At last progress

Finally, progress has been made!! Not on our adoption front, that happens later this week but in our house major progress has occurred. All last week while I was away on business Jon diligently worked at home on a few projects, like our dining room table, island, and our new bathroom vanity(this one was a surprise to me!!) I am thrilled with our table, and being able to sit down together and have dinner then have game time on Saturday was great!! Now we have moved on to Gabriel's room, and have moved the jelly cupboard/wardrobe and have painted it, it is a lovely creamy sherbet(Julianna and Amelia's room color with more cream in it), and it makes his room so bright and cheerful(especially bright, I will have to put up heavy light block curtains!), I can't wait to get the rest of his room painted then move on to the more fun stuff, like pinstriping and Jon's mural. It feels so good to finally have some progress to report, I also have to report that I have finished their scrapbooks to send to them. I took forever to do them, I wanted them perfect and fun, with interactive pieces and tons of pictures, but sadly Amelia's album will not take any recordings. She can listen to Gabe's when she visits him in the nursery area, but hers now has musical cards which I am sure she will love(Julianna sure does!) I have also finished their blankets, they have a fabric swatch sewn on with our picture, and their own picture on one side, then their name and a iron on on the other, Amelia has a rainbow heart flower with LOVE written in it, Gabriel has a lion with a fuzzy mane! They ALSO have an Easter bunny(the ultra plushy kind) , Easter bunny sun glasses(hope to get a pic of them in these!), and jelly beans. I overcompensated for sending the package so late by sending a bunch of stuff, thankfully the PO now have the flat rate boxes in a 12x12x5 size, cause it is filled, and must weigh 12 lbs!!
Progress on another front is that Julianna has really begun to use her reading skills, she will walk around now and start to sound out a word that catches her eye, she does it slowly and phonetically, but is good at sounding it out all the way through. Her letter recognition is just about perfect, there are few letters she does not recognize on sight now, and the same with numbers as well. her adding skills are increasing, she does best with manipulatives(items like blocks, sugar packets, ponies etc), so she is a visual learner, but so am I at times. Her hand writing is really coming along now, we can just tell her to write something, and she is almost always able to do so, without assistance, though at times she needs spelling help. Her interest in many areas of education is growing so much, for Christmas she got the Smithsonian series on animals and sea life, and she loves them!! I enjoy the stories too, they are interesting, factual, well illustrated and show the life cycle of different animals in a very engaging format. I am happy to see Julianna progress so far so rapidly, it is very rewarding to know that the songs we sing, and the games we play, stories we read and all the other little unshcooling things we do really work, and our little homeschooler is growing and thirsting for more knowledge all the time, this is our main goal, to teach our children how they learn best, and to teach them to always question and seek answers, this is the best gift we can give them.
Well I must not go and make progress on getting ready for work, and getting the trash to the curb, the recent construction has caused a huge amount of garbage bags to accumulate rapidly, and they need to go!!, Jamie