Paint Gate

i think a couple of months ago i posted something about me being our church's preschool coordinator. we go to a smallish church, so we don't have a preschool minister.

i've had this position since a little before thanksgiving, and i've had lots of plans to do things. first thing i wanted to do was to get preschool a bigger budget. for the last several years (maybe as long as 5), the budget has been $270 - FOR THE WHOLE YEAR!! i thought that was ridiculous, since there was tons of things the ministry needed. so when budget requesting came around, i shot for the moon and asked for $3000. i had it down to the penny why i wanted the money, and even had a letter telling them why they should give it to me. :) needless to say, i did not get the whole amount i was asking for, but i did get a good chunk of it! i'm also very happy to say i managed to get our childcare workers a well deserved raise; they love me now!

so anyway, some of my request dealt with having some money to paint the 8 preschool rooms we have. i did get my money, but it got transferred from my budget to building's budget. no big deal, at least i got it.

since our church is a typical baptist church, there is always a mountain of red tape you have to get through before you can do anything. i knew i was supposed to call the building committee's chair to tell him i was ready to spend my line-item money on his budget. to my surprise, he promptly told me he cut my budget within his budget, and not to go over my "new" amount. alright, that ticked me off, but hey, at least i'll get to spend some money.

so my next step was to go to the sherwin williams paint store and negotiate a price. i made sure i looked harried that day, and i that i also brought the kids with me - i wanted them to get me out of there as soon as possible with a great price! don't worry, they did.

the next step in the process was to present my color choice to the person on the building committee who "approves" paint color; she happens to be our PDO director. and let me tell you, she's been pushing to have the rooms painted yellow for years...well, i just let her pick out the color, and MAN was it yellow!!

the preschool parents came out two weeks ago over spring break and painted the rooms daffodil yellow. those rooms glow, let me tell you. unknowingly, when we looked at the paint wheel we looked in the "bright" section...otherwise known as the neon section. it was hilarious watching the volunteers reactions when they were painting. "man, that sure is yellow" pretty much sums up comments.

wednesday came along and we only had one or two rooms left. we were all very pleased with the progress and how things were coming out. but, our joy would not last. our music minister happened to come along and pitch a huge fit over the paint color. i won't go into all he said, but basically heads were gonna roll. his complaint had me pretty rattled. i mean, i did the things i was supposed to!! he even came by a room on sunday and made a snide comment about how bright the walls were...jerk.

well, the whole nasty incident was brought up in staff meeting that monday. and he was asked to call me, and all the parents who witnessed his hissy fit and apologize to us. he was very gracious when he called, and i have not let it hinder our relationship. i appreciated his humbleness...

so for years to come, when new members make comments about how the walls in the preschool rooms are very yellow, they can be informed, yes, we know - it was all a part of michelle mcneal's Paint Gate.

D-D-D Daddy-o and Emmyyy

disclaimer: dan and i do spend time teaching our children things, but this post makes it look like we don't...

about a month ago, emily came home from mother's day out saying she wanted to watch a video called letter factory. i told her we did not have that one, but maybe the library did. actually, we use the library card with a lot of things. she knows the library closes at night so she accepts that reasoning for why we tell her she can't have something. wrong? yes. helpful in reasoning with a 3 1/2 year old? yes. anyway. this way the library gets to be the bad guy, not us.

so after a few days of her asking to watch it, i decided to look for it. i did not find talking letter factory, but i did find talking word factory. i thought it would be a poor substitue in her opinion, but she loved it. she watched it nearly every waking moment for 7 days. having her like to watch word factory instead of max and ruby was a welcome change. but anyway.

after a week of non-stop word factory went by, the kids and i were waiting for dan to meet us at the auto shop. we beat him there by about 10 minutes, and in those 10 minutes emily kept making strange noises. for the first few minutes i did not pay any attention to her, but then it dawned on me she was trying to sound out the sign on the shop. we were at norman's, and she was saying, n-n-o-o-r...you get it. she got to the end and i asked her what she was doing and she told me she was reading the sign. i asked her who taught her to read signs and she told me tad (he's the main character in word factory). i was impressed. a video taught my daughter how to sound out words, a.k.a. phonics.

when dan got in the minivan i told him what she was doing. he was like, great! but instead of sharing his excitement, i thought the opposite. i thought about it, and i'm 7 1/2 months pregnant, we have our house for sale and i have a clingy almost 2 year old. i don't have TIME to sit down with her and finish what tad started. so now emily walks around most of the day sounding out words and telling me things like, mom, i'm c-c-cold. mom, cold starts with c! we already can't say we taught her how to write her name - she her magna doodle and aqua doodle taught her that, dora has taught her spanish words even i don't know, and now thanks to a video she's a few months away from reading. week before last she came home and said they'd watched number factory at school. dang!! if she starts doing math before the end of MDO, i'm going to take her to have to take her to sylvan this summer.

on to ethan.

last week ethan began to say emily's name. for a couple of months he called her sister, and you could only tell that's what he was saying if he was pointing at her. one day i heard him calling for her - saying, emmmyyyy! emmmyyy! i was so excited! he finally is beginning to use words we can understand. his vocuabluary has exploded, and he's quite happy about it. he'll walk around pointing to things and saying what they are. i was afraid he'd never learn to talk!

so there is a lot of talking and reading going on in our house these days. it's a fun thing to watch your child learn new things and be impressed with themselves. we've even caught emily awake in her bed an hour after we put her down "reading" her books. she'll go to bed sometimes with a stack of books and tell us she has to read them all before she can go to sleep. this stage in her life is fun.

"sammy antonio" at least that's where emily said we went

saturday we had lunch at chili's before we left. emily kept saying how she wanted to "show us the town" - she meant she wanted us to go out of town! since mary had gotten to our house friday night, emily would say out of the blue how much she loved mae mae days. that statement alone probably made mary want to come keep them all the time! so we said our good-byes and headed off.

dan and i had a great time. we had a great view of the "river" (i don't think it's a real river), and the place we stayed was within walking distance to many neat things. don't worry, we remembered the alamo - but we did not go there this trip since we've visited it before. :)

we had lots of lunches and dinners sitting at a table for two, not four. the only kid who went with us was the one i've been carrying around for 7 months, and he was a good baby most of the time. we did not talk a lot about the kids, but we did sometimes. the only thing we did other than eat and shop was to see king kong on the imax screen. and btw, that movie was WAY too long, and i had some disturbing dreams that night, but the overall imax experience was okay. and dan was a trooper at the outlet mall; deborah, i don't remember seeing a gondola. but trust me, if i had seen it we would have gotten a ticket to ride. dan would drive to a store, drop me off, park and i'd be finished by the time he came in to get me. it was a little boring, but i think that's only because i was too pregnant to walk around a ton. we'd been walking EVERYWHERE. i enjoyed pottery barn the most, i think. i was unimpressed with the gymboree outlet. frankly, i can get better prices at our local gymboree when they have red hot dot sales and the like.

i tried to refrain from calling dan's mom every couple of hours, so we called once a day. but we did get our first phone call from her in the middle of dinner saturday night. she called to say she and the kids were locked out of the house. an agent showed the house and locked the door from the garage that goes to the laundry room. did we have an extra key? yeah, we had one, but it was in the house. so in the pitch black night mary and the kids walked into the back yard and tried to break in the windows. unfortunately, they were locked tight. the back door was left unlocked by the agent, thankfully!! so they got in. the whole experience probably made emily even more afraid of the dark (she sleeps with her light on, even in broad daylight). our agent would have let them in (she lives next door), but she was not home and would not be for a little while. but but at least they got in!

i did have a couple of interesting conversations with emily in the days after mae mae left. every now and then she would tell me a story about an adventure they had, or about a conversation she they had. emily had no idea, but she told on her grandmother several times!!!

so basically, we all had a good time. we thought about it, and the last time dan and i went anywhere without the kids was the weekend of ethan's first birthday. so hey, a once a year getaway is not bad.

Offers

it's been a little over a week now that we've had our house listed with an agent. the first day it was officially on the market, we had an agent want to come over that morning. i was shocked! i mean, it had not even been 12 hours since alana listed it in the MLS. but hey, the kids and i accommodated them. i quickly picked up the house and packed them in the minivan to go on a sonic adventure for tater tots.

side note: my kids love them some tater tots, ANYTIME of the day. i've seriously slacked on my son's diet though. we were much better about what we gave emily to eat - but that all flew out the window with ethan. emily was well over a year old before she tasted any fried foods; she was 2 1/2 before she had pizza. but ethan, well, he was gnawing on french fries when he was about 5 or 6 months old...anything to keep him quiet at a restaurant. and also, now that they've been introduced to donuts (last summer on the way to VBS our breakfast was donuts), they each have to have their "own" bag of donut holes....

so back to the house. well, the prospective buyers were gone by the time we got back, so i knew right away they were not interested; a sonic trip is very close by. but on the up side, the house was clean for the day!

the next day i was at the computer killing my last 30 minutes or so before i had to get the kids from MDO and i noticed a truck parked in front of our house. a woman got out and got a flyer from the box and started walking up to the house. i lost sight of her as she went close to the garage, but after a few minutes i opened the door and went around to where she was. she told me she and her mom were looking for a house in this neighborhood and could they come in? i was like, sure! so she came in and started walking around saying how she loved the openness, blah, blah (i continued my game of solitaire on the computer) and then i hear her say what a lovely shade of pink our countertops were!! by that time her mom was in there with her - and she was like, mom! this is my favorite shade of pink! i had to turn the chair the other way so i could laugh. i mean COME ON! who likes mauvey pink countertops in their kitchen?? i thought to myself THESE are the type of people who need to buy our house, older ladies who are lost in late 80's decor... long story short, they loved the house. they made tons of notes on their flyer.

this wednesday our agent called me early in the morning to tell me we had an offer. the guy was an investor from out of state and low-balled us right off. he wants the house for rental property. i could tell poor alana was sad she'd be living next door to a rent house, but hey she should work harder to sell our house!! anyway, we counter-offered him with our drop dead number. we did not hear anything until yesterday afternoon - and he declined. i'm a little sad since it would have been sooo nice to sell the house in a week, but hey, it's only been a week. we are not desperate to sell, so we won't be taking just any offer, especially one that's lower than what the house is appraised for. i was a little ticked off his agent never even came by to preview the house. how does he know it's not worth what we counter-offered?? jerk.

i'm sure we'll get tons of traffic looking this weekend. it's supposed to be beautiful weather, and plus, dan and i are going on a mini-vacation to san antonio. we'll be staying on the river walk somewhere! i guess this will be our last hoorah before the baby comes. we are going to drive a triangle so we'll be able to pass through san marcos to do a little outlet mall shopping. dan will be my outlet shopping partner. i've wanted to go to san marcos for a while now, but i always thought i'd be going with a group of girlfriends...not dan!

dan's mom will be coming in town tonight to watch the kids for us while we are gone. we won't be coming back until tuesday!! i know they'll survive while we are gone, but i'm just not used to not being with them!

maybe my next post next week will be a tale of how our house sold while we were gone. it could happen!