Yes, my poor blog has been neglected. What can I say. I’m on Facebook and do most of my updating and picture-sharing there. It’s so much faster and easier. I do miss blogging sometimes though.
Life is speeding by. I am nearly 28 weeks pregnant already! Almost entering my 3rd trimester. So far, everything is going great. I’m just tired all of the time, not super bad though. But otherwise, this has been a great pregnancy. I love this little baby girl so much already!! Every little kick makes me smile, rub my belly & whisper or say in my head, “I love you, little one!” I can’t wait to meet her.

We’ve been busy with projects around the home. I can’t make any promises but maybe when we’re done, I’ll post before and after pictures. We’re re-doing the guest bathroom and dining room. “We”- ha! Kenton would laugh if he saw that. Okay, so hubby’s doing most of it. I helped tear down wallpaper though- that counts, doesn’t it? In the bathroom, we tore down wallpaper and ripped up the {water-stained} hard-wood floor and then hubby put in a new tile floor, painted the walls a pretty light blue and put up white wainscot. The bad part about the bathroom remodel is not having a toilet there for a few weeks now. Our home is a tri-level. We spend most of our time downstairs- our school room and computers are down here. The guest bathroom is on the main level. The other two bathrooms are upstairs. I have to visit the bathroom frequently in my present condition and get winded so easily- I’m TIRED of walking all the way up there 521 times a day! Can’t wait till that bathroom is DONE.

We HAD carpet in our dining room. CARPET!! We have SIX CHILDREN!!! CARPET. In the dining room. Okay, so now that that’s clear, maybe you can imagine why I’d want that gone. When we first bought this house, it was in IMMACULATE condition. Not a spot or blemish anywhere. It was a bit intimidating. So I tried for years to keep up with the inevitable stains on the dining room carpet. I will admit too that I did like the feel of warm carpet under my feet at the table. I guess that’s why I tried for so long to keep it nice. But it was no longer looking nice. The spots I’d scrub out would reappear the next day. Not. Fun. So bye-bye carpet, good riddance! We took great pleasure in ripping that out. We now have vinyl plank flooring in its place. I LOVE IT!! It looks great & is so easy to clean! We also ripped down wallpaper in that room. It had oak stained wainscot in there- hubby left it and painted it white. The walls are now graced with a pretty pale yellow coat of paint instead of the striped wallpaper. It looks so pretty! We still have some touching up to do in that room and I need to find some wall decorations, but at least we can EAT in there now.

I also did a lot of work in the girls’ room, in preparation for the newest little member of our family. I completely cleaned and organized their room, drawers and closet. By the time I was done I had 5 bags of trash, one bag to donate, three bags of clothing to separate into tubs to save for later and one big girl telling me that their closet looked like it did when we first moved in. I also put together another set of bunk beds and two under-the-bed storage drawers so my older girls can stash their treasures where little ones can’t easily get to. We still have some touch-ups to do in there too, including hanging some accordion-style closet doors and painting the trip around the closet and windows white instead of the wood stain color they are. Oh, and we need to convince Julianna to sleep on the bottom bunk of a twin bed instead of her dilapidated old crib- that thing’s getting tossed as soon as she’s done with it.

Since I found out about my pregnancy early on in our school year, I had an idea. If we didn’t take a break over Christmas like we’d planned AND if we skipped our planned spring break AND if we took advantage of the Fridays that our homeschool co-op took off over Christmas break, we could be done with school ON my due date. So we have persevered and worked hard and have not taken a single break from school since we started in September. We do a 4-day school schedule since the homeschool co-op we participate in on Fridays takes up most of our day. I know they are breaking for 2 weeks in spring and I’m hoping to shave off an extra week during that time too. We shall see. But it would be SO nice to be done with school a week BEFORE my due date, since I tend to go early. We’re in for a nice long summer break!

So I’ll wrap this post up with a couple of pictures of my sweet baby girl, Julianna- or “Neena” as she calls herself. The child is SO well-loved and probably a bit spoiled by her older sibs and parents. She’s always making us laugh with the funny things she says and does.

How is YOUR school year going?

Oh, and did you hear the news? HSB is for sale!?