about the boys in the fam

AJ crawled for the first time this week!!!! Yes, he IS almost 11 months old, but in his defense we have very slippery wood floors that have, until now, thwarted his best efforts.  He has just been sliding around in reverse and spending the better part of the past month stuck under the furniture as a result.

(& how 'bout these chairs I found at a 2nd hand store here.  They rock, yes both in the sense that I think they are really retro cool and in the sense that you can rock back and forth in a relaxing way in them.)

The other 2 kids learned to crawl in a carpeted one-story apartment with a dearth of electrical outlets. The very first place AJ crawled was straight to the stairs. The original owner/builder of our house was a professor of electrical engineering at the same school in which M teaches now. The man had a passion for electrical outlets. Let’s just say M has put in over 50 of those little plastic outlet covers even after we have everything we own plugged in and it looks like we may need another boxful. It appears our little crawling outlet magnet shares that man’s passion for voltage.  This is going to be a lot more exciting this time around!!

M has been working on the stairs  and it’s looking so good. I think we are going to be painting soon! Then I'll post some before and after pics.  And although it is blowing to beat the band out there tonight, he has enjoyed a couple of the awesome bike trails around our place this week.

(this is a very very muddy bike in case you can't see that from the pic.)

J can be quite a ham, especially when it’s just him and me together, but you will have to come and live with us for a week (which I whole heartedly encourage all of you to do, but maybe not all of you on the exact same week.) before he’ll come out of his shell. I think it’s perfect that his favorite stuffed animal and alter ego is a turtle.

So I’m curious, if you hypothetically had an animal to represent your alter ego, or for you Harry Potter fans an animagus, what would it be?

Fun & Resolutions

For fun this week, we dumped glitter, sequins, beads, curly ribbons, and any random sparkly thing we found around the house in couple of water bottles. Then we filled them with water and they have provided hours of entertainment for the kids.

I tried putting a touch of food coloring in mine, neh, we liked the plain water better. I also tried putting oil in mine to see if it would be cool to have bubbles of it separate from the water. That was also less than successful; it glommed on to my sparkly stuff and I ended up with one big clod instead of the free falling, tumbling fun in the plain water.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to finish 2 or 3 projects a month that I already have begun…yep that means I easily have 3 dozen projects underway. For me the real thrill of creation occurs in the conception of the idea, maybe working out a few details and a pattern, and collecting the materials. Then I lose interest after a couple of hours or days into the actual execution of the project. So I’m planning some “Finish It UP Fridays” to balance out the rest of the week of wild idea generation.  This week's Finish It Up Friday projects were special Christmas pillow cases with our first initials on them,

and a scarf like the one M made for our sister-in-law.  I tried a striped sweater and decided I liked 5 inch squares with the heavier material.  I thought sewing went easier stacking the squares upside down from the way shown in the tutorial; the corners didn't flip up that way.

I also finished up a couple gifts, but I can't show them until after they are delivered next month.

As long as I'm making some of my resolutions public, I might also mention my parenting New Year's resolution is to argue with M in front of the kids (even if we have to stage it), to let the kids sleep in and to stop telling them that they are brilliant.  Why such an ambitious agenda?  Read this interview I heard on NPR and some of his book.

stuff we made for Christmas

I just wanted to brag blog about a couple of gifts we made for Christmas gifts.  First M sewed this super cute scarf.  Yes girls, M, my handy & handsome man, sewed it not me.  I AM such a lucky one.

S asked for a little tiny suffed animal for her favorite stuffed animal.  So I made up BB BunBun, as S named her, out of some fabric that her best friend back in San Diego had used as wrapping on her last birthday gift.  She was thrilled.

J likes to pretend to be a cowboy so I made him a spiffy felt cowboy vest.

But the gift I was most excited to give was a mobile I made for M to hang in his new office.  When he was a kid he took apart, remodeled, and blew up almost every toy he ever had.  Remember Sid on Toy Story?  Yep, the mild mannered man you all know and love today was once Distructo-Boy.  Bless her heart, M's mom hung on to a bunch of the body-less action figure limbs, the twisted Erector set beams and the general charred wreckage of M's beloved childhood toys and I used them to make this mobile.  It was really my first attempt at a mobile so I just approached it as if it were a ginormous earring...I think there are probably better ways, but this worked.

 

2 big 1st for little S

S has had a momentous couple of days. On Thursday night she received an Honorable Mention ribbon in Visual Arts at the City-wide PTA Reflections award ceremony! She wasn’t a bit shy about going up on the stage to shake hands and get her ribbon. I didn’t even think about bringing my camera?!?!? Duh!

Last night S lost her first tooth! (bottom center, left)  M wiggled it a bit, but that made her too nervous and she ended up pulling it out by herself a little later. The tooth fairy left her tooth and a quarter so she’s going to leave her tooth under her pillow again tonight to see if she can get another quarter. She wanted to tell some of the kids at church about it, but the only times she thought of it was when the teacher was talking, so she didn’t because she didn’t want to get in trouble. She is seriously identical to how I was when I was 5. She was sliding her tongue around on the new gap and said, “My tongue can go through a door now!”  It’s fun for me to watch her and I remember exactly how strange and cool it felt.

Happy 3 Kings Day!

Feliz Día de los Reyes Magos a todos mis amigos españoles! Les echo mucho de menos.

Happy 2010

For New Year’s Eve we had Grandma & Grandpa C fly in to party with us. We made party hats out of balloons. We spread bubble wrap on the floor and danced on it. (That was a little too loud for J.) We made 2010 out of glow-in-the-dark bracelets. We went on a treasure hunt and found new DVDs which we watched late into the night while eating excessive amounts of sugar. The kids got sent to bed before midnight but the grown ups all stayed awake to do the ol’Spanish 12 grapes-in-the-mouth-at-midnight tradition. And how 'bout that Blue Moon! It made our snow look magical.