Calgon Take Me Away!!

What a long day! I'm so glad to have a moment to sit down here and veg out for a few minutes. I'd nearly forgotten what a job it is to sell a house.

We've had our house For Sale By Owner for exactly 2 weeks and 3 days. We've shown it 8 times now and taken a ton of calls on it. Until today, the last time we'd shown it was last Thursday evening, then all of a sudden yesterday we got several calls from people all wanting to come tonight at basically the same time to see it. So I've been juggling schedules for showings and furiously cleaning. Somehow between last Thursday and today it looked like the house had thrown up toys or something. Thank goodness Vince pitched in more than his fair share because I just wasn't functioning at 100%. I've been pretty tired these past few days and it seems to have effected my brain-ha! Part of that is the fact that I've gotten serious about packing. So now we are starting to have boxes neatly stacked around our family room. It's lovely.

I've come to the very brilliant conclusion that it's not exactly the best plan to put your house up for sale, start homeschooling and start packing up your house all in the same week. Ya think?!?
But, hey, we do what we have to do, right?

Oh--and did I mention that I'm supposed to be packing us up for a weekend trip to Arkansas? Yes, we're leaving in the morning and I have absolutely nothing packed. The suitcases aren't even out of the attic yet. Oh, well...

...I'm excited about going though! It's my birthday weekend! Whoo hoo!! Plus we are going to look at houses there and Vince has some appointments while we're there, too. We're praying hard about those!

Well, thanks for listening! I'm feeling much better now...I think I'll go get a suitcase and starting packing!

The Making of an Egyptian Death Mask

We are learning all about the ancient world this year with Story of the World I and loving it! We've been learning a lot about Egypt, of course, which is completely fascinating. Most recently we have studied the New Kingdom of Egypt, which includes the story of King Tut. So we decided making an Egyptian death mask in the style of King Tut's would be a fun project. First since it was too cold at the time to paper mache in the garage (it probably would have frozen instead of dried-ha) and it was too messy to do it in the house, we decided to pick up a couple of cheap craft masks at Hobby Lobby. Next we cut out cardboard shapes to complete the shape of the death mask, attaching them with hot glue. Vince even put a little detail on the *beard* with the hot glue per The Princess' request. Then the kiddos started to paint them with this metallic gold tempera paint. It worked okay for the cardboard, but would not coat the plastic of the mask. We thought maybe a second coat ...

Door Hanger Chore Charts

My kids have had a chore chart for a while. It's one of those magnetic boards and they share it. However, it's not by their rooms and often they (and I) forget to update it. Plus it's a little bulky. When I saw the concept of a door hanger chore chart on Pinterest, I loved it! It was compact, right there were the kiddos could see it coming out and going into their rooms, and it costs almost nothing to make. I headed over to one of my favorite stores: Hobby Lobby, of course. They have these little wooden door hangers for .79. I also grabbed a couple of packets of decorative buttons for $1.99 each. I already had the clothes pins and the paint so those cost me nothing. I began by painting the door hangers (I used tempera paints because that's what I had). Then I grabbed a fine point Sharpie and the clothes pins and started writing chores on them, making sure to write them correctly so they will ...

Making Notebooks

Recently I tried out a new craft idea~and it was SO much fun!! And extremely frugal, too. That's always a bonus, right? So here we go: 1. Take your basic composition notebook (purchased at the back-to-school sales for .99 each). 2. Go to your craft supplies and get your Mod Podge ready, along with a good paintbrush. 3. Look through all those scrapbook papers you've been randomly collecting and choose some. 3. After choosing your paper for the cover of your book and trimming it to fit, start *painting* the cover with the glue. Next, give the back of your paper a good coat of glue, too. (I left the binding uncovered so that I could use a contrasting paper there later on). 4. Glue it on! Remember to smooth out any air bubbles under the paper. 5. Flip the cover open and make a few cuts on the corners so that they will fold over nice and neat, then add a little more glue to the edges of the inside cover and a little more to the paper edges. 6. Fold them over and press...

my blessed life

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