Around the House

I try to get us up and doing something on the weekend, especially when Hubby's not around trying to relax after a long time on the road.  I have sort of resigned myself that I only really get to sleep in when he's here to entertain the girls.  Otherwise, I might as well just get up and do something.

Today I planned on taking the girls ice skating after a leisurely morning, but they dug in their heels and really didn't want to go.  It helped that they started playing together beautifully, having a great time pretending - when they're getting along really well I have a tendency to let them go and not interrupt a good thing.
After a while they decided they wanted to play checkers.  We have a neat retro wooden checkers and checker board set, but the red checkers are so dark you can't easily tell them from the black checkers. So I figured after they've played their game I'll pull out my acrylic paints from the good old single days when I used to paint crafty things and red up the checkers.  In the cellar next to the paints I found several unfinished nutcracker woods, and brought everything upstairs to work on while I waited for the girls to finish their game.
Sure enough, when she saw me painting a nutcracker, Thing 1 wanted to paint one too.  Turns out I had a box of six mini nutcrackers that look like they might be ornaments or something.

I also had a set of six plaster dogs and cats that Thing 2 was more than happy to paint on.
So at the end of the day, I finished off one nutcracker that I had almost completely finished before I'd packed it away and forgotten about it 11 or more years ago, and then started and finished another.

Thing 1 painted the mug bearing mini nutcracker in front.

The next picture is the plaster dog Thing 1 painted, and close up of the mini nutcracker which she also painted.  These pictures don't do them justice, she did a really nice job.  I'm just too lazy to upload pictures from my real camera, emailing them to myself from the phone saves me a step.  Take my word for it, the detail is great.  She painted the plaster dog as a miniature Kelso.

Thing 2 painted three plaster kitties.

Thing 2's attention to detail isn't quite as intense as Thing 1's, but she enjoyed painting them and was very happy with the result.  Which really was the point of the whole thing.


I just got off the phone with Hubby and found that he won't be coming home on Saturday morning like I thought.  Because of the conference he's at this weekend he won't be able to travel on Sunday (tomorrow) and so he will be flying to Brazil all day Monday and will be there Tuesday through Saturday to put in his five days.  Since it takes 24 hours of travel to get home, he won't come home until Sunday evening.  He was trying to figure out a way to get home in between San Francisco, where he is now, and Brazil, but it's just not looking possible.
He travels all the time, and I guess I don't think about it a lot... but finding he'll be gone all through the weekend made me a lot sadder than I thought it would.  I'm used to him being gone during the week, that's status quo around here.  But I don't like it when he's gone on the weekends, and I REALLY don't like him being gone this long - two or more weeks and weekends in a row...  And then when he's home for 36 hours and goes onto another two week trip, it's even worse.  He said a bunch of people at the conference were asking about his schedule and were commenting that they don't know how he does this much travel.  He was thinking "by not thinking about it, thanks so much for reminding me!"  He's sounding pretty tired of being gone this much too.