Saturday, March 2, 2013

Week in Review, 3/2/2013

Lord have mercy, this was a tough week.  I mean that in every sense of the phrase--I really need to really on God's mercy sometimes, because sometimes our weeks (which might not look hard from the outside) are real pressure cookers!

We arrived home to a...drum roll, please...finished closet and bathroom!  So for the first time since Thanksgiving, Bill and I were able to brush our teeth in our own bathroom.  YAY!  I want to do a whole post on the bathroom, so I'm just going to post one little picture of the bathroom:

It's really still not done, because now I need to get rugs and hooks, and I still need to buy pulls for all the drawers.  But I can shower or bathe in my own bathroom.  Wonderful!

Rain, rain and more rain was the weather for the first part of the week.  That made riding very hard.  We have a clinic coming up, with an instructor from South Africa and the Netherlands teaching at our farm.  All the girls and I need some extra time in the saddle, and it was not there this week.  Oh, no!

Paige is getting ready for Math Olympics with a friend in her class.  Math Olympics is a competition with some other schools in the area, where the top math students from each grade go head to head.  I am helping our students get ready for the reasoning part of the competition, so starting this week I was going in to school for a half hour every morning to go over word problems with a couple of kids.  Definitely a good way to wake your brain up!  But somehow, that half-hour would totally throw off the rest of my morning.  Isn't it strange how little things do that to your schedule?

I have to admit, looking at my calendar leaves me wondering what made me so crazy this week.  But.  I know I had to spend several hours on kitchen planning, because we also came home to this:
It isn't actually this bad anymore.  The bracing is mostly gone, and the plastic is completely gone.  But we are left with bare bulbs strung across the kitchen.  Lovely.

The laundry room gets torn out this week, and the kitchen will follow.  Right now we are going with "Coal Mine Chic" (my contractor's description), but I'm hoping that "functional" and "happy" are soon to follow.

Thursday was Paige's last day of Cotillion, a black-tie ball.  I love Cotillion because it is a low-stress way to learn manners and learn to dance with a boy (or a girl).  Every one of the kids has had to go through it.  This is how Paige looked on her way to the Oriental Ball:

And here is how she felt about it:
But here is my sweet girl during the dance, looking like it wasn't really all that bad:


Friday we had a ROAD TRIP!  I love road trips, and this one was my Christmas present:  tickets to the George Strait concert in Knoxville, Tennessee.  We let the kids skip school (yes, we are THOSE parents) and headed up to UT early.  This was the kids' first concert, and George's last tour.  The Cowboy deserves an entire post, but for now let's just say that the trip was worth it.  George Strait was an incredible performer.  Here's just a little look at the show:

I think things calm down even if they don't slow down this week.  At least I can work on a little laundry. 

Have a great week!

3 comments:

PJ said...

I must chime in with a few thoughts. First, I loved you "Here's how she looked" and "Here's how she felt about it" series of photos. I was amused. On a side note, what's with the yellow tags on all the young ladies' wrists? (I've never been to a Cotillion ... so feel free to explain as in-depth as needed)

Second - Math Olympics! Wonderful. Does my heart good to know that there is a rising math genius in the congregation. I hope she and her team do well.

Third - the bathroom looks gorgeous. This was the room with the personally designed window? If so ... looking forward to the pictures. Congrats on regaining just one more piece of your life back!

Cheryl said...

The yellow tags are dance cards! The young men keep theirs in their jacket pocket. That's so everyone has a different dance partner throughout the party.

For the record, I didn't do cotillion, either. But I love that the kids get experience in treating each other with "dignity and respect," as the instructor says repeatedly. It is nice that they hear it from more than just their mama!

Yes, that's my window. May even in March, or January. Life is coming back together.

Mary Prather said...

Paige -- she looks beautiful :-)