Functional but not Decorated

So Battle of the Books happened and my cute little team of all sixth graders placed 15th out of 36 elementary schools competing. Not bad for our first year. I'm so impressed with all those readers! The judge's meeting was so serious. The auditorium was full of parents and siblings wilting in the stuffiness. It was a great day!

I decided to post a few photos for the sake of having a memory of moving into our fifth home. Nothing is really decorated, but we're getting our place to be a bit more functional. The kitchen counters look a little bare, but no worries, we can mess that place up and cover all the counters with dishes in no time at all. We had a whole chicken cooking in the crock pot on Sunday. I need to decorate the tops of the cabinets with something someday (but what?), however, the counters may always remain quite bare because I am just enjoying all that glorious work space so much! I told K that we would have to have a family council over anything that goes up on the walls. Might be awhile.

I didn't mean for the dining area to look so..."country"...but the table and hutch have belonged to my parents since I was born. There are a lot of invisible memories around that little table and I've always liked the hutch, so there you go--sentimental. The cookbooks aren't really meant to look cute or decorative...it's just a functional use of the space. There are trays and baskets stored in the cupboard underneath. So, we'll see how this goes. I don't love it (love the hutch, but don't love everything I've put on it) yet I don't know what else to do with it. And I don't know when I'll have time or money to do anything further. I would like to get a circular or oval rug for underneath the table, but K is against this idea.

Both bathrooms are up and running! What you see is what you get. We'll get a couple of nature photos up on the wall. Someday...

March is a wrap and my students are just a little too stoked about April Fool's Day, so I emailed the assistant principal who'll be visiting my class tomorrow to see if she has any cool pranks to pull. I also emailed the music teacher to see if we can come up with something there. And since I'm fairly confident none of my students read my blog, I'll go ahead and mention that I'm trying something new this year...I made a word search puzzle about Immigration and Industrialization, but none of the words are in the puzzle! They won't be able to find a single word! I'm wondering how long they'll look for words before they figure it out. Got any other ideas for me?