Challenging

For the last three days Grace has just been a bear about everything. Nothing is good enough, nothing we do is what she wants to do, everything is an argument and anything we try to say in reply just makes her upset and starts a whole crying/whining/complaining fit that just seems to go on and on.

And I get to take her to the doctor tomorrow for her 5 year checkup and she is going to get shots. I know that will be a struggle too and she probably won't feel good afterwards and that'll just perpetuate everything.

So I don't know what has sparked all of this or when she will return to the normal Grace, but it's driving both of us nuts. It has to stop or Julie and I are going to go crazy. The good thing about tomorrow is that it's supposed to be fairly warm out (60) and so maybe she can play outside a little bit. Maybe that will help keep her a little happier tomorrow. Who knows?!

So anyway, we are finally moving forward with our family room remodel as we ordered the recessed lights for the ceiling yesterday. They should be in by Thursday so I have a few days to take the drywall off of the ceiling so that installing the lights will be much easier. My uncle is helping me install the lights and my brother-in-law said he could help me with re-drywalling the ceiling. I'll have to call him tomorrow before I start tearing it out to not only double-check, but to also make sure I take it out properly so that it will be easier to put the new drywall back up.

After we complete this part of the project we can move forward with everything else that we have already bought but haven't put in because we've been waiting for the ceiling work to be done. And since we hadn't decided what lights to put in nor had we bought them, we were at a standstill.

Here is the list of things to-do in the family room: tear down ceiling drywall (most of it), install recessed lighting, reinstall ceiling drywall, wallpaper the ceiling, paint the wallpaper on the ceiling, paint upper section of walls, finish filling screw holes on trim, paint trim, wallpaper lower section of walls, paint wallpaper on lower walls.

After all of that work we'll just need to replace the carpet and get new furniture. But that will have to wait as those things don't come cheap. And last I checked I don't have any income. Grace doesn't pay much on the dollar bill side of things. Of course on the enjoying your daughter growing up side of things she pays pretty darned good (except for the last couple of days: see paragraphs above.)

Speaking of doing things around the house I put our patio furniture away this weekend and I cleaned it up first. So it's clean and it's in the basement but the cushions are completely useless; and so we aren't sure what to do with them. There is buying new cushions but that costs about the same as buying a new patio set. We could always buy a new patio set but it isn't cheap and it would render our current patio set useless as it would just be thrown out. I had another idea which was to use the cushions we have as a pattern and make some new ones. I'm not sure how to do that or who could do it for us or anything like that, but it seems like it would be cheaper. I'll have to look into it.

I do realize that they have generic replacements at home improvement and other stores but none of them are the right size and so they wouldn't look right and probably wouldn't feel very good when you sat on them depending what size they are. So that won't really work either.