We love Saturdays

Three times a month (first Saturday at Home Depot, second and fourth Saturday at Lowe's), Jack and Owen get to do a kid's project. These projects vary with the season but all involve some hammering. We just started about three months ago and have built

• a Mother's Day planter (complete with wooden flowers)


• an actual planner (and we grew real flowers in these but they died)


• a bird house


• a dune buggy (with working wheels)


• a baseball stadium toy


• a catamaran (kudos if you know what that is without looking it up)


• a sailboat


• a tape measure


• a miniature toy of that game you play with the pole that has a rope attached to the top and a ball attached to the end of the rope, I can't remember the name of it

We usually take it to the next level by letting the boys pick out a color and buying a can of spray paint to colorize their project afterwards. Fortunately (and, at the same time, unfortunately), Jack is happy with painting everything purple.

Saturday is also the day that Mom and Dad do other projects around the house, which this past weekend included painting the two remaining walls in the boys' room, installing a ceiling fan in our bedroom (haven't finished), some landscaping work, and replacing our front porch lamp. The last lamp busted somehow and someone cut it off at ground level. So replacing it means digging up the entire concrete foundation and putting a new one in. I'm halfway there. The concrete is too heavy for me to take out myself and I have no concrete breaking tools.

Anyway we also built a shelf for Jack and Owen's room, as pictured below. Plank: $7, supports, $21, wall anchors, $2. We routed off three edges, stained it, and glued it all together. Also we had to move Neptune and Pluto to a different place in their orbits.

So the picture above demonstrates our painting efforts, our shelf-building efforts, and most of the boys' projects to date (one of each-- in most cases one of the two toys is destroyed within 12 hours).