Maria came in at this point for an inspection:



Her room now has bling. She approves.

We probably have to do one more coat on the ceiling, and then it's on to the walls.

Tomorrow: Cabin fever and bowling.

In fairness to the girls...

...I was reminded last night that Nick and I occasionally do some strange things to our own hair. You may know that Nick has been wearing a "faux-hawk" for the past several months. It looks like this:



Well, the other day I needed to take a shower in the middle of the day after sanding the walls in the girls' room:



And Maria had the bright idea to make my hair look like Nick's:





So the boys have had their own hair adventures, too.

Tomorrow: A closer look at that sanding job, and everything that has followed.

Update on Anna

Gentle readers, a quick note to let you know that Anna is doing great - completely done with her chicken pox and back to school this morning. We're still waiting to see if Nick and Maria come down the magic spots....

Girl hair

I have to admit I'm baffled. Maria has been going to great lengths recently to curl her hair. Here she is, first thing in the morning, with empty orange juice cans attached to her head. She slept like this!



Last night - I don't have a picture of this, alas - she went to sleep with tight curls of hair attached to her head with maybe two hundred bobby pins. Help! I'm just a simple caveman. I don't understand.

This week: Chicken pox!

Things are going to be a bit quiet on the blog front this week. Young Anna has come down with chicken pox, and that's having some... interesting effects on our schedule. We expect the other two to start sprouting spots sometime soon. (There's your alliteration for the week.)

Back soon!

Wayback Machine: March 2009

We don't have any plans yet for spring break, but after the briefest of winter thaws this weekend, to be followed by a week of rain and slush, I thought it might be nice to have a look back at our time in Florida last March:







Stay warm this week, northern friends!