Hey! Just one of those “I’m still here” kind of posts. Ari is now seven days out from the national deadline for picking a college, and….he still hasn’t picked one. That’s consuming an awful lot of everyone’s energy around here lately. At least mine and Dave’s and Ari’s. We spent spring break doing college visits (Macalester and St. Olaf and Oberlin) and then he flew to New York and met up with his grandfather for another one last week (Hamilton). And he’s revisiting UGA this week to talk to some math people and sit in on a class there. And then he’s just going to HAVE to pick one, like it or not!

We tried to fit in fun stuff for younger siblings along with colleges during spring break. Like we saw Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield!

I’m a sucker for photos of old kitchens with light coming through the window. Which is kind of a weird thing to be a sucker for, but there you go:

We also went to the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, where they have these Mold-A-Rama machines that make souvenirs for you before your very eyes, and I’m kind of obsessed with them now. I want to get all the Mold-A-Ramas that exist, which is really not that many of them, and I think they’re all in the midwest. So I can plan one big road trip and knock them all out.

EXCLUSIVE PRODUCT! We made 3 of them. Because that’s how many machines we found.

But now we’re back home, and we have a plan–albeit a vague one–for what we want to get done around here before summer travel season starts.

The least fun thing is reseeding the front yard. Sigh. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Finally finishing up the dining room is next on the list.

And then the kids’ bathroom.

We had some vague notions of trying to get more bamboo floors in upstairs before summer, but I think that’s a more realistic post-summer travel project.

So I’m hoping to have some progress to share about all that soon!

In the meantime, I found a runner for the hallway at the thrift shop!

And this table and chairs for Abe. It’s bigger than the old table and chairs that was in the same spot. Because ABE is bigger now, too:

And I couldn’t seem to walk away from this tree the other day, so it came home with me, too and will go in the dining room somewhere or other.

A periodic reminder that I’m also blogging over at Boxy Colonial on the Road (more regularly than here, because all the stuff I need to blog about over there already happened–last summer, in most cases. Anyway, get your Atlantic Canada fix there!)