Still painting

Nick and I are both worn out from the day’s activities (I seem to say that we are worn out quite a lot of the time, but it’s nothing that a night’s sleep can’t fix). My day has been very full and busy. I did some puzzles with Aaron, dot-to-dot and numbers with Caleb. Then read some library books while we waited for Sharon to arrive. She came just after 11 with her two boys, and we couldn’t get the pram past the car in the driveway, so had to go all the way around to the schoolroom, through the church, down the stairs by the church, and down more stairs into the back door. We had a good morning together, and at 1.30 we went through to the toddler’s group. Zak had just fallen asleep in his pram, so we left him in the diningroom, with Nick upstairs. That helped Sharon a lot. I enjoyed toddler’s group today. The usual horrible children weren’t there, and we had a small group because of the rain. Also, with the carpet now in the schoolroom, some kids played quietly instead of making the usual noise (I must confess, ours are the ones usually making the most noise!) I went back to the schoolroom after settling the boys for a sleep, and painted until 5 pm, then went home to make supper, which was warmed up left-over pizza (left over from the bible study last night – three ladies brought home-made pizza, so we had two huge platefuls left). After 7 Nick and I both went to the schoolroom again to paint, which we did for about an hour. So far we have done most of the brown, green, red and black. It’s starting to look nice.

The Lord has really been blessing us with provisions for the holiday club. As you know, we didn’t know what we were going to do about paper to do these paintings on, and the Lord gave us two big rolls. The other problem was paint. No shops sell any sort of craft paint, either powdered or ready mixed, so we had two options – either use the paints that I brought over, which are fairly small quantities, or buy 1 liter tins of acrylic house paint in whatever colours the shops had available. Neither option was really a good one. Then, on Monday night, Nick happened to mention at the deacons’ meeting our need of paint, and Teddy remembered that he had some left over from some other event, so he dropped off red, yellow, green and black on Tuesday morning. Then, I had mentioned to Sharon last week that we were needing paints, and wondering if I could buy her acrylics off her since they are leaving in a few weeks, but today she said that her husband, who is the youth worker (resigned though due to government meddling), said we could use the paints from the youth centre. So he dropped them off when he picked up Sharon after toddler’s group. We now have every colour we need except orange which is easy to mix, and big quantities of all of them. So not only do we have the paints, but the church didn’t have to buy them! Also, we have received £30 in donations, so only need to spend about £20 of the church’s money to get the remainder of supplies.

Aaron got himself stung by a bee again this morning. He was walking around barefoot outside the back of the church, and stood on it, I think. It caught him on the second littlest toe on his left foot. He cried and cried, but I immediately gave him some of the medicine we got from the hospital last time, and applied the cream. It’s a little bit swollen, and he limped very dramatically whenever he remembered he had been stung, but otherwise no complications. His cold continues to get better. He seems to have gotten over the bad part very quickly, but now let’s see how long this phase will drag on.