A Head Start on Summer

I've been wanting to write this since before Summer vacation started and so I'm just going to keep the original title.  Before the kids got out of school I printed out my list of things I want to do in the Summertime and hung it on the fridge.  I decided that there was no real reason to wait until it was officially summer vacation to get started.

So far I have done the following things from my list:

1.  Read on a blanket outside.  Spring has been cold and rainy, but there have been a few sunny, relatively warm days mixed in and I decided that I should be out enjoying any day that was nice.  I ended up reading outside on a Sunday after church.  The only bad moment was when the little jumping spider decided to jump on me, but he jumped back off pretty quickly.

2.  Sew Something.  In Relief Society we planned on making plastic bag holders.  These are the cool kind where you shove bags in the top and then pull them out the bottom.  The nice ladies e-mailed me instructions and I made it here.  It works great! We didn't end up having time for it in Relief Society meeting anyhow.  We were too busy learning other fabulous things.

3.  Go to the Library.  Let's face it, I'll probably do that every week.  I just wanted a few things on the list I knew I'd do!

4.  Paint the bar stools (fabulously of course).  I'm not done with this, but I am half done.  Here are what the stools basically looked like before I started.

Then I chose two colors (because I can't possibly be decisive enough to pick one).  I painted the bottom of one stool black and one green.  I like the black better, but I kind of like the contrast, and let's face facts, I don't really want to paint the green one black after all of the work it took to turn it green.

I painted the top a cream color because my fabulous idea was to make the tops look kind of like one of my Grandma F.'s dinner plates that looked like this:

It was hard to find wheat that matched, and any pictures of the plate printed out too gray and so I finally just chose some wheat that was close enough and the stools ended up looking like this:

A closer look at the top shows you this:

They are darker than the plate but they look nice.  Hopefully they will be great for sitting and cleaning off.  They at least look better than before.

So, I have a headstart on my Summer list and that is good because I spent a lot of the first week of vacation panicking over how to organize the children so that they will have fun, help out, AND learn things, which means I was too busy stressing out to actually look at my list.  Thankfully there is more Summer ahead to do better.