Getting Back to Normal

Joel has been back from the hospital for about a week now.  His surgery was a success.  Now I am just trying to make him mind.  :-) 

We are into full swing of Spring Festival.  The kids have two weeks off of school.  We have one week together here and then Joel is taking the two oldest kids to Thailand to see some friends at a homeschool-get-together.  I am sure that they will have a lot of fun.

These past couple weeks and for a couple more we are painting our English Training Center.  The people that were here before us did a great job teaching but never did much decorating.  I had this grand idea of making the waiting area (a large room) into an airport waiting area and then making each classroom a different country.  I am excited about the progress so far, but we still have a lot to do. 

BEFORE

AFTER

So far we have painted the waiting area but have not hung up any of the additional decorations.  And we have not done much of anything to the classrooms.  We are also decorating the teacher lounge (no longer a teacher lounge) into a family-themed room where we will hold all of our marriage/family/parenting meetings.  We have finished painting that room as well, but we haven't done anything else.  (Thanks, Dad, for having patience to teach me how to paint when I was younger.)

Right now we are getting ready to go and do some more work there.  We are hoping to finish at least the largest classroom before the kids come back from Spring Festival.  Then the other classrooms can be done during the weekdays after the holiday--maybe finishing one classroom a week until we get all done.  

Here are some random picture from the last week.