On a very chilly day Ken and all 3 boys were sent out to Sunday School while the girls and I stayed home, but not to rest… I spent well over an hour tidying and sweeping Emanuel’s room and then sorting through all of his clothes in his dresser. I have not completely cleaned and organized both his and Trinity’s rooms… the next big project is OUR bedroom. Which is not a simple matter as a lot of the things that were other places have been “temporary” placed in our room. Not to mention ALL of the out grown Trinity clothes I have yet to sort and discard any ruined pieces from. One step at a time, but all done before the 12th and the boys’ joint birthday party.

I spent a nice chunk of last night and today stitching away and was able to finish my zombie piece. It is now ready to be sent off this week. I am actually hoping to get MOST of our belated packages out the door. Cold weather or not!

All done

Sean and Ken made it to IKEA to get our sofa beds finally. Quite the undertaking, they had to remove the two middle seats, all the carseats and the stroller to fit them in. For once they each came in ONE unwieldy box! Talk about excitement though. They are such cute little sofas, the perfect size for our boys… and fun too, as they can choose to lay on it like a sofa or pull out the cushion to sleep. Nothing fancy and I do want to get some quilted blankets to act as added comfort, but not spend too much at the same time.

As a couch

As beds

Tomorrow we are planning on driving down to my mom’s for the day. I need to go to the baby supply store there and the kids have not been to visit in ages. Not since Christmas Eve I think actually. So the hope is that we get off at a decent time in the morning, but with 5 kids and much more limited space in the van we shall see how it goes.

Here are Gavin’s two pictures from our conservatory trip!!

From two different sections of flowers

I found a great site for our next animal project – since the boys got a frog for Christmas and the zoo does a drop in on Sundays for it, we are going to do some frog research. Ken is going to load some YouTube videos onto his netbook for the kids to watch and I am going to scour our personal library for some books with frogs in them. Again we are doing a single project together as a family. That way we share the load on the more difficult worksheets.

Hopefully tonight will be a nice and relatively quiet evening. I still need to pack to go to mom’s – winter clothes, pj’s for the ride home, as well as collect up blankets for each of the kids for the ride (the van does take some time to warm up). It is a lot harder to pack for these trips without the stow and go and the room that we had in the newer old van.

A busy Trinity on Sunday morning