Hobby Horses

I made J a hobby horse like the girls' this year because I figured he'd eventually be big enough to use it. Good thing. He's not big enough, but he sure knows which one is his, and he loves it!

Communication

This little guy hasn't started talking yet, but he sure is getting his point across! I had to sneak the camera in (I cut out the shots of the cabinets and the front of the stove while I walked in) so he wouldn't stop what he was doing, but he caught me in the end, anyway. :-)

A Birthday and more Life!

I was really proud of my Pinewood Derby this year.  It’s my third since I was put in as Cubmaster, and I’m feeling like I’m getting the hang of it.  This year I made a cake, which I was also proud of.

J has figured out how to push the kitchen chairs around and get up on the table and the counters.  Nothing is safe anymore!

We did finally get some snow.  It didn’t stay very long, but we did get out to play once before it turned into rain and disappeared.

J has become obsessed with shoes.  He must always have a pair of shoes on … even if they aren’t his!

We had a Birthday!  I can’t believe how old my L is.  When did that happen?!

I always let my kids pick a cake for their birthday.  This year, L picked a “Buttery Citrus Lemon Cake”.  The recipe sounded good, but I may have just met the first cake that I don’t care to eat.  The cake itself was wonderful, but I couldn’t get past the lime zest in the frosting.  Blech …  But, it wasn’t my cake, and L ate it up!  As did everyone else …

I also made some popcorn balls to take in to L’s class at school.  She wanted pink, so we made pink for the girls and blue for the boys.

And last of all, since L is six years old, we went ahead and bunked the bunk beds the girls have been sleeping on for two years.  It really opens up their room, and they love it!

Little Ghost

Christmas 2011

Let’s start with the gingerbread house.  We had an architect in the house, so I asked him to make a me a template for my own house.  I’m sure you’ll recognize it …  

Both of the girls really got the hang of using the icing bags, and they figured out how to put the candy wherever they wanted.  (I gave up this year on the idea of having my picture-perfect house.  The girls just want to decorate, and they’re more important than a “pretty” house.

We even had our rabbit out the back door:

He’s the little pink blob sitting on the “rabbit poop” – the whoppers!  I was so proud of myself this year for just saving our Halloween candy to use on the house.  It worked out great!

This little man is the reason why we waited so long before putting the tree up (and why the tree is already packed away in the garage again!).  He couldn’t keep his little hands off it!

It was nice while it lasted, though …

Thanks to my dad, because his drill is still in my garage.  Otherwise, the horse heads would still be stick-less … and I'd have three sad little children on Christmas day.

But we did get the heads on and secure.  The kids love them!  Even poor J, who can’t do much more than drag his around the house.

We had church at 9am on Christmas, and the girls were really good about waking up, eating breakfast, putting their dresses on, and going to church before opening presents.  They were real troopers!

This little one refused to pose for pictures … this was the best I got.  At the time, he was irritated with me because I was taking pictures instead of putting his socks on.  He’s figured out what happens when we’re going somewhere, and he wasn’t about to be left behind.

The girls wore their dresses all day!

J got to lick the whip cream off the beater before dinner.

C presented us with another wonderful bird.

And we demolished the house!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!!!

NaNoWriMo 2011

So, this was the fourth year I've participated in NaNoWriMo.  (If you have no idea what I'm talking about: http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/faq/how-nanowrimo-works )

I found out about it in a magazine article on Nov. 3, 2008.  I can remember the date because, after talking about it with C that night, I started writing on Nov 4th, with the prayer that starting four days late wouldn't knock me out of the race.  I wrote frantically, using the only idea I had in mind at the time: an LDS romance.  It was the story of a BYU freshman who falls in love.  I hit my 50k that year, and three months later I finished the novel.  November 2009 I wrote a sequel to that book.  Again, I finished the novel a few months later.

No, I haven't had any success getting those novels published.  After many kind rejections (really, they were mostly encouraging ... one wanted to read more of my work, but I didn't have anything else to send them!) I did some research on LDS fiction and found that publishers are looking for novels with "issues".  My two novels have no issues.  They're cheesy love stories.  That's the way I wrote them, and that's what they are, and I make no appology for it. 

In November 2010, I had a new baby.  I signed up for NaNo knowing there was no way I'd be able to compete.  I wrote about 3,500 words of a sci-fi novel that C gave me a plot for.  What's that, 7% of the 50k? Haha!

This year I was excited to do it again.  I've had an idea for a YA novel (shooting for 12-13 year olds) about a boy who works on a squid boat in Monterrey Bay, and this was the time to do it.  I gave it the working title of "Monterey Jack."  I started off with a bang, but around 12,000 words, I realized I was about half way through the novel.  Twelve thousand times two does not equal 50k.  So, I threw in a subplot about his best friend, whose parents had died and their fortune had never been found.  Between working nights on a squid boat and following a scavenger hunt to find the missing fortune, I eased my story across the 50k line with four days left in the month.  And I actually finished the novel in November, which is the less-emphasized point of NaNo. 

I've learned that writing a novel is a love/hate relationship.  Some days I love it, I think it's brilliant, and I'm so excited about it.  The next day I hate it, it's not worth the storage space on my hard drive, and I ought to just throw it away. 

I haven't decided yet if Monterey Jack is proof that YA is not my genre, or if I just need to give it time and work on it after I've let it sit a few weeks.  I'll let you know how that turns out.

In the meantime, I've hit 60k on my pet project - a novel I've been working on since 2008, on and off.  I'm at the climax of the book, and I can't wait to finish it off.  I'm funneling the momentum from NaNo into this novel, and I can't wait to share it with ... well, anyone who's willing to read it.  :-)

Life at my house

Seems like whenever I go for a while without blogging, I end up with a post like this.  Here’s what’s been going on, in no particular order:

We had our faucet in the bathroom sink bust on us.  One of the handles broke off, and with it gone, we had a four foot geyser in our bathroom!  It meant a trip the next morning to Home Depot and a lesson in how to install a new faucet.

J has learned to feed himself.  He actually does a pretty good job, moving the spoon to the bowl and back again.  But if you turn your back for just a second … Yes, that is oatmeal in his hair!

When my grandma gave us our Christmas presents early so she could see us open them, she probably didn’t think J would have to fight the girls to play with his book.  We all love it!

We did celebrate Thanksgiving, and I had two little helpers when I made my pumpkin pie this year!  They were so excited to eat it!  L ate a piece as big as mine, but poor S took one bite and decided she didn’t like it.  She got ice cream instead.

Are they ready yet?

This is J’s very first peanut butter sandwich.  Or, to be completely truthful, this is S’s peanut butter sandwich … which she didn’t eat for lunch, so I left on the table, telling her she’d have to eat it for snack.  J swiped it.  I found him crouching on the floor, munching away, happy as can be.

He was very pleased with himself.

We put our little Snow White to work.  Snow White and Aurora are regular visitors at our house, now.  (You can spot Aurora’s skirt, sitting at the kids’ table in the background.)  So I figured, if they’re gonna live here, they’re gonna do their share of the chores.  (And yes, I’m having her vacuum the kitchen floor – it’s much more effective than sweeping!)

There have also been more adventures in sewing at my house.  Starting with a project L has been begging for.  She played with a hobby horse at a friend’s house a few months ago, and since then, she’s talked about nothing else.  At C’s encouraging, I decided to try and make them, instead of buying them.  You can find all sorts of instructions on the internet, but I wasn’t happy with any of them.  I wanted a mouth on my horse.  And a white patch on his nose.  And if I went with the internet patterns, it was either one or the other.  So I grabbed a piece of tissue paper:

I found costume fur on sale, and my almost-final result is:

I’m trying to figure out the bridles now, and then I have to buy some large dowels to put them on.  They’re for Christmas, so I still have some time.

Also, I have a sleeping bag (not a camping sleeping bag, but the baby/toddler sleeping bag that you zip them into so they can’t kick off their blankets at night) that I’ve used for all three of my kids.  It’s gotten a little worn lately.

So, you might not be able to see without zooming in on this picture, but the place where I already fixed a tear under the right shoulder has torn again, shredding this time.  The fabric around the turtle has become threadbare, and the fabric at the top of the zipper is about to give out. 

I tried to find a new one at the store, but the only sizes I could find were newborn and 6 months.  So, I ran to the fabric store, and after much puzzling over it, I ended up with this:

J seemed to know it was his, and he kept snatching it off the kitchen table when I was working on it.  Most of the time that was okay, but I had be be careful to put it out of his reach when it had pins in it!

Sometimes I wonder what I did before I bought that sewing machine.  Seems like it rarely ever gets put away!

A few months ago I posted about how I hate when my kids have clothes that fit them in the wrong season … Well, it’s cold now, and I put J in that little fleece outfit again.  It won’t fit for long, but …

We bought L this rocking chair when she was a year old, and I’ve got pictures of her standing on the seat, holding onto the back and rocking.  S did the same thing when she was that age.  J climbed up into it the other day.  He’s too tall to stand – it’s too unsteady, and he’s too smart to try – but here’s him kneeling on it.

And to conclude:

I have a friend who’s joined the 501st Legion, and made herself this Imperial Officer uniform.  They were at a charity event in town, so I took the girls down to see.  At first, when I told them where we were going, they said, “What’s a storm trooper?”  But when I reminded then, “From Star Wars!”  S immediately said, “Oh, and Darth Vader, too!!!”  No.  No Darth Vadar.  Just a Clone trooper.  S was very pleased she got to hold the gun.