Routine

With all of our decorations put away including the outside ones, I must say it is bleak looking. January gray doesn't really brighten anything. The decorations all got put away before the "cut-off" of being tacky which is January 6th (today). The last time we really turned them on was New Year's Day.
All of that means the holidays are over and things are a bit more slow-paced and more normal in the way of that routine schedule.

Aliyah is back to doing her work and we are pressing on to our finish date in the first week of March. So far, we are right on track =). We do this so that we can fully enjoy the days when it starts to get warm. We go on walks, the girls play outside, and we do projects outside like getting the yard ready for spring/summer. There's always plenty to do that's for sure.

I've started a couple of new things to motivate Aliyah in school. If she does a good job and doesn't complain about work, she gets to play Beanie Babies online--she really loves playing. Another thing that we are working on is the bedtime routine. The girls like to look at books after going to bed. I don't mind that, however when it turns into getting toys out and into the bed and making a mess while failing to go to sleep--that doesn't fly! Since Aliyah wasn't going to sleep as she was supposed to, we made her get up and complete a couple of pages in her schoolwork. This was to remind her that she goes to bed when we tell her on our terms and not on her own. It worked...we didn't hear a peep out of either child all night. The same will happen tonight. Keirah gets a swat or something else since she's younger.
Things feel decently organized since I made that a project over the extra days off.

The next thing we are looking forward to is getting the additional cabinets in our kitchen. We will be ordering them in a little less than two weeks. My kitchen doesn't have much space for anything really. It works because I don't have a lot of extra stuff--I keep things cleaned out. Adding cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling plus some trim and wood valances across the windows will be great. We get a new countertop as well since we are adding a small cabinet on the other side of the stove. Josh has become "project man". He is the one coming up with projects to do--get that! He has several he wants to tackle. It feels so nice to not have any portions of the house undergoing a project at the moment, I just may want to keep it that way a bit longer. I thoroughly enjoy that new bathroom, that's for sure!

Well, other than to say that normal routine is back and that's perfectly peachy for me...some new shows have started up. I watched one called "True Beauty" last night and thought it was quite funny.