We Wanna Rock!

Kate has discovered the joys of throwing rocks in the water. We've been going out to the beach a lot, as the weather's getting warmer, and that's all she wants to do. Luckily there are lots and lots of rocks on the beach, so there's no chance she'll run out any time soon.

Her throwing technique has improved dramatically. A few weeks ago I took her to the duck pond, well-supplied with bread for the ducks and peanuts for any intrepid squirrels we happened to meet. The ducks were hungry and Kate was trying to feed them, but just couldn't manage it. She kept walking toward them with bread clutched in her out-stretched fist, which of course made the ducks run the other way, and then she would fling her hand out and the bread would fall right at her feet.

On this same outing we did in fact meet a squirrel who was not only intrepid but downright stalker-ish. He followed us all around the pond, begging for peanuts. He climbed halfway up my pants leg, and also climbed up trees as we went by and peeked out, right at eye-level, stretching forward and kind of bobbing his head like he was getting ready to take a flying leap. Now, I like squirrels, but I was worried that he might jump on Kate, and I could see that going badly. Don't want to give her a squirrel-phobia for the rest of her life. (I couldn't help thinking of that line from Over the Hedge--"I am a crazy rabid squirrel!") We managed to avoid being leapt upon, and after he ate up the last of our peanuts he eventually figured out that there was no more forthcoming and stopped following us around.

Kate can actually get the rocks into the water now. Or the bread to the ducks, as the case may be. Of course, she still throws like a girl. And she doesn't seem to like waves, so if the water is rough at all she doesn't get too close, and instead of throwing the rocks in herself she has me throw them. She picks up rocks and hands them to me and says, "Throw this!" (Toss) "Throw this!" (Toss) "Throw this!" Lather, rinse, repeat. As we walk around on the beach I've been picking up rocks myself. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with them yet, but something. My jacket pocket is now full of interesting-looking rocks. In fact, as I was putting on my jacket to leave for church this morning I noticed how heavy it was. I need to get them out of there.

Easter Dress

Here's Kate in the pretty dress that her Aunt Barbie made for her. (It looks a lot like last year's dress, since they were both made from fabrics that Barb picked out for her wedding.)

We have church from 9:00 to 12:00. It's always a mad dash to get Kate ready in the morning, and then when we get home she's tired and cranky, but I took along my camera so could snap a few pictures as soon as we got home (and she had a couple of eggs that they gave her in Nursery). It was sunny and the lighting was not great, and Kate did not have an overabundance of patience. Here she is hollering at me to stop taking her picture.

"If you like to waltz with potatoes..."

After I posted about Kate singing wordlessly to herself, we were having dinner and she was sitting in her highchair playing with her applesauce, and we heard her sing, "He's a tramp... I looooove him!" (Guess what she'd just been watching?) We were much amazed and amused. And last night she was singing part of the Primary song (from church) that goes, "Hello! (Hello) Hello! (Hello) we welcome you today." It's so fun. I've heard her sing recognizable snatches of the alphabet song, but it's just neat to hear her putting things together with words.

All of us at NDISB have been working hard at getting the store put back together. They weren't able to restore anything from their older backup, which means they lost their entire customer database. Very sad. But we're determined to bring it back better than ever.



I just finished up this Potato Prints set. I did the potato stamping back in January, and then got distracted with other things. It was fun. And messy. I had potatoes and paint piled up on the kitchen table for days. I also painted a cantaloupe and rolled it on the paper. (And then we ate it!)

I also got Baby Blue-Eyes up in the store, and the creative team ladies have been doing wonderful things with it. Here's a layout by Karen and one by Audrey.

27

We like 27. Kate's birthday is December 27th, my birthday is February 27th, and my dad's is May 27th. So when Kate turned 27 months old on March 27th, it seemed only appropriate to take some pictures to commemorate the occasion. (Not that I need an excuse to take pictures of my cutie!) We went to a nearby park and had a fun walk.

Kate has a new phrase--"It's the wrong one!" She still doesn't say yes, which has made it difficult to figure out what she wants sometimes. "You want this one?" "That one!" "This one?" "That one!" "This one?" I think she know what yes means but she won't say it. We'll hold whatever it is up to her, and if she wants it she taps it. And now if it's the wrong one she'll let us know.

At this moment Kate is sitting on the floor singing loudly and wordlessly to herself, and waving a couple of small fir branches that we brought in yesterday. She sings a lot, and she likes to hold things and make them walk around or dance (that's what she's doing with the daffodil in this picture). We'll have to take these branches out before they start dropping needles on the carpet.

Baby Blue-Eyes and a Crash

I've got this digi kit that I've been working on, off and on, since about last June. It's based around the baby blue-eyes wildflowers that we found at the park in this post. So I finally finished it and got it all packed up, got the previews made and everything (which always takes longer than it seems like it should) and NDISB's server got overwritten by their host. Ack! The whole site is gone. Theresa is working hard on restoring what she can from an older backup. In the meantime, I wanted to share here.



There are some complicated transparent and glassy effects that I had fun with, and a handmade-style paper with petal and leaf inclusions. Hopefully I can get it up in the store soon!

Rainy Day Kate

Spring is here! We've had some lovely sunny days interspersed with clouds and drizzle. Kate is loving spending more time outside, even if it is a bit wet out. On this particular day she was intrigued by a puddle outside our complex where the water drips down from the roof. She didn't want to come in, so I got the camera. It's been a while since I posted some good screen-saver material for Grandma, anyway!

Our friend PDR sent us this cute pink coat for Kate. It brightens up our cloudy days! And it's big enough that she should be able to use it for at least another year. I especially like the hood, which stays up well.





After sitting, and rolling, in the wet grass, Kate had to have a full change of clothes, but she had a good time. In one of those pictures she's yelling at a seagull overhead.

Beware the Ides of March

I just wanted to say that.

"It's a Russian Inwention."

A couple of Doug's students (one from Russia, one from the Ukraine) brought him this for his cough. It's a jar with two pieces of tubing through holes in the lid. The long tube ends above the water and the short tube ends in the water. You put hot water in the jar with garlic and olive oil, and then breathe in through the long tube, which pulls in air through the short tube and makes it bubble through the water. (Doug says it's the same principle as a water bong. I didn't ask him how he knew this.)

We were all sick before the move, then mostly recovered, but Doug was out in the rain loading the U-Haul and had a relapse. He got this annoying cough that hung on for over a week. (Which makes things very difficult, when you make a living by speaking to classes every day!) He tried a lot of different things and the garlic jar seemed to finally kick it. He's feeling much better now, and has started tackling the mountain of papers that piled up during the past few weeks.

The new place

This is what our kitchen floor looks like. There's also a mottled brown shag carpet. Let's just say our ugly couch and our harvest-gold kitchen chairs fit right in.

We are missing our little yard, and our two bathrooms and our walk-in closet. The washer and dryer here are also not quite as nice. But there is quite a bit more storage space in the kitchen, which is great. On the whole, it's not bad. We're probably in the worst spot in the entire complex as far as being surrounded by parking lot on all sides, but there is some nice grass not too far away.

Kate doesn't seem particularly phased (err... fazed. I have been corrected. I knew that. Yeah.) at being in a new place. (She was upset by the old place after we got everything moved out.) It's like, "All my stuff is here, I guess this is where I live now." She's got her little plastic animals all over the living room.

This is the stack-o'-books in Kate's room. What's going to be Kate's room. We found the diaper boxes very useful for moving books (they have handles!) but we only had a few, so we loaded up the boxes, took them over to the new place, stacked the books against the wall, and took the boxes home to get more books. I have since made quite a bit of progress in getting the books back on the shelves, but I wanted to take a picture of the pile first.

36 years (oink!)

My birthday came in the midst of chaos. We're surrounded by boxes, and certainly not settled, whatever that means, but we took the time to go out to lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. (And then came home and took a nap!)

I was born in the Year of the Pig, which has rolled around again. Next time the Year of the Pig comes, I'll be 48. And the time after that I'll be 60. In addition to the twelve animals, the Chinese zodiac also cycles through the five elements (the year I was born was the metal pig--this year is the fire pig), so it takes 60 years to get through the whole cycle.



Here's the "Year of the Pig" kit that I finished up in time for the Lunar New Year. (That's what my cute little papercut piggy was for.) It's been fun to see what people do with it. I wanted to share a couple of links:

Marci's "Only in Vegas" (I really like the way she cut the flowers out of the paper and layered the other stuff on them.)

Kat's "One Month (Very cool strong graphic design!)

My birthday sale!

Prolonging the agony

This was going to be the weekend we moved. It didn't happen. Kate is still sick, I've been sick, and now Doug's got it. We all stayed home from church today, convalescing. Rebecca brought us over some yummy lemon chicken soup (thanks Rebecca!)

We've been dreading this move for a while, and the delay is not helping. Unfortunately it's not one of those things that'll go away if you stop thinking about it. We have started boxing up our books, but it's a small dent in everything we have to do. (We have six bookshelves. With books on them.) Kate has been having fun getting into things that we're trying to pack. I've seen her a few times pick something up, and she gets this look on her face like, "Wow, we have this? I didn't know we had this!"

Kate has started asking to have her nose wiped. Wow.

The answer is 42

The question: How old is Doug today?



Kate has been sick. She was feverish on Sunday, threw up twice on Monday, and has in general been needing a lot of comfort and care. We haven't been getting much else done. This morning I looked at the date on the computer and thought, "Oh yeah, it's Doug's birthday!"

Kate was much better today--not completely well, but much better, and going stir-crazy from being cooped up inside--so we all went out to I Love Bento for a birthday lunch. Kate got her own bowl of miso soup with extra tofu, which she was just gobbling down. That was good to see. It's so hard when she's sick.

It's also my sister Barb's birthday, so we called tonight and sang to her and then she sang to Doug. It's a tradition in my family that we always call and sing Happy Birthday to each other over the phone (often as badly as possible, holding out the "toooo yooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" at the end, like the stork on Dumbo). As the family has scattered it just means we get more phone calls and more songs. It's fun.

Happy Birthday Doug!

Footprints

(I can't help it, this makes me laugh.)

One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that for many times in his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened to be at the very lowest and saddest times in his life. At still other times in his life he could see only a single footprint, with a circle-print where the other foot should be, and a straight line between them. This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it.

"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow You, You'd walk with me all the way. But I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only ONE set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed You the most You would leave me."

The Lord replied: "My son, my precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, It was then that I carried you." The man felt much better, but was still perplexed.

He asked: "But what of the footprints with the line and the circles? Where did they come from?"

"My son," said the Lord, with compassion in His voice, "that was when we were joined by a one-legged pirate with a wheelbarrow."


(I am compelled to add that if you google footprints pirate wheelbarrow you get Princess Bride references.)

This Little Piggy

I've been trying to come up with a Chinese-papercut style pig. I like this little guy.

Say Uncle

I found a cafepress shop recently where somebody has some adoption-themed shirts with words like mother, grandmother, etc, in different languages. Including Korean. Some of it is right, but some isn't. The word they have for uncle is actually the word that you'd use to address a bus driver or some guy on the street. The problem is that family words in Korean are pretty complicated. The word for uncle is different depending on whether you're talking about your father's older brother, your father's younger unmarried brother, your father's younger married brother, your mother's brother, your father's sister's husband, or your mother's sister's husband. "Aunt" is similarly complicated. That would be a lot of different T-shirts to offer!

On the Move

It's that time of year again--the time when colleges start posting their job openings. Doug's been after that elusive full-time job for years, but the market is very seasonal. It's kind of ironic that we're getting ready to move now, and if all goes well we'd be moving again. Though one of the schools with an opening is a school that Doug already teaches at, so that would be ideal. And we wouldn't have to move again till we want to. (So we could use all the good hiring vibes you can send our way!)

We found an apartment at a complex right across the street. Initially we got a second-floor unit, and were going to have to move in January, but then we found out that they had a ground-floor unit opening up in February, so we switched. We feel much better about it now. A little more time to prepare, and no stairs to deal with. We haven't really done anything to get ready yet, though we did get a bunch of boxes. I called a friend whose husband can get boxes from work, and asked if he could bring us some. He brought us all the boxes in the world. We now have stacks of them (flat ones) leaning against the wall in various places around the house. Kate likes to lean them up against the wall and make tunnels, or slides for her stuffed animals. If we had the space we could make one killer box fort.

Our little reader

Kate has loved books for a long time. She's always coming up to me with a book and saying "Read this! Read this!" (It was a great day when we got her to stop dropping them on our faces in bed.) She's interested in the words. When we read Hop on Pop she always wants to read the lists of rhyming words on the end papers. Several times, even. A few weeks ago she started pointing to the words herself and saying "fast past last, it bit, upside down." Sometimes she even gets fairly close to the right words that she's "reading." (We've done it so many times she's memorized where they are.)



We've had Mo Willems' stirring The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog out of the library before. It is currently visiting our home again, along with the adorable Knuffle Bunny. Kate loves both of these books. The last time we had the pigeon book, she was intrigued by the page where the pigeon loses it and yells "THAT'S IT!" Perhaps it's the big letters. Or the pigeon's crazed expression. Or the way that Mom yells "That's it!" when she's reading it. Kate would point to the letters when we got to that page. This time she's reading it with us.



We made an audio file yesterday. Kate's squalling a bit at the beginning, because she wanted to play with the microphone, but she still says "That's it!" right on cue.

Click here to hear Kate

And just for fun, we'll throw in some animal sounds too.

The cold wind doth blow, and we shall have snow

I used that phrase in a kit recently, and I wasn't sure if it was "cold wind" or "North wind." I did some googling and found lots of hits for both, as well as "the March wind doth blow," which was definitely not what I wanted. I decided to go with "cold" for maximum flexibility.

We had a snowy week. Doug missed a whole week of school, since his morning class kept getting canceled. Now he has to rearrange his syllabus.

The first snow was lovely and fluffy and sticky. We went out right before lunch time and made a snowman. It was the kind of snow where you roll the snowball and all the snow comes up off the ground, leaving a swath of bare grass behind you. I used up most of the snow in the yard making that snowman. We didn't have anything to put on it for a face, though. I think the reason Kate likes snowman is because of their cute faces. She didn't seem much impressed by this one.



The snowman slumped a little in an afternoon thaw, and then fell over that night as the wind picked up and temperatures dropped. The roads were bad. Schools closed. Sunday morning Doug tried for an hour to get the icy locks on his car open, and ended up walking to church for his early meetings.

It's been warming up and drizzling the past couple of days and the snow is mostly gone. Kate seems relieved to get out of the house again. And of course, we are happy that she's happy.

Vrooom!

Coming to you via my new graphics card. We are speedy! We got some more RAM for the computer a little while ago (bumped it up to a gig), but I wasn't really noticing a difference. Then Doug, poking around in the machine's innards, discovered that it didn't have a graphics card at all but was just running off the motherboard. So we ordered a card. He got it installed last night (after minor difficulty which did not quite devolve into cursing) and now everything is so much faster. Wheee! Not just the big graphics programs like Photoshop and Painter, but even things like opening up windows in the file browser. This should be a major boost to my productivity. When working on graphic stuff I tend to do a lot of zooming in and out, and it would often get hung up just re-drawing the screen.

Now I can start saving my money for other things. Next on the list: Adobe Illustrator, and a professional membership at sharedink.com.