Kate at 48 weeks

Kate and I both have drippy noses. Joy. We weren't up for much in the way of pictures.

These two are titled, "Kate with snot-sucker." Hey, I have to distract her with something, right?

Eleven months

Kate was eleven months old on Sunday! After church I took some pictures of her in her cute little dress.




Cheap and easy toys are the best! This is a piece of ribbon on a cardboard tube. Kate has fun waving it around.

This is a chest that I made in a woodshop class at BYU. (I went through a very brief phase where I was saying I wanted to be a cabinetmaker, but it turned out I was afraid of the machinery.) The chest has been in Doug's parents' storage shed for eight years, and his mom brought it up when she came to visit. Kate has been learning how to work the doors and drawers. We'll have to watch out for pinched fingers.

It is I, Grammar Police

In school we learn that we should put the other person first and say "Bob and I went to the store" instead of "Me and Bob went to the store." Many people get this drilled into their heads and will over-correct and use "Bob and I" even when it's supposed to be "Bob and me." (On the radio the other day I heard someone talking about "the dedication of my partner and I.") The trick people will tell you is that you should take the other person out and see which pronoun to use. For example, you would say "Sally sat down next to me," so if Bob was there too you say "Sally sat down next to Bob and me."

Most people probably know this. We have grammar threads on Two Peas every once in a while, and it seems like this often gets brought up. People complain about the incorrect usage of "Bob and I" when it should be "Bob and me." I know, I notice it too.

But how about this construction?

"This is Bob and I."
"The winners of the contest were Sally and I."
"That's my mother and I in front of the cabin at the lake last year."

Many people would probably think that they should say "This is Bob and me" rather than "This is Bob and I." But it is grammatically correct to say "This is I." (If you want to get technical, the "be" verb takes the nominative case.)

It sounds awkward and stilted. Nobody talks that way. I don't talk that way. (Though I do say "This is she" when I answer the phone, even though I think it sounds doofy.) But it is correct.

Generally, I tend to be much more of a descriptive grammarian than prescriptive. Feel like ending a sentence with a preposition? Be my guest. Want to boldly split infinitives that no one has split before? You go right ahead. I'm not saying that everyone should go around saying "This is I." That's not my point. The point is that it's not wrong if someone says "This is Bob and I."

Now, anyone want to know the difference between "lie" and "lay"?

Kate and Grandma

We enjoyed having Doug's mom here. She got to spend lots of time with Kate, and I got lots of painting done, which was great. Hogwarts is still not finished, but I'm much closer now.

We took some pictures of Kate with Grandma Mary the night before she left. Kate is the fifteenth grandchild on Doug's side of the family, but apparently it never gets old.



(Yes, that's the ugly couch--we haven't gotten the slip cover back on since we moved.)

Kate at 47 weeks

I took pictures out at Sylvia's house this week. It's been quite a while since I've been able to do that. In some ways it's easier than taking them at home.

Our little girl is getting so big! This past week she's been on an eating binge. Maybe her food intake has finally caught up with her activity level. When we had her weighed at the doctor's office recently we found that she'd only gained eight ounces in two months, so I was a little worried. Now I think maybe she's getting ready for a growth spurt.

My friend Amelia

It has been brought to my attention that I need more pictures of me with Kate, so here are a couple.

Amelia is my Wrinkle Puppy puppet, that I got back in 1989 when I was going away to college. (My sister Betsey has one named Cookie that we always enjoyed playing with, so I thought it would be fun to have one of my own.) She has mostly sat on a shelf all these years, but has occasionally come in handy for entertaining other people's children. Now she gets to entertain Kate. Kate loves Amelia. She shrieks and laughs when she sees her.



There's something about the shape of Amelia's nose that triggers Kate's latch-on reflex. Heh.

"Looking for Livingstone"

We love this song by James Gordon--the jungle as a metaphor for communication. (And it's great for dancing around the living room.)

Return to Hogwarts

Doug's mom arrived on Monday, and then we went out to Port Orchard four days in a row (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday--whew!). Kate had a good time playing with Grandma Mary while I worked on the Cupboard Under the Stairs. Most of that time was spent working on this bridge. I was hoping I could just concentrate on painting for a few days and get a lot done, but it's still slow going. There's a lot of exacting work in that bridge, with all the straight lines and the arches that all have to be about the same size.



Getting back to Hogwarts now seems timely, with the fourth movie opening this week. I mentioned to Doug that if we go see it he could wear his Ravenclaw robe. That would be fun. We did go see Serenity in the theater, and left Kate with a babysitter for the first time ever. She did great, so I'm sure we could do it again, but we haven't decided yet.

Kate at 46 weeks

And here are a couple from this Monday. This shoot did not go well. It's getting more and more difficult to get Kate to sit and smile. She keeps crawling towards me and wants to play with the camera. She is most certainly not allowed to play with the camera, but she keeps trying anyway. Hope springs eternal.

Kate at 45 weeks

I'm behind again--these are from Monday last week. Like my artistic cropping?

How I spent my Veterans Day vacation (2002)

(I dug this up from several years ago):

And it came to pass that we did journey unto the city of Seattle, even unto the market which is called Pike Place, and we did gaze upon the fine meats and the cheeses from many lands. And we saw that they were delicious to the taste, and very desirable. But of the fine meats and the cheeses we bought not, for the price thereof was exceeding great.

And when we were an hungered, we did buy of them that sold food from the land which is called Turkey, and we did feast upon the doner and upon the chicken talas, yea, and upon the lentil soup did we feast, and behold, it was good.

And we went unto the sellers of toys which is called FAO Schwartz, and we did dance upon the large piano keyboard. But behold, we could not play "chopsticks" as did Tom Hanks in the movie, and we waxed wroth. And I spake unto my spouse and did say unto him, "Phooey! This is lame!" and we did depart from thence.

And it came to pass that we did journey to and fro upon the streets of that city for many hours, and my feet did grow exceeding sore, for I did wear upon my feet the boots of hiking, to which I was not accustomed, and they did pain me, and great was the soreness thereof. But my husband, to whom the boots of hiking were grown accustomed, did say that his feet were fine and pained him not. And I would that he should not say so, for I did envy him.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

This is the other painting project that I've been working on--clouds for a family out in Gig Harbor. They are expecting a baby girl (any day now), so they are moving their two-year-old boy out of the nursery and into his own airplane-themed room. The clouds were a nice change from some of the more exacting work that I've been doing recently.

The plan was for me to paint some airplanes as well (like WWI era biplanes) but because of the set painting for the play, and various people getting sick at inconvenient times, I wasn't able to devote the time to this project that I would have liked. I went out yesterday and finished up the clouds. The plan at this point is that they'll decide whether they do want airplanes or if they'll stick with just the clouds, and they'll get back to me after Christmas. That sounds good. In the meantime I can focus on the Hogwarts mural again, and this drawing for my sister-in-law's uncle, which I still haven't started.



Overall I'm pleased with how it turned out. It was a quick job, anyway. Quick for me. The hardest part was doing some of the clouds on the ceiling. Aside from the fact that painting above your head is tiring work, the undersides of clouds are often pretty featureless, so it was hard to make them interesting but realistic.


This is the ceiling fan that started it all. Isn't it cool?

The play's the thing

...the thing which kept me busy for weeks.

This is a multi-stake production of the musical "Savior of the World." I think there were five stakes involved (a stake is a group of 9-12 wards or congregations), so they had a large pool of resources to draw from.

Due to my chronic inability to do anything quickly, the set painting ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. I know it only has to look good from a distance, but I'm up close working on it. Ah well.

The main set was these panels with arches in them, and steps on one side. They kept giving me more props to paint, as well. I mentioned earlier that I was comprising the entire painting committee. This turned out to be not exactly true, as they did get a few people out to help me one Saturday. They went to town on the arches and got the whole thing basically covered, but I just wasn't happy with the way it looked and ended up going back over everything.



The hardest thing was getting people to watch Kate while I worked. Several of the Young Women volunteered, and we also passed around a sign-up sheet in Relief Society and got some of the older sisters involved as well. By the end of it I think Kate was starting to think she lived at the church.

Here I am painting the rock that is rolled in front of the tomb--also known as "the giant pizza." I offered to paint pepperoni on it, but they didn't think that would go over well.

Kate and I went to the matinee performance this last Saturday, while Doug stayed home and graded papers. I had seen bits of the practices and was really impressed by how well they pulled everything together. They have a live orchestra and everything. Some of the music is really lovely.



There are four more performances this weekend, so you can still catch the show! And look for my name in the program, as "set artist."

Kate at 44 weeks

Kate has been sick and feverish this week. She was just starting to get sick on Monday, and she was rather ticked at me when I was taking these pictures, but I did get her to smile a few times. Poor baby! She is finally feeling better now, hooray! We had a rough couple of days (and nights).

Kate is pulling up on things and standing a lot. She has started saying "Hi!" (sometimes even in the right context) which is absolutely adorable, and she has a new game where she sticks out her tongue at herself in the mirror. She's so funny.

Halloween

Doug went all out with his Halloween costume this year (meaning that he started planning well in advance, which I...errr...didn't). He was a guest lecturer at Hogwarts. We went to Jo-Ann and he got a pattern, some black suiting fabric, and blue lining (at the same time that I got some fabric for photo backdrops, finally). Our friend Jill at church put it together for him. She did a great job!

Doug says that if he were to get sorted at Hogwarts he would be in Ravenclaw, so he designed the costume in Ravenclaw house colors. He got a tie from wizardties.com and a Ravenclaw patch from patchpalace.com (the book version, which has an eagle on it, not the movie version, which has a raven on it. Go figure). He made himself a name tag out of Sculpey polymer clay. You can print something out on a laser printer (or a photocopier--something that uses toner), put it face down on the clay, and wet it with rubbing alcohol, and it will transfer the image onto the clay. (I told him he should be the Lecturer in Recent Runes, and then he could have a sly reference to Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. He laughed but stuck with the Ancient Runes.)

We had a Halloween party at church Friday night. I had been busy painting all week, so I just kept my painting clothes on and went as a painter. I ran out of time to put something together for Kate, so I just gave her a paintbrush to wave around and said she was my assistant. She thought that was great fun.



We ran into these two cute little Harry Potters in the hall. Doug said, "I think those are some of my students! They must be first years." We took some pictures with them later.

I love this picture of Kate bear-crawling, off to explore. She still wants to stay close to Mom and Dad, but is reaching out more and more. She seemed quite excited by the bustle and the bright colors.


Here Kate meets a little horse. Isn't it fun how babies are so fascinated by each other? (The little horse was also fascinated by Kate's paintbrush.)

Our friend Tom ate six hotdogs at the party. Fortunately I did not get any pictures of this feat.

Doug also wore his robe to his classes on Monday, though he said he took it off once he started teaching, because he was getting chalk dust on the sleeves.