My Daughter's room

I'm currently redoing my 7 year-old's room. She first wanted a Tinkerbell room, but then changed her mind to an "Under the Sea" room. I'm not talking Finding Nemo or The Little Mermaid, but she wants sea creatures.

I painted her room 3 shades of blue and bought some decals from Amazon.com. I knew I could not paint fish. However, I did paint a scuba diver because I was not going to pay $26 for one scuba diver. My daughter thinks the diver looks great and that's all that matters.

All her furniture is wood. So we are installing wall shelves, buying a lighter desk and I'm painting her bed and dresser white. White goes more with a little girl. I had stripped the foot board and headboard to her bed YEARS ago when I thought I would just varnish them. Since then, I've thought everything would look better white. So I wasted countless hours taking off-white paint off the bed pieces just to paint them again! However, they are now white and look pretty darn good, IMHO.

Her dresser is my dresser from when I was 10. It's in decent shape and all wood. I'm still in the process of removing all the varnish to paint it white. This is tedious. I can't imagine 'wanting' to do something like this for fun. I've put a lot of time into this project, as well. I still have to do some minor repairs to the dresser, too, which required me taking the top off of it. I'm hoping gorilla glue for wood will help with the repair. My husband is doubtful.

So, when all is complete, I will post pictures. This is just a teaser, I suppose.

Florida trip(s)

For the past 3 years, I've been trekking from Virginia to Florida for at least 2 weeks during the summer breaks. I visit family and "tourist traps". The first year was due to our house being renovated. The next was due to family vacation at Disney. This year was a shorter visit for family visits. Anyway, driving here is nice because I can come and go as I please. Visit places I used to go. Visit where I want to go. Leave when I want to leave. I'm not dependent upon others to drive me somewhere because I flew down.

Driving down also has the benefit of playing it by ear when I'll leave. I am free to take the kids to the beach or some other destination, as I feel, such as Ft. Lauderdale Beach or Disney or Busch Gardens or Gatorama or Gatorland....the list is pretty endless.

On our way down this year, we stopped in St. Augustine, Florida, for the night for an extra day at the beach and wasting time until my sister would have more days off. It was nice. We went up in the St. Augustine Lighthouse. I would have liked to visit the Old Jail or the Castillo de San Marcos, but that may have been a bit boring to the kids. Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum may have been interesting, but alas, we didn't visit.

We first went to the beach at Anastasia State Park. The next day, we went to the public beach off of A1A near our hotel. Great place and has showers to rinse off. However, the restroom was not that great. The St. Augustine Lighthouse was great, even for a 7 and 10 year old. They climbed all 219 steps without complaint. We took some great pictures of the lighthouse and the grounds. Shopped at the gift shop and headed to Orlando.