Once again it is Friday and this time it is also the last day of April. The entire month has been a total blur. Does it feel that way to you? Our flowers and leaves were way ahead of schedule when we had an early warm-up. Then the temperatures returned to normal to cooler so everything slowed down. I think the leaves are probably close to normal now. Where we live in Michigan, the tree leaves are usually fully out around Mother’s Day. That looks about right when I look outside.

The black-eyed juncos hung around a few days past their normal April 15 departure. They will return on October 15 most years. Six months here and six months away, like clockwork. There are no signs of the Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks yet, but I expect they will show up at the feeders soon since it will be May tomorrow. We’ve watched diligently for Teddy, the brown thrasher, who likes to toss wet leaves from the brush area onto the grass in the spring. We haven’t seen him this year so we’re all a little disappointed because he was quite entertaining last year.

Don’t you name all the various birds, deer, bunnies, opossums, etc. that show up in your yard? If not, you must not have a creative daughter in your home. Everyone gets a name, including the two big crows named Maleficent and My Pet (courtesy of her very favorite movie, Sleeping Beauty). And, yes, she can tell the two birds apart.

Last weekend I splurged and used some of our stimulus money to buy curtains for our bedrooms. We had decided to go without the dust collectors and enjoy the open views, but changed our mind. Caroline wanted room darkening something. When we moved into the house ten years ago, all the bedroom windows had expensive custom Hunter Douglas room darkening blinds. Since our house faces East/Northeast, these were very handy. However, one of hers wore out and Hunter Douglas custom blinds are not in our budget. So we tried some “room darkening” blinds from Lowe’s that were worthless and promptly returned. Caroline has just kind of lived with it since then with regular blinds from Meijer that don’t block the sun much at all. However, last weekend we found some room darkening curtains at Meijer and they work very well. She’s thrilled.

For our lavender and sagey-green cottage-style bedroom I purchased silver/pewter colored metal rods with clear crackled glass balls on the ends. I bought sheer white panels to hang on them, two to each window. (Our bedrooms both have two tall window-paned windows.) You can tell the panels are not expensive cheap because they aren’t very even on the bottom when they all hang. The ones I had purchased for our previous home came from J.C. Penney (I think) and they were much nicer. But I decided these will work fine for now, adopting my best make-do Grace Livingston Hill attitude. LOL! I was surprised how much I liked having window treatments back up. It definitely gives the room a more finished and cozy look. Since they are inexpensive and washable, I’ll be able to keep the dust collecting to a minimum.

That is truly the only interesting thing I did around the home in the past week. Other than that I spent a lot of time updating posts and products. I added a List of Affiliate Programs page. I started an index of my most popular posts to share on Gab. Then I realized I really wanted to update many images on posts and pages before I started sending people here. So David and I have been working on that. (If this sounds like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, you may be right.) So now I need to get back to creating those index posts to hopefully reach more people on Gab and beyond.

I added a new section to my shop called Journaling & Note Pages. We created four new sets of journaling pages that match the designs of the editable homeschool planners. Adding journaling pages to the homeschool planners was suggested by a customer so David and I made it happen. After we made them and added them to the planners, it only made sense to also offer the journal pages separately since they were all made. I also went through and gave many of the writing and homemaking products that are similar the same “name” to show they coordinate. So there is one set called A Cozy Year and another set called A Sweet Year.

What is going on in your home? I hope you’ll leave a comment and share.

Artist: “Mother with Child and Cat” by Fritz Zuber-Buhler