Today I Made...

A crayon carrier that rolls up and fits in my diaper bag. It holds 12 crayons, and it's going to be awesome for church, waiting rooms, restaurants, etc. I came up with the pattern on my own after looking at lots of different ones online and not finding exactly what I wanted. I think I might make a bunch and try to sell them. My sister-in-law wants me to do a craft fair with her next December and this is one of the ideas I might use. It didn't take me very long to make, about an hour and a half. And after making one, I already know a few ways to make it even better. So we'll test it out on Sunday and see if it keeps Lincoln entertained at church.

Good Memories of Being Sick

So, my title sounds like an oxymoron. Or I sound like a moron for writing it. Or something. Well, my little family has been sick for the last few days. Let me tell you it has been anything but fun. But, one good thing that has come of it, is that I think I have a better appriciation for being sick when I was still living at home. I have some great memories, not of the actual being sick part, but of the part where my mom and dad took such great care of me.

Growing up being sick went something like this: I'd wake up with a high fever, or puking, or feeling generally miserable for one reason or another. My mom would tuck me into her bed, which was always softer, and had more pillows, and somehow magically always made me more comfortable than being in my own bed. I could watch TV or a movie in bed if I wanted to, but usually I was feeling so miserable that I just slept. My mom would bring me Sprite with a straw, and would wake me up when I needed to take medicine. She'd even bring me toast with butter, cinnomon, and sugar on it. When my dad came home for his lunch break, he's always bring me a chocolate Premium Creamie popcicle. For the longest time growing up I thought cinnamon-sugar toast and Creamies were magic "get well" food, because I only ever had them when I was sick, and I always felt a little better afterwords. It wasn't like either of them waited on me hand and foot or anything, and it definitely wasn't worth faking sick for, but when I really was feeling lousy it was really nice to have parents who loved me and took care of me while I was trying to get well.

Suddenly now I am a mom with sick kids, and I'm sick, and believe me, if there's any cinnamon-sugar toast to be had, I'm the one making it (at least while Aaron's at work, he takes really good care of me too!). And forget sleeping until I'm well. Sometimes I wish I could just go back to my mom's house and curl up in her bed for awhile. But, something else that's amazing to me, is the love I have for my own children. Even when I feel like I'd be better off having someone smack me over the head with a large rock and left for dead, somehow I still manage to wipe noses, change diapers, make food, and snuggle two cute little guys who feel at least as miserable as I do. I'm not trying to say that I am amazing or to pat myself on the back, not at all. But when you love your kids you can keep giving and giving to them, long past the point you thought you'd be able to.

Not Computer People

Aaron's coworker had this posted on his desk at work. We thought it was pretty funny. Aaron decided to go find this and post it, when he started using these exact steps to fix our printer. He says this counts as his post.

People Bug Me!

Ok, I'll probably read this tomorrow and think I totally overreacted. But that's tomorrow, and this is today. And today I am bugged. And it's dumb, too because it wasn't actually even that big of a part of my day, probably 5 minutes total, but I'm still bugged. My husband will read this and tell me I'm ridiculous, because he is much too nice of a person to ever be bugged. But that's him, not me. I'm still bugged.

We have been apartment managers since October. It's a good job for us to have right now, and I feel like it's a way that I can contribute a little bit, monitarily at least, to our family. The job has some nice perks; however, it also has a few people that come along with it  that I'd like to throw a snow ball at. It's winter, and awhile ago it snowed pretty heavily. The parking lot of our complex became and ice skating rink. The owner doesn't like to have it plowed unless the snow gets really deep because there isn't a lot of room to put the plowed snow, and therefore it eats into the parking spaces, and then people complain. The parking lot is too big for us to shovel. So pretty much it's on it's own. It's usually pretty slippery and icy. I realize this condition is not ideal, and I feel bad that the tenants (that includes us by the way) have to walk on ice to get to their cars. This year, the owner decided to try some heavy duty ice melt in the parking lot. He ordered it, and it took a long time to get here. But when it got here, we spread it on the parking lot and it worked wonders. The ice was almost melted, and then....of course, it snowed again last night leaving the parking lot covered again, and quickly turning into and ice skating rink once more. So that's the parking lot story.

Well this morning, Unnamed Tenant comes knocking on my door. I open it, and am greeted with, "I need the snow shovel, I am NOT going to go out on ice AGAIN tonight." At which point, I turned around and walked away from the door into the back, and Aaron handed her the snow shovel. I don't know if they had any further conversation. I was semi-bugged then. Why not say, "Hi/Good morning/How are you? etc., I was wondering if I could borrow the snow shovel, I just feel like getting some of that ice out of the way." Or something even remotely pleasant. (Usually we leave the snow shovel right outside our door, and tenants know that they are willing to use it whenever they want as long as they bring it back. It just so happened to be really windy a couple of days ago, so we'd brought it inside because it kept tipping over.) Anyways, so I was slightly bugged by this person, but she took the shovel and procedeeded to begin shoveling the parking lot. And Aaron, bless his heart, was like, maybe we should pay her for her time? And I was ornery and I said, "No! If the owner wants to pay to have the parking lot shoveled by hand, he would have us do it."

Anyways, then a little while later, Unnamed Tenant knocks on my door again, hands me the shovel and says, "I didn't make much progress. (Ya think?) You know, you aught to talk to the owner about buying an ATV and putting a shovel on the front. It wouldn't take very long that way, and if you'd get it before anyone drove on it, then it wouldn't be so icy." I probably gave her the dumbest blank stare. I didn't know how to respond. Aaron, who was sitting in the chair next to the door, said, "Actually the owner has an ATV and he just bought a shovel for the front of it." But we weren't about to go into all the details about the parking lot, the owner, and the ATV with this woman. She left, I shut the door.

I don't know. I guess what bugged me so much about this whole encounter was the fact that she acted like we didn't give a flying fig about the condition of the parking lot. When in reality, it's a topic we discuss on a daily basis. So I'm venting. There you have it. People bug me.

Letter F: Fish, Faces, Fingers

Today, my friend Suzy taught the boys about the letter F. First she gave them a paper with a big F and a little f on it. She talked about how fish starts with the letter F. The on the bottom of the paper she traced the boys' heels and then their fingers to make a fish. Then the boys got to color their fish. This is how Lincoln's turned out. He wanted me to color the little f and kept handing me the colors he wanted me to color with. He also wanted me to write Lincoln and Mommy on his paper. (He actually wanted me to write Suzy and Nathan on his paper too, but I told him that was for Nathan's paper.) Linc is getting better with his coloring skills. He's still no where close to staying in the lines, but he'll say things like, "I color eyes black." and then scribble black over the eyes. So we're coming right along. :)

The next activity Suzy had, I thought was so cool! She had cut out four circles. On one circle was an empty fish bowl, on another was a head without a face, on another was a fish and plants, and on another was a face. We taped the empty fish bowl and the fish back to back with a straw in between, and the same with the head and the face. (Make sure you get the orientation right or it won't work.) Then when you twist the straw between your fingers fast enough it creates the illusion that the fish is in the fish bowl and that the face in on the head. It's really cool, and the boys loved it.


After that Suzy passed out Shark Fruit Snacks, and we loaded all the kids in the car and took them to Jay's Jungle, a pet store, and let them look at the fish, turtles, snakes, rats, hamsters, birds, and puppies, that they had in the store. All the kids loved it, even Ivan and Kaitlyn. So I'd say F Day was quite a success.

Get Us Outta Here!

We've been going crazy in our apartment. We've actually been feeling a lot like the video above :) A classic, if I do say so myself. The kids are tired of being in the house, I'm tired of being in the house. Our house is tired of us being in it. Today was the last straw. The sun peaked out from the clouds and we escaped. I got down the Radio Flyer out of Lincoln's closet (still the best $5 bucks I ever spent), I bundled up the boys and we walked around the block a few times. The fresh air did wonders for us. :) I hear it's supposed to storm a bunch later this week. I really hope not. I enjoyed going out side today and am hoping we can do it again tomorrow.

E Day: Elephants and Eggs

The holidays are over, so it's time to get back on track with our letter days. It was my turn this week to do "E". I decided to do an egg and elephant theme.  Lincoln really loves to paint, and we haven't gotten it out in awhile, so I picked activities that would allow us to get out the paint.  When I was little, my Grandma Lemmon did this activity with us where you poke a hole in each end of an egg, and then blow out the yolk. You are left with a hollow egg. We used to glue little squares of tissue paper on it and then paint a clear coat over it. I thought tissue papaer might be a little advanced for two year olds, so the plan was to just let them paint their eggs.

The night before Aaron helped me do some prep work. We washed the eggs first and then poked holes in each end and blew out the center of the eggs. FYI, it helps a lot if you stick the pin inside the hole and swish it around to break up the egg yolk.

Then, since these are supposed to be decorative eggs, we made egg stands to put them on out of the egg carton. Then we covered the stands in tin foil so it would look fancy.

I know it's a long long way from Easter, so I modified a little bit and decided that these eggs could be Valentines eggs. Ya, ya, I know, Valentines Day is still a ways off too, but it's the closest holiday we've got. So I found some heart stickers that the kids could stick on their eggs after they were painted, so help spice things up a bit.

That was the egg part. For the elephant part, I got the awesome idea to make a paper sack elephant puppet off of a website a friend shared with me called ABC Stuff. It's an awesome website and has multiple activity ideas for each letter of the alphabet. She had a link on there to a sight that had a pattern to print out to make an elephant puppet. I didn't think cutting would go so well for the kids, so I printed out the patterns on cardstock and cut out the pieces for them and made them each their own little envelope (whatever it takes to stick in another E word right?) with all of their elephant peices in it.

That was all the 'before' work. And I think having it all ready made the day go a lot smoother. When Suzy, Nathan, and Kaitlyn got here, I sat the boys down in special "story chairs" (our banana chairs, I hoped having special chairs would help their attention spans, it only sort of worked) and read them Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Suess. Which just so happens to be about an elephant to tries to hatch an egg. Not only that, but it's got a good moral (patients and hard work pay off in the end) as well. Double winner.

After that we headed to the kitchen to paint! Oh, I should mention, the apples on the table are for "Eating", which starts with "E". Couldn't think of any egg snacks that sounded good, so I got creative. The boys painted the paper sack first. They painted it gray. The only color I got out to begin with, so that at least the body and the face would look elephantish. You'll see what I mean in a minute. When they were done with the sacks we put them aside to dry and got the elephant pieces out of the envelopes. Then I got out more colors so the boys could be as creative and artistic as they wanted to be. :) They didn't let me down either.

Here's Lincoln painting his elephant ear a nice mix of red and orange. We haven't used brushes very much with him, but let me tell you it's LOTS less messy than finger painting. And he still loved it. So I think from now on I'll have him use the brush for inside, and save finger painting for outside. It was also a nice addition to have the garbage sacks taped to the table. I usually just spread newspaper, and it's more of a hassel, and paint still always manages to get on the table.

When the boys were done with the elephant parts, we put those aside to dry. I took their painting plates away, and got them different ones with only Valentines Day colors on it. Then gave them their eggs. They seemed to have a little bit more trouble painting the eggs because the eggs kept rolling away from them. But I think they enjoyed that too. Once the eggs were nicely painted, we washed up and let the boys down to play while everything dried.

They had a good time playing together, which they always do. Unfortunately the paint did not dry fast enough, so we had to send everything home with Suzy in pieces to have Nathan put together after nap time. We put ours together after nap time too. Here's how they turned out:

Not quite as professional looking as the elephant puppets the lady on ABC Stuff made, or the eggs I used to make with my grandma, (and actually, the ABC Stuff page did some blown eggs as well, that are really well done), but hey, for two year olds, not too bad. :) And we had fun doing it, which is really all that matters.

Magnet Obsession

We seem to have come down with a bit of a magnet obsession at our house recently. Lincoln got these cool "Mag Neato" blocks for Christmas. They are sort of like blocks with magnets in the ends to tey stick together when you build things. They also stick to every other metal thing in our house, fridge, dishwasher, washer/dryer, front door, and the latest, Lincoln trike. The other night Lincoln finished eating faster than Aaron and I so we let him down from the table to go play. When we peeked in the living room a few minutes later we saw him decking out his trike like this. It's the rage around here now. And heaven forbid if Ivan get close enough to touch one, oh man!

Rough Schedule

Poor Ivan. The new church schedule is a little rough on him. He couldn't even make it through a jar of peas.

Book Review: Stargirl

by: Jerry Spinelli

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'll start off by saying that young adult/teen fiction, is not my genre of choice, so that may have something to do with my only giving it two stars. I thought the book was cute, and it does make a good point. But there were a few things that bothered me about it. 1. There was SO MUCH stupid drama, but considering the intended audience, this point probably isn't valid as a complaint. But the drama bugged me. 2. I didn't think it was believable how mean the student body was to this one poor girl. I could see a group of students being this mean, or even blaming her for the basketball team losing, but not the WHOLE school. Maybe my high school experience was completely different from everyone else's, but there were lots of little groups that conformed to each other for sure, but the whole school did not conform to anything, really, as a whole. So I find it hard to believe that an entire student body would shun a girl for being compassionate to the hurt player of another team. Especially because she wasn't doing mean things, but lots of odd nice things. I understand and agree that on occasion she didn't know her boundaries, but that doesn't make her a criminal. Maybe the author thought it had to be all or nothing to get his point across, but it kind of bugged. 3. I wasn't a big fan of everyone thinking that homeschooling was a good explanation for Stargirl's "weirdness". I know plenty of weird people who were not homeschooled, and plenty of normal people who were. But that's not really a big issue, just a point I wanted to make.

I really liked the character of Stargirl. I thought she was really well done in all her excentric behaviors. Of all the characters I think I connected emotionally with her the best. I felt so bad for her, that even her own boyfriend couldn't just accept her for who she was. I'm glad she had Doris as a friend.

So, I don't know. The book was pretty good. It had a good message. It was not my favorite. If you like young adult fiction, you might like it.

Little Project

I am always looking for new ides of things to do with Lincoln that are 1. Educational 2. Fun 3. On his level. Sometimes I find it a challenge to come up with things that fit all three. I've decided that there are probably a lot of moms out there like me looking for ideas. So, one of my new goals, is to post the projects that Lincoln and I do together, in hopes that it will benefit someone, somewhere. And if not, at least it will be a good record of the things Linc and I did together.

Today during Ivan's morning nap, Linc and I made this great tube. All you need is the tube out of a roll of paper towels, some tin foil, tape, and stickers. I gave Lincoln the tube to play with while I got out all the rest of the stuff. Then I took out a piece of tin foil and told Linc to set the tube down on the foil. I gave him small pieces of tape, and held the end of the foil against the tube, while he taped the foil to the tube. Then he rolled the tube in the foil until it was completely covered, then I held the tube and gave him pieces of tape and he taped the foil shut. You want to leave the ends of the tube open. Then I let Lincoln decorate his foil wrapped tube with stickers. When we were done it looked (to a kid at least) like an amazing tool. Then I showed Lincoln how if he held the tube up to my chest and put his ear on the other end, he could hear my heart beat. Then I switched him and listened to his. We talked about how you have a heart in your chest and how it beats, and that's what you can hear with the tube. Next I put the tube up to my mouth and whispered through it, and let Lincoln do the same. I explained (very basically) that when you listen to things through the tube, they sound louder.

We had a good time, and he keeps asking me to "hear his heart". So I think it was a success. I got the idea in our Highlights High Five magazine, and altered it slightly.

Sharin' the Wealth

For Christmas, my mom subscribed Lincoln to the Highlights High Five magazine (which is similar to the regular Highlights magazine, but for the younger age range of 2-6). Our first issue came today. I remember loving the Highlights magazine as a kid, and was really excited to share it with Lincoln. We weren't disappointed either. They have fun little stories, games, and puzzles, that are entertaining as well as educational.

Probably my favorite story/activity in this month's issue was one about space men called Add Them Up! I took a picture of the page to give you an idea. If you click on it, I think it will get big enough that you can read the words on the side. What I liked about it is that it was clever, and pretty versatile. For the younger kids you can work on counting up the space men. Which is what Lincoln and I did. But for older kids, you can use the same paragraphs to do simple addition. And if you wanted to add some of your own ideas, you could turn everything around without too much trouble and do simple subtraction. But the best part is that it's fun, so you hardly realize you're "doing math". :)

Anyways, I'm thrilled with the magazine. Lincoln and I got half way through it today. And I think he enjoyed it enough that we could read it multiple times. Also, for anyone interested they have a website that has a lot of the same kinds of ideas and it's all free. Go to www.highlightskids.com and see if you can find anything to tickle your fancy. I think the age range is 2-12, so you can probably find something. Or, if you want to check out High Five (the one geared just to 2-6 year olds) go to www.highlights.com/highfive , on the bottom of the page in the center is a blue box called About High Five, and under that if you click on Preview a Sample issue, you'll be able to print out one issue for free. It's at least worth going and getting the free one.

Our Latest Cardboard Monstrosity

As always, this year Aaron and I have set a goal to do better with Family Home Evening. I thought it might help me be accountable to something if I post about what we did for FHE each week, so I'm gonna try it.

This week we decided to have a lesson about Temples. Whenever we drive up to Hooper, Lincoln always gets excited when we point out the different temples to him (we can see about 5 from the freeway between Provo and Hooper). When I mentioned the idea of doing temples, Aaron got excited and suggested we build one out of cardboard. I was thinking something small...I should have known better. ;) But Lincoln and Ivan both loved it, and it did give us a good opportunity to talk about the different things we can do in the temples, about how Mommy and Daddy got married in the temple, and about how the temple is Jesus's house. We sang "I Love to See the Temple", and I took Lincoln around our living room and showed him all the different pictures on our wall and had him pick out which one was the temple.

Our cardboard rendition is the Salt Lake temple, in case you can't tell, and not to be sacreligious or anything, but I hope it doesn't inhabit our living room for long. :)

Scary Hairy

This is the "do" Lincoln woke up from his nap with. Love it!