What We've Been Up To

Well, I've been sick the past few days, so lots of laying around chez Skypek. Ellie's watched probably 5 hours of TV in the past two days, but it's zapping all my energy just to make sure she doesn't hurt herself. I'm tired just thinking about it. I also caught a few minutes of Oprah the other day, and she happened to be talking about genealogy. Interesting stuff, and got me thinking. So I pulled up about.com's genealogy page and followed some of the tips and with just a little bit of research, I was able to find names and dates going all the way back to Tom's great-great-grandparents who came to the US via Ellis Island. We also found out that although Tom's great-great-grandfather was Polish in ethnicity, he was actually an Austrian citizen - in 1900, when Michal Skrzypek came to America, the area of Poland that he came from was part of a "partition" belonging to Austria. Here's the boat he came on:

Fascinating. And it all factors into my next big project: redoing our basement. Right now it's comfortable and welcoming (and childproofed!), but it's still very much an adults' space. I do still want to get our curtains hung in the dining room and I have a picture wall I've been meaning to put up in the living room, but the next big thing will definitely be turning the basement into a more child-focused area. I want it to be bright, cheery, and fun with a focus on learning, but I do still want to keep it a place where adults can feel comfortable watching TV and relaxing. So the basic plan is to do a little bit of rearranging to create more space on the far side of the room. I'll also have to add some shelving and storage, and I'd like to put up some rain gutter shelves and perhaps a bit of chalkboard paint. Ellie's not quite ready for any structured preschool time, but I want the room to be ready when she is. But there's definitely no rush on it...right now I'm just gathering ideas.

Oh - and why all the family info factors into this? Because I'd like to do some sort of canvas with a family tree on it, detailing our ancestors. I'm thinking I'll be taking down all the movie posters on the far side of the room, which just leaves us with one movie poster that wouldn't be touched, but I don't think one movie poster alone would look very good. So I'm thinking I'll put up the family tree in its place. A little bit of history, and still us. But we'll see how it all works out, right now I only have about half a tree and I'm nowhere near close to doing any of the other things I'm thinking about.