My Other Life

Well, Paul just left this morning on a quick business trip to Williamsburg , Iowa. Back at the homestead, we're dealing with drainage problems in the kitchen sink, which has been going on since Sunday evening. Paul's been plunging it, "snaking" it, and dumping boiling, soapy water dawn, but nothing. Hence, we have piles of smelly, dirty dishes all over the place. So we finally had a plumber come out today. He at least reinstalled the poorly installed garbage disposal (which is missing the seal) that had fallen off when Paul was plunging, but couldn't do much more than that since the basement is finished, and the pipes he needed to get into were behind finished walls. We're going to have to go through the roof....Darn finished basements! We also have yards and yards of cable running through the middle of the room since the walls prevent any access to the electrical wires, but we won't go into that....

Anyways, now seems to be a good time to take a break from it all and blog. I decided to take this chance to show that I have other obsessions in life besides Benjamin and taking pictures of him.

I have a lot of creative energy that I have to burn somehow, so here are some of my latest projects. This is a tiny paper cut-out I did of "Goldbug," one of Benjamin's favorite fictional characters, for his room.

This one is a work in progress, but is also a paper cut-out. It's another favorite storybook character of Benjamin's, "Drummer Hoff." I plan on finishing it and framing this one for his room also.

This is a watercolor I did this past Spring for Paul during his business trip to Switzerland. It's an olive tree.

So I joined an FHE group since I've been out here with a bunch of other moms. We get together about once a month and prepare lessons to make copies of and swap. I made this one of The Fall out of paint swatches. We had about a zillion of them lying around the house, and I couldn't bear to just throw them away! Anyways, this is a color copy of that, laminated with velcro backs for kids to pull on and off to tell the story.

And last, this was the first FHE lesson I did of the Creation. It's also laminated with velcro backs. I feel like if I can at least make these now, then I can try to have FHE lessons every week when Benjamin is old enough to listen to me for more than two minutes.

I'm also of course scrap-booking all of Benjamin's zillions of pictures, plus the few that Paul and I have from pre-Ben days. Then I'm working on a square 2 1/2 foot acrylic/collage painting incorporating the alphabet and numbers, but it's just started, so I didn't include a picture of that. Anyways, now you know what I'm really up to during the few spare moments I feel blessed to have!