Productivity

Okay, all those negative things I said about being frustrated that I can never get anything done ... I take it back.  I'm feeling really productive at the moment.  Over the last couple days, I've gotten a lot of things done.   

 I made baby food the same day I cut out all those bibs.  This is the easy way to do it. I baked a dozen apples, then pealed back a section of the skin and spooned out the flesh of the apple.

 It's easy to get all the good stuff out and you don't have to peel the apple, which is the part I hate doing.

 The pulp then goes into a blender and then the pureed applesauce is poured into ice cube trays and frozen.  Once it's frozen, I pop it out of the trays and put it in zip lock bags so I can take out as many cubes as I need for each feeding.  Super easy, and super cheap.


Once I got started I figured I might as well make up everything - so there are a couple of cubes of blackberries we had left (I'm not sure he'll like those - they're pretty seedy) and a quart size bag of blueberries. 

That was all done on Friday, with a busy day with the daycare kids.  I also managed to do extra preschool crafts, and meet a parent who is new to town and is looking for daycare.  The picture above was taken this evening, but I thought it was cute, so I wanted to share.  He was sent to the chair tonight because he purposely knocked down a pile of towels his brother had just folded.  I guess now we know why he was being ornery.  This one keeps me on my toes, and is a good source of entertainment.  Friday I was cutting up some fresh pears for lunch in the daycare and he got so excited when he saw them.  He yelled, "Parents!"  I just cracked up and shook my head.  At least he likes all sorts of fresh fruits and veggies - even if he doesn't know their real names. :)
 

Now I'll share with you a huge project I managed to take on thanks to the little man in that picture.  Our church building is pretty outdated.  It needs a lot of work, and we just haven't gotten organized enough to tackle any of it.  Well, the three year old decided to help motivate us when we were at teen group a week and a half ago. 
 

He pulled half a sheet of this lovely green wallpaper off the nursery wall.  The room in this picture is right next to the nursery, but the colors and wallpaper are the same in both rooms.  Or at least they were.

This is that lovely wallpaper that has shiny gold in it.  Can you see it in the pictures?  This is really heavy wallpaper, and thankfully it came off cleanly in sheets.  Once we saw what he had done, we just pealed it off the whole room - in about 3 minutes.

This is what the nursery looks like now.  Better?  I love the colors.  They look bluer in the pictures than they are.  The blues have a lot more green in them than they appear in the pictures.

The black section is my big idea.  Me and my big ideas.  I always manage to take a manageable task and make it ten times more time consuming.  The black on this wall is magnetic primer.  In other words, primer with metal in it.  The wall is probably 10 feet or so.  And I had the bright idea to paint a mural on it, so we can buy cute magnets for the kids to use on it.  Of course being the one who thinks up the project tends to get you volunteered for the project too.  I'm really not complaining though.  I think it's a lot of fun.  I can't wait to get it all done :)  The plan is to have a construction site, farm, and water (lake or ocean), and maybe a train track running through the whole scene.  We'll see how that all works out.

We also still need to touch up around the edges, paint all the trim, and the cubby storage unit.  I'm hoping to get all that done by next Sunday, so the kids can be back in that room.  Yeah.  We'll see.  After that, I'd like to do the room next to it, which is my SPARKS classroom (the one in the pictures).  I'm thinking I'd like to use greens in there, and paint half a globe on the bottom section and children dressed in outfits from around the world just above the middle border strip, with words saying "Jesus loves the children of the world" curving above the earth.  I forgot to mention that we're planning on putting a verse on the wall of the nursery too.  Of course having those two rooms done will mean the other three classrooms really ought to be done.  My husband has already come up with some ideas for his teen classroom, and the other two rooms will probably just get painted a solid color.  So see how my "little" idea has sprouted into a whole yard full of dandelions?  I guess this will be an ongoing project for quite some time.

This is another project I completed at the church tonight.

The bulletin board in the foyer usually only gets decorated at Christmas, and when it isn't decorated, it is covered with faded burlap.  It really just needs to be recovered or something, but nobody really knows what to do with it.  I agreed to decorate the church for Christmas, which again lead to me inheriting the job of decorating the foyer bulletin board year round.  I enjoy doing that sort of thing, and again I'm really not complaining.  Our pastor and his wife are in their 80's, and she has taken care of it all these years, so she is very happy to have someone else take over the task. 

The center says "Love is" and each of the large red hearts has a phrase on it from I Corinthians 13 "Love is patient (long-suffering), love is kind," etc.

I'm not thrilled with the look.  I had intended to use a silver wrapping paper for the background, but there wasn't enough.  The only paper I had enough of was this red, which is a nice paper, but it makes the hearts disappear.  If I had known I would be using that, I would have just used the pink and white hearts.  Oh well.  It's done now, and it isn't bad.  The silver pen doesn't show up as well as I'd like either, but live and learn.  Next time I'll stick with black.