Home Project Week: Dining Room

Now that Caleb goes to preschool four times a week, we've been needing to make our mornings count. Our mornings had previously been full of, "Quick, we're late!  Get dressed!" and "Stop playing!  Eat your breakfast!"  So I decided we needed some help with Caleb's understanding of morning chores.

Now we have these cute little cups I found at Ikea hanging on a wall in our dining room.

Basically, I have all his morning chores cut out and placed in one of the buckets.  As soon as he finishes the chore, he can move it to his second bucket.  When they're all in the second bucket, he can play until we need to go to school.  I have some for Isaiah to be used a couple years from now but for the moment, the other two buckets are empty.

Next up, a bare wall that needed something.

Latey, Caleb has been coloring and cutting and drawing all day long, so I thought we needed an art display shelf that I can rotate in with the latest art.

I had to give Isaiah at least one frame, but he hasn't done anything since the day I practically forced him to draw something for this project.

Here's what it looks like today.  A train Caleb made is parked on top.

The next thing we wanted to do was take down a big dying branch on our front ash tree.  Here's what it looked like before.

Kyle used muscle to cut the thing down.  A neighbor came up to us after we were finished and wanted to know if we would like to borrow his chainsaw.  A little late, but thanks anyways.  I guess there's something satisfying about tackling a huge branch with nothing but a  handsaw.

This is the after picture.

The next weekend we borrowed a neighbor's tall ladder and cut off a couple more dying branches on our Ash tree.  

I'll leave you with a picture I took a couple weeks ago of our perdy walnut tree.  It was gorgeous.  (The trees in the back still have green leaves, but if they get pretty, I'll show you that too.)