Random stuff

Yesterday I used some big swoopy letters from the font "Aquiline" to put some random lines across the background of a layout I was working on. The layout is of a Young Women activity, so I suppose I should get permission before posting it, but part of the swoops looks like this. (That curlicue thing is the ¶ character--go figure! It's alt+0182) I like that irregular bumpy, broken-up line look. So today I was messing around in Photoshop and using layered filters to see if I could reproduce the effect. I think I got pretty close. Then I took it a little further and came up with this:

Ooh, pretty! Kind of a batik thing going on there. This has possibilities.

This week I've been busy editing photos from a couple of shoots I did (that sounds so formal... ha!) and messing around with various things. We went to the zoo yesterday and Kate got to walk on walls and benches. That's her latest thing. Sometimes she tries to do it without any help, which is rather nerve-wracking.

Kate has learned "apple" (which she says like "bappu") and "meow," and "done!" When she's sitting in her high chair and has finished eating, she holds out her arms and says "Da!" Of course we think she's brilliant.

Doug has an interview at a college in Olympia next week! We are excited.

Children's Day

May 5th, 1992, was the day I arrived in Korea for my mission. It was Children's Day, a national holiday, and I saw lots of people out with their kids, with balloons on their cars, and people flying kites along the river. On Children's Day parents often dress their kids up and take pictures of them in front of the flowers. Azaleas are very common there. We have a lot of azaleas and rhododendrons here in Washington state, too, which makes me feel nice and Springy.



This is Kate on Children's Day last year. She was so little!

This year we went to the park. She wasn't interested in posing for me, but had a good time running around, and I did manage to get a few pictures with the flowers.





Kate enjoyed walking back and forth across the bridge in the Japanese garden. It's a little too steep for her to manage on her own, so her daddy gave her a hand.

After taking the obligatory flower photos we went down to the beach, where Kate sat in the wet sand and got her pants wet, and we watched people throwing sticks out into the water for their dogs to fetch. There was also a seal swimming by, poking his head up to look at all the strange people.




Here's Kate helping her daddy push the stroller along the packed wet sand. She's crazy about pushing things.

A Children's Day Digital Freebie

Tomorrow (May 5th) is Children's Day in Korea. Since I just figured out how to type in Korean, I thought I would make some word art for the occasion.



Here are six titles (one vertical) that say Children's Day ("orini nal") in Korean hangul, and a date with Chinese characters. It's a single png file, so you'll have to cut out the pieces you want. I hope this will be useful to somebody!

Click here to download the file (right-click and choose "save target as").

Mural pictures!

I finished up the Cupboard Under the Stairs on April 12th. Doug went out with me and helped me take pictures and get everything packed up.



Sylvia's husband is going to put a little bookshelf back in the bottom corner, where the ceiling slopes down to the floor. They'll have a small TV in there and all the Harry Potter books and movies. Sylvia's also got some quilts that she made with Harry Potter fabric, and bean bags.

Signing the mural and taking all the tape off is always an exciting moment. It looks so different without the blue tape outlines.



Sylvia's daughter Wendy found some glow-in-the-dark paint, and we thought about putting it on the moon and all the windows, but I tested out a little area and thought it wouldn't look very good. I did put little dabs on all the lamp posts, which is kind of a neat effect.






Kate was just six weeks old when I started painting. If I had known this was going to take so long, I would have taken regular pictures of Kate in front of the mural, so we could see them grow up together.


This last picture is stitched together from a few photos. If I get a wide-angle lens for my camera I'll have to go back and take more.

Happy Easter!

Here's Kate in her pretty dress that her Aunt Barbie made. She liked carrying the basket around, but lost interest in the plastic eggs. (In fact some of them are still sitting on the ground outside--I should go pick them up).


When we got to church this morning, we went in and sat down and I discovered that Kate only had one shoe on. I found the other one out in the parking lot, under a truck that had parked next to us after we went in. We're lucky the shoe didn't get run over!

You may have noticed that I haven't posted any pictures of the mural. It is finished (hooray!) and we took lots of pictures, but I just haven't gotten them up yet. I heard from Lisa at Griff's Shortcuts again, and we definitely are going to offer some digital versions of my frame designs. So I've been working hard on that for a few days. I was hoping to have some things ready for Easter but I'm not sure that's going to happen. I might try to put some stuff up if I can get it ready tomorrow or the next day (I'm not going to work on this on Sundays), or I might just wait till we've got more ready to go.

Almost done!

Work on the Cupboard Under the Stairs has been progressing very slowly. I've only been out to Port Orchard to work on it a few times since Christmas. I was working on rocks for a while, then got sick of that and spent a day putting bars on windows. This picture was taken back in February. Those little floating white things are lamp posts. Or rather, they're lamps with no posts. I've since put in the posts so they are no longer floating. (The perspective on that building looks really weird--I think it's just the angle of the wall. I hope!)

Last Wednesday Kate and I went painting again. I've been saying for quite a while now that I only had "just a little bit more" to do, but this time I finally felt like I was really almost done. There's a bit of water along the bottom that needs to be put in--that won't take long--and the part where the water meets the rocks. Other than that, well, I could spend weeks fiddling with rock shading, but I'm not going to. (Just say no!) So, Doug is going to go out with me tomorrow, and I'm going to finish up and sign it, and get eveything packed up. It's been a long, long project.

Here's Kate out at Sylvia's house last week. Awww!

Kate at 15 months

I'm a bit behind here. I've been working on this layout since, oh, March 27th, actually. The trouble with scrapping digitally is that there are so many possibilities, and I just have this compulsion to keep playing around with it and trying out different things. But then, the nice thing is that I can always go back and change it later, if I want to.

The blue and reddish papers are from Ronnie McCray's "Maritime" kit. I made the large curve and stitching--I was rather pleased with the way it turned out.

Since hitting 15 months Kate has been changing even more. She learned how to turn around in a circle and make herself dizzy, and she's developed a penchant for pushing things. We went up to Ikea last week and she was pushing around one of their little kid-sized shopping carts and just having a great time. Now she keeps wanting to push other things--the stroller when we go to the park, the big shopping carts at Fred Meyer, and even the rocking chair, which doesn't push very well.

Kate also has a new word, and that word is "meema." It means snowman. Over the Christmas season she had this thing about snowmen--everywhere we went, if there was a snowman decoration somewhere, she would spot it. Maybe it's their bright carrot noses (she does like carrots), or their cheerful expressions. You don't see snowmen around so much in April, but Kate does have a couple of books that have have snowmen in them, and she just started saying "meema" a few days ago. There's also somebody on Two Peas who has a snowman blinkie in her signature, so when Kate's sitting on my lap when I'm reading the message board, she'll point suddenly at the screen and say "meema!" and I'll scroll back up and see that I just went past the snowman.

I have a little Gingerbread Man book by Richard Scarry. It was given to me by one of my roommates at BYU. In the front she wrote, "This is to help you remember the gingerbread groundhogs." As it happens, I don't remember the gingerbread groundhogs, but Kate has been enjoying the book. Doug reads it to her (with humorous ad-libbing), and he has a little song that he does for the "Run run, fast as you can" part. Now when Kate sees a picture of a gingerbread man, she points at it and starts singing the little song. ("La, la, la.") It's just the cutest thing.

We do have one book, a little book of colors (which I can't find right now, but I'm sure it's around here somewhere), that has a snowman on the white page and a gingerbread man on the brown page. What fun.

Wahooooo!

I figured out how to type in Korean! With a lot of help from various sources, we finally put the final pieces together today and got it working. I got a bunch of yummy fonts from this site, and I can use them in Word and in Photoshop. Wheee!

A girl and her stuffed animals (and a flower!)

I took this yesterday:



This is Kate sitting in the laundry basket (yet again), surrounded by all her furry friends. We've been pulling her around in the basket quite a lot. Doug made some modifications--a piece of cardboard taped onto the bottom, so it slides smoothly over the carpet, and a belt on the handle so we can pull it without bending over. Loads of fun.



And here's one from today. She's becoming more little girl and less baby.

April Fool!

This is my avatar on Two Peas.





This is my avatar on Two Peas for April Fool's Day.


I'm easily amused.

Check out this beautiful family...

This is what I've been working on the past week. Actually more than the past week. I've been editing photos, but I got sick, and then Kate got sick, and everything ended up taking a lot longer than it should have.

I took these pictures for Ross and Cathryn (owners of the Jerusalem mural) back in October. They were going to order some for Christmas, but I never got the final word from them (I was insanely busy, anyway, what with the drawing and Barb's wedding and all). Then a couple of weeks ago Cathryn found an email in her draft box that she thought she had sent to me back in December, with the list of pictures they wanted. So, I've been editing.



Some of these were posed and some were just spur-of-the-moment candids (and hence not too well focused). You can see the mural in the background on those last two. We'd been taking pictures outside, but it was getting cold, so we went in and were just hanging out in the living room. One of the girls was looking at a book by the lamp, and I just loved the way the light fell on her, so I started taking pictures. Then we had to get the other girls in too.



This was one of my favorites--Cathryn didn't order any of this one, but I had to post it anyway because it's so cute. They're such a sweet family.

Testing 1-2-3

Blogger has been doing weird things since I posted yesterday. *smack!*smack!*

Have a ball

The purchase of this ball was a result of two recent incidents, and led to a rather unfortunate adventure.

Tuesday night we were at the church for Young Men/Young Women (the girls were, ironically, scrapbooking, but I hadn't gotten anything together to work on with them). Kate kept wanting to go run around in the gym, so we spent a lot of time in there. Then a guy came in with a basketball to shoot some hoops. Kate wanted that basketball. Wanted it bad. She wailed and wept and carried on for what seemed like a good 10-15 minutes. (It was very sad, and probably annoying for everyone else, I imagine, but I couldn't help laughing--I mean, who would have thought that a basketball would be such an object of desire?) When the guy took a break Kate got to have the ball for a while, and was just as pleased as punch. She has played with basketballs before--we were using one for an activity a couple of weeks ago, and during the Bishop's spiritual thought in opening exercises Kate was up at the front of the room, pushing the ball around and yelling "Wheee!" So this didn't completely come out of nowhere. We were just surprised by the strength of her reaction.

We have a couple of folding crates that we've been using for laundry baskets. A few days ago, Doug got the bright idea of pulling Kate around in one. This means that we've spent a lot of time hunched over, dragging her around the house while she signs "More!"



So, Wednesday afternoon, I borrowed a little red wagon from a friend in the complex. I put the laundry basket in the wagon and it just barely fit, so I pulled Kate around in that. She was having such a good time that I thought we'd take a walk up to Kmart, which is about 3½ blocks away. She likes looking at the stuffed animals and things. We played with the big plastic balls for a while and I picked one out for her. (Hey, three bucks!) The guy who checked us out tried to put it in a bag, but he didn't have one big enough. I said I'd manage somehow. I ended up holding the ball in one arm while I pulled the wagon with the other.

Shortly after we left the Kmart parking lot, on our way back home, it started to rain. It was a light sprinkle at first, but got progressively harder. By the time we were about a block from home, it was really pouring. Then a sudden gust of wind whisked the ball out of my arm and tossed it down the street, back the way we had come. We stood there in the rain, watching the ball dance away, performing graceful, gravity-defying leaps like an actor on wires in a martial arts movie. I was laughing. I seem to recall Kate pointing after it and exclaiming in surprise. ("Ball!")

In retrospect, I should have just left the ball and gotten Kate home. But we went after it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I left the wagon at the side of the road and picked up Kate and hurried. We found the ball back up at the edge of the Kmart parking lot. Brother Smith from church was standing out in front of his house with an umbrella (I didn't even know they lived over there) and he walked us and the ball back home.

Kate was soaked and shivering when we got home, and looking a little blue in the extremities. I tried giving her a nice warm bath, but she wasn't going for it, just hunching over and crying, so I got her all towelled off and into a nice warm sleeper, and then we spent a good long while snuggled up and nursing. I called the doctor to see if there was anything I should be looking out for. I figured Kate would go to bed early after all that, but she didn't.

Kate seems none the worse for wear, and has been enjoying playing with her ball. This morning she even dragged the laundry basket over to me and then went and pointed at the front door. But we aren't going outside right now. It's raining.

If I could talk to the animals

Kate was laughing in her sleep the other night. Doug said, "She's probably dreaming about doggies!"

Kate loves doggies. If we're outside for a walk and she hears one in the distance, she'll stop and look around and say "Woof!"

We've been reading lots of books with animal sounds. Terry Pratchett's Where's My Cow? is a current favorite. I must have read that one seven or eight times the other day. (Doug and I are both big Discworld fans, so we're starting Kate off young.) One of her other books has a turkey and a dolphin, which are both great fun. Kate has been quite amused by her silly parents' turkey impressions.

Someone posted these on Two Peas: Talking Dogs and Talking Cats. We have been watching them over and over (and over and over and over), with Kate signing "More! More!" before we even get to the end. That last cat just cracks us up.

This Funny Cats clip is also getting a lot of runtime, though it contains no talking.

"More!"

I went to a baby sign class back in January, and I'd been sort of inconsistently trying to do a few signs with Kate. Then when she started copying my "The crocodile goes snap! snap!" when reading one of her little board books, I figured she would be able to learn some. We've been doing "more" and "milk," and I think she's got "change" figured out too.

Today we all went down to Olympia so Doug could drop off a job application at South Puget Sound Community College. After a brief visit to campus we went to a couple of parks. While I was taking pictures of some crocuses (ah, Spring!) Kate was having fun stomping on metal plates in the ground. One of them was a little bit loose, and Doug was jiggling it with his foot. Kate complained when he stopped. He said, "You want some more?" and she signed "more!" (She doesn't do it quite right, but we know what she means!)

One fish, two fish

In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday yesterday, I wore my One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish shirt. (It came from a T-shirt shop in Victoria, BC.) Kate was fascinated by the shirt and kept pointing to the words and the fish. We have the book, too, and she was able to make the connection. "Hey, that's the same thing!" When we were getting ready for bed I put the shirt on her, and she had fun walking around in it. (I hitched it up with a twisty-tie in the back, but it was still dragging on the floor!)