Tad finished a painting that he had been working on for three weeks!  I love it when he really takes his time on projects.  This one is a still life of his own shoe.

Apparently he would just take his shoe off, set it in front of him, and go to work.

By the last week, his classmates objected to the… aroma… from said shoe.

He is a teen boy, after all….

We are so not done with this stuff.  Nope nope nope nope nope.  *sigh*

The garage remodel/conversion was the most labor-intensive and expensive part of the project, but it was only step one.  The next step: rearrange the kids’ rooms so the teenagers have their own spaces, and the little boys bunk up together.

Step one of that process: take the last baseboard heater off the wall and replace it with a forced air heater, as we have with all the other rooms in the house.  Great-Grandpa came over to assist us in this project.

Well, the baseboard came off, the new heater was ready to install, when….

Okay, what you are seeing here is the space left by the baseboard.  The wires needed for the forced air heater are on the left-hand side, which is fine.  However, this is directly under the window, and there are additional studs supporting said window.  To make a surprise story short, we have less horizontal space to work with than we thought, so the heater we had all ready to put in… went back in the box and got returned to the store for store credit.

A vertical forced air heater will have to go into that spot, which needs to be purchased at a DIFFERENT store than the one we returned the horizontal forced air heater to.  *sigh*

So, not a huge problem that can’t be solved, but nothing seems to be simple and easy with these remodeling projects.

We seriously started the big house remodel ONE YEAR AGO???

That is what the garage looked like one year ago today, before the crew first showed, put the washer, dryer, and freezer inside the house, and started working.

One year later, we don’t have a garage anymore.

It seems like a lifetime ago that this whole process got started, not just last year!

Tad is progressing very well in swimming lessons – to the point that he is actually on the final “level” of lessons.  His teacher is confident that he’s very close to finishing what they can teach him.

I am worried about transitioning him out of swimming lessons, honestly – they are so much more than swimming lessons to him.  Swimming lessons are the cheap version of sensory therapy for Tad, so we are going to have to strike a deal to keep him in the water.  But really, we need him to finish up, so that Thumper – who is attracted to water, like so many kids on the spectrum – can start learning water safety and swimming.

Rerun, on the other hand, is on level 4 (of 7) of lessons, which is pretty good considering that his lessons had been pretty inconsistent until this last fall, when Ane left regular lessons and joined swim team.  He’s not a confident swimmer yet, but he does love the water.

And Ane is going to be working at swim camp again this summer, preparing for swim team, and has been told that as soon as she is 16, there will be some kind of job waiting for her at the pool.

So, there’s the swimming update that you didn’t know that you needed.