keeping busy

Here’s a round up of a few things we’ve been doing to keep ourselves busy this cold winter week.

I finished up some ornaments and wreaths that I’ve been meaning to do for an embarrassingly long time.  Just in time for *ahem* next Christmas.

We’ve resumed art classes with the Baum family.   They tried public school for a while and it worked for some of their kids, but not for all of them.  We looked at how lines can show dimension, sort of contour lines.  I thought I’d made it really easy & simplified…I guess not.

Marc and his running buddies put short sheet metal screws in the soles of their trail running shoes so that in spite of the cold temps and icy trails they can get back to running. (No he doesn’t wear these in the house.)

Sage has been using balloons and candy wrappers to do some fashion designing for her Poly Pocket sized dolls.  She takes after me; I never really like to play dolls or house, but I loved designing houses and clothes for them while my friends made them play act in families and relationships and all that junk. 

Sage has also discovered hand lettering as an art form/minor obsession.

Joseph took a blow to the face from an errant toy and then a few hours later, got smacked in the same spot by a feral cub scout’s head.  He’s sporting a bit of a shiner. He wrecked his remote control car and Marc cut most of his hair off too; so lots to not smile about there.

AJ likes to play act AND build houses for his eraser collection.

Everybody except for me has headed up to Terry Peaks for a half day of skiing in Martin Luther King Jr’s memory.  They spent the morning watching how-to-ski YouTube videos; we’ll give a report of how it went next week.

~Christy

Girls Camp

I get to help with our church's program for teenage girls.  This is especially fun since S is one of those girls!  We got to spend a week with the girls from 9 other congregations at a girls campout.  S had a total blast.  She's the frog on the left in our skit.

wild raspberries on a 6 mile hike are AWESOME!!!!

 crazy hair day

 crazy sock day

tent mates 

service project 

 serving dessert!

 be your own princess day

I had to be the adult most of the time and think about schedules, rules, safety etc. But guess what, I got to be in charge of the craft station that all the girls could visit during their free time.  Here's what they could make with me.

Watercolor socks 

*color socks with cheap dollar store "Sharpies" and then spray with rubbing alcohol to bleed the colors or draw whatever your tweeny heart desires and leave all the crisp details*

Scented sugar scrubs 

*3/4 cup sugar, 3 TBS extra light olive oil (yes coconut oil or many other options would have been better, but we were working on a tight budget and a huge group of girls so olive oil worked fine), one drop of food coloring, couple drops of flavoring extracts (again essential oils would have been better, but pricier)  This recipe filled 2 little tubs (about 4oz each?)*

funky tassel necklaces 

*thread a 1/4 inch copper coupler from the plumbing section of the hardware store on to a skein of embroidery floss.  fold the skein around the coupler and use a tiny hair elastic to tie the skein tight right under the coupler.  cut the loops at the ends of the skein and wrap one of the strings around the elastic to hide it and tuck it under the elastic to hold it. thread a yard of silk cord or thin leather/suede into the coupler and tie its ends together.  Easiest necklace ever.*

Good times were had all around!!!

Southern Utah

It's the annual post where I express dismay at the how quickly the summer has evaporated and I have not posted about any of it.

We go to Utah multiple times a year to get grandparent and cousin time for the kids, but after driving 11 or so hours to get to grandma's house, we haven't shown them much else of the great state we grew up in.  So this summer we kept them in the car for a couple more days and took them down south to....

Bryce Canyon with my mom, dad, and brother, 

 the Coral Pink Sand Dunes, (aka the day we spent on Tatooine and/or Jakku)

 Pipe Springs (okay this one is technically across the boarder into AZ but my ancestors were the first white settlers there and now it's a National Monument so it's a big deal to us.), 

  and Snow Canyon.  

(The kids' first exposure to classic Utah slick rock & slot canyons.  They loved it!)

We also drug them to a half dozen great aunt's house and an odd second cousin or two.  They were pretty good sports about it.

My mom had the kids collect sand at all the different places and she help them make souvenir sand tubes. 

  And I had the kids draw all the fantastical things they imagined in the Utah desert on top of some of our vacation photos.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

Watched these little goslings and their moms down at the lake

 then later, with my own little flock in our yard,

it was a good day.

Reflections

Are you familiar with the PTA Reflections program?  I remember participating in it when I was a kid, so it's not a new thing.  It's a nation-wide arts contest where kids are asked to interpret a new theme each year in one or more of the following categories: Dance Choreography, Film Production, Literature, Music Composition, Photography, and Visual Arts.  Anywho, I made our kids enter stuff this year.

The theme was "Let your imagination fly"; perfect for our kids.  AJ did a visual art and a photography entry.

The artistic statement is where they tell the judges how they interpreted the theme in their art work.  It counts almost as heavily on the score as their artistic abilities.  Like I said this years theme was practically MADE for our kids.  His artistic statements are hilarious!!!

Now J might be our most imaginative kid and a super artist as you well know.  He drew quite possibly the LEAST imaginative drawing I've ever seen him do.  I asked him what was up and he said he just didn't want to have to get any awards in front of people.  Stinker.  He wouldn't even let me post it on the blog!

S was excited that they changed the visual art rules this year.  Before all the entries had to be flat, even regular canvases were too thick to meet their restrictions.  I suppose it was an issue of being able to mail the entries that won on the state and national levels.  This year they said 3D stuff was fine and if it was too bulky to mail, digital photos would be fine.

So S did some string art, plus some of her favorite characters that she doodles and she made some sparkly little dream catchers and put them all together to create this!

Both S & AJ won best in their divisions on the school level and their pieces went on to the district level and were judged against all the winners from all the other local schools.  Believe it or not they both won top honors there too!!! Here they are getting their medals & certificates while J sat in the stands and thanked his lucky stars I didn't make him enter something better.

That meant that their entries went on to be judged against the other district winners from across the state!  We were surprised to find out that S won at the state level too and hers will be judged next month at nationals!!  (There are advantages to living a state that is barely populated after all. *wink) Here she is accepting her state trophy!!

But seriously we are proud of her and really glad that there is such a thing as the Reflections program to recognize creative academic abilities.

The undisputed Champion!!!!!

M is THE man!!!! He DOMINATED the five ward combined Young Men's No Rules Pinewood Derby. (Okay there were 2 rules: you couldn’t touch your car once it was on the track and the standard church wide restrictions on flames/explosives inside any church building.) 

Finessing the last minute details

Some of the other vehicles had remote control engines and one even had a couple of those tiny remote control helicopters attached sideways to it...

The competition

but M’s vehicle just rocketed down that track leaving the others to eat its dust!!! He was testing it in the hall at home before he even had wheels on it and nearly knocked a hole in the wall. In the video, the car in the center lane had metal rods sticking out of the front that were meant to snag the other racers and have them push it across the finish line first, but Marc's car just blasted over it and jumped into the middle lane in front of it! 

You’ll have to call and chat with him about the design details, but basically he attached a soda bottle to the wheels, devised a valve that he could fill the bottle with air pressure using a bicycle pump, and a trigger mechanism to release the pressure when the starting gate dropped. IT WAS AWESOME!!!! 

M got a huge celebratory cone of Red Hot Cinnamon ice cream, and he deserved it!

Happy Easter!

We’ve had 3 snow storms this week that have put down 3 or 4 inches each and then the snow completely melted within 24 hours of each storm. It’s beautiful, then it’s gone. It’s fantastic!!! On the way to school on one snowy day, AJ said, “I feel sad for the snow that falls in the street. It gets all dirty and grey instead of staying bright and pretty like the snow on the grass.”

We had snow Saturday morning for the Easter egg hunt. To hide the eggs, M and I just walked to the center of the yard and then chucked the plastic eggs in all directions so the kids couldn’t follow our footprints to the eggs. Some of them landed neatly on top of the snow, but some of them got thrown a little too hard and burrowed under the snow so the kids had to watch for random isolated holes too just in case. 

I cleverly placed a few eggs right next to some actual bunny tracks in the snow! I know, I know, I’m aaaaahhhh-mazing! And no, no one else noticed.

For some Easter themed yard art, J and I built a snow lamb and a couple of snow peeps before the snow melted that afternoon.

We dyed a few eggs. We tried using a Kool-Aid recipe for the dye. meh. We didn’t think it did any better job than the regular dyes and we even added some food coloring to some of them, but it did SMELL a lot better than the vinegar kind. (I cheated on the photos by using a vivid filter so the eggs appear to be as colorful as we imagined they’d be.) 

Since the dye was completely edible, AJ decided to peel his egg first and THEN dyed it and eat it right away...lemon lime hard boiled egg anyone? 

We tried using hot glue to block out areas instead of white wax or rubber cement. meh. Sometimes it slid off the eggs in the dye, and sometimes it peeled the egg shell off with it when we tried to rub it off. S managed to keep the hot glue in an egg shape when she peeled it off the egg, so that was sort of cool. 

We also busted out the Sharpies and colored some eggs that way. Egg dying is all about the process here.

Besides a Saturday morning egg hunt our most consistent Easter tradition is that I stay up WAAAAAAAAAY to late on Saturday night, sewing an Easter dress for S, and then she refuses to wear it to church Easter morning. This year we kept the tradition alive, only this time it was because S (and I) stayed home from church because she’s sick (again); bummer.

I think the only disappointment this Easter for me was I missed singing one of my favorite hymns, Christ the Lord is Risen Today, with the congregation today ~ nothing says "I'm really grateful for Christ's resurrection" like a hymn with 12 exclamation points! Alleluia!