Fighting Hibernation

The weather here in Cleveland has taken a serious turn towards cold, dark winter recently, and we're feeling its effects. While, thank God, my mood has not been seriously impacted, the girls are feeling some "cabin fever." Even into October, the weather was warm enough that they could spend a lot of time and burn up a lot of their energy outside. They don't quite know what to do with themselves now that they are spending most of their time indoors. On the plus side, this has driven them into actually putting some real effort into cleaning up their room. Hooray! As far as I can tell, they're 1)bored enough to actually do it and 2)wanting to have their room nice so they have a cool place of their own to hang out in indoors. I don't know yet if I'll be able to parlay their boredom into extra attention to schoolwork as well. We didn't do much today schoolwise; I gave them a break as they had a couple of days off last week due to illness. I'm hoping we'll get back into the school groove as the week goes on.

I also need to get into some nice indoor projects now that the weather is getting inclement. There's so many things I *want* to try, but between finances and my ADD self, getting all the materials for a project bought and together can be problematic. On the other hand, it's not like I have a lack of sewing projects to do. Every time I think maybe it's just my ego driving me to make most of the girls' clothes ("See how special I am! I made all of these myself!"), I look at the prices of ready-made clothes and realize why I still sew so much. On the *other* other hand, we're getting into the Christmas-dress season, and velvet does make such a mess when you cut it....