Projects

Daniel is a project guy.  He is not good at entertaining himself, but give him a project and he will work hard at it until it is completed.  So in order to keep from going crazy when Daniel is off of school, we look for projects for him to do.  This can sometimes end up being more work for us than we had anticipated.  For instance, one afternoon I asked Daniel to vacuum out the lint hose leading away from our dryer.  Three hours, a trip to Lowes, and considerable involvement from both Tim and me later, we had a whole new hose in place.  We needed that hose (and it made our dryer much more efficient!), so I'm not complaining, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind when I suggested what I thought was a five-minute chore!

Over Christmas break, Daniel cleaned the washing machine, cleaned the microwave, defrosted and cleaned two refrigerators, helped Tim replace a leaking faucet in the bathroom, installed a light on our living room ceiling fan, and probably a few other projects that I'm forgetting right now.  He didn't have a working computer at that point, so if he wasn't doing projects he was following me around.  One day he followed me all.day.long...upstairs, downstairs, flipping light switches on and off in our wake.  (He has this habit of reaching out to passing light switches and flipping them on and off several times...drives me nuts!)  Since Tim was also on break, he was able to "spell" me by having Daniel do projects with him while I played with Esther or got some of my own work done.

But Tim was working during Daniel's spring break, so we knew we were going to need a good project if I was going to survive a week by myself with both kids home!  Daniel has been bugging me for literally months about renting a carpet-cleaning machine to clean our carpets (yes, these are the things that float his boat!), so that was the project we chose.  It required sorting through boxes and piles of stuff on the floors of two rooms, moving all of said "stuff" and all of the furniture out of three rooms, of course the actual cleaning of the carpets, and then moving everything back in.  It was definitely a week's worth of work!  In fact, I told Daniel that if I was going to be giving my attention to cleaning the carpet rather than my normal "maintenance" chores (laundry, dishes, etc.), he was going to have to help with the other chores.  And with only minimal grousing, he agreed!  (This is huge, because normally when I ask him to help with a maintenance chore he complains that that's my job.)  I asked him to choose whether to be my laundry helper, my dishes helper, or my cooking helper.  He chose laundry, and was quite independent with running the loads, switching clothes to the dryer, and even some of the folding and putting away!!  (I still sorted the clothes and told him which temperature each pile should be washed at.)  It really was a huge help, which freed me up to do sorting and putting away of piles without letting the rest of the house go to pot.  He also helped me some in the kitchen.  AND, on Monday, he willingly entertained Esther (in my earshot) for several longish stretches so I could sort in peace.  Like I was saying a few weeks ago, that sibling bond is making progress!  (Okay, so after attending the kids program of our foster-adopt support group that evening, they got into an altercation and both got in big trouble on the way home for spitting on each other.  But at least the first part of the day went well!)

By Friday evening, we had three rooms and a hallway of clean carpet (the rest of the upstairs is wood or tile), one clean dining room rug, and clean(er) upholstery on our dining room chairs.  (Seriously, who designs white upholstery for something that's supposed to be sat upon??)  I also had red callouses at the bases of all my fingers on my right hand from pushing the heavy carpet-cleaning machine, plus a bonus blister on my palm from trying to dig a hole in rocks to plant a new blueberry plant, and a small cut on my index finger on the same hand courtesy of Friday night's dinner preparations.  Needless to say, I was avoiding the use of that hand for a while!  But it was nice to have all of that work done and to be able to move stuff back into our rooms.  Tim put Daniel in charge of rinsing out the machine before he returned it to Lowes, and the people at Lowes said they had never seen one come back so clean.  That's my boy!  :-)

Meanwhile, since all the stuff was out of the bedrooms, we decided to go ahead and switch up our sleeping arrangements rather than waiting for the summer.  So we moved the desk and computer stuff out of the study into our bedroom, moved Esther out of our bedroom and into Daniel's room next door, and moved Daniel down the hall to what used to be the study.  The bed we put Daniel in when he arrived in our family is an elevated bed a little lower than a top bunkbed would be, with drawers and a cupboard that fit under it, and a ladder going up to it.  I think it's a cool bed, but Daniel doesn't like being up that high.  At all.  And while he has come up with various solutions (re-engineered the bed to make it lower; put his mattress on the floor under the bed; etc.), he has been begging for a new bed almost since he got here.  Ordinarily I wouldn't put a new bed high on the list of priorities, but since we needed one anyway as soon as Esther outgrew her crib, we agreed that we can have a new (to him, anyway) bed for his main 15th birthday present from us.  Since Daniel's birthday is still several months away, he is currently sleeping on his mattress on the floor in his new room.  Esther is sleeping on her crib mattress under the bed in her new room (she uses the top of the bed as a place to read books and do art).  And we are really, really enjoying having our bedroom all to ourselves for the first time in four years!  We did love having Esther so close to us all that time, but...sometimes it's just nice to be able to sit in your own room with the lights on and have a normal-voiced conversation while kids are sleeping! 

We hadn't been sure how Esther would take to the transition, being as how she nixed the idea of moving to her own room in no uncertain terms when we last proposed it a year ago, but she is loving having her own space.  (It probably helps that she got to take over Daniel's room!  Nothing like sibling ownership to make something look attractive.)  She was pretty cute hunting through the house for her stuff so she could squirrel it away in her room.  At one point she pulled some pieces of packing foam out of our closet (I'm not even sure why we were keeping them in there in the first place, but sometimes she uses them for padding when she practices gymnastics).  She asked if she could put them in her room.  We asked her why, and she said earnestly, "Just in case!"  So we let her.  :-)

And right now, as I type, Daniel (and Time) are at it again!  Yep, another project.  This one started out with a clogged pipe (due to the yucky stuff we dumped from our dirty water tank after cleaning the carpet)...that led to a newly discovered leak...which turned out to not be coming from where we first thought it was...and then in the process of fixing that, Daniel bent something and now it looks like we have to replace a piece of pipe before we turn the main house water back on, or we will have a flood.  You know how I wrote at the beginning of this entry that projects seem to expand on us?  I hadn't intended for those words to be prophetic!  Sigh.  Never a dull moment!