"I need more letters!"

Since I posted less than two months ago about Kate recognizing a few letters, she has learned the entire alphabet and the sounds that the letters make. She just loves letters. One of her favorite things to do is go out and paint letters on the porch (with water). I make the letters and then she comes along behind me and traces over them--or sometimes she traces the lines pretty well, and sometimes she kind of colors them in--and when she gets to the end she says, "I need more letters! I love letters!" (Doug once, when asked for more letters, gave her a thorn and eth. I told him not to confuse her.)

We got this Leapfrog video out of the library, that has a little song (to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell") that goes, "The A says aah, the A says aah, every letter makes a sound, the A says aah!" and goes through every letter of the alphabet. Sometimes we sing it together while we're painting. (Kate still has her pronunciation quirks, so some of the sounds don't come out quite right, but she knows what they are.) She can also identify the letters just fine in isolation, not just in order or with the song.

Kate has also figured out that letters make words, and she's started trying to figure out what the words say, which she does purely by guessing from the context. It's awfully cute. Like the time she was looking at the cover of The Land Before Time and read, "T-I-M-E. That spells dinosaurs!" Of course she's got a long way to go before she's actually reading, but she's very interested in letters and words and books, which we think is great fun.

Kate talks in her sleep sometimes. Often something like, "I want to hold it!" which she says a lot when she's awake. The other night I saw her smile to herself in her sleep and murmur, "W-X-Y-Z!" Maybe she was dreaming about painting letters on the porch.

The shadow knows

I've spent a good part of the day today making shadows. It ended up taking a bit longer than I was expecting, but it's amazing the difference a good shadow makes. Here's one of the pieces I've been working on, without the shadow:



And here it is with the shadow:



These are for the monthly collaborative mega kit at ndisb. I'm in charge this month. I wanted to call it "Stratford-Upon-Avon," but we ended up with kind of a broader scope so we have changed the name to "Hey Nonny Nonny." It's period, but vague. Says so much without actually meaning anything.

Edit: the ribbons are now available separately.

Eight Random Things

I've been busy--I was reading Harry Potter, and then working on various projects. I'm in charge of the mega kit at ndisb this month, and I'm also putting some stuff together for a charity kit for orphanages in China. Lots going on.

Since Eva said she wanted to tag me, I thought I'd do this "eight random things about me" meme.

1. I was named after my mother's mother's mother. Helena was the first of her two middle names. She was from Sweden. I don't have a middle name, myself, but have not often felt the lack.

2. For many years I labored under the misapprehension that "buttercup" was another name for daffodil. It wasn't until I was in college that I found out what a buttercup was. I'm still not sure how this happened, but I have since discovered that other people also have the same problem (a search for "buttercup" on pbase brings up quite a lot of daffodil pictures), so perhaps I heard someone say it somewhere and it stuck. But it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, they're yellow, and they have that cup-shaped thing....

3. I have a scar by my left eye from when I fell off the neighbor's trampoline and hit my head on the frame, and had to have stitches. I had a babysitter at the time and I was not supposed to be in the neighbor's yard. My parents came home and found an ambulance in the driveway. I think I was about six.

4. I still have my baby blanket and slept with it for years. Blankie is getting so ratty that I had to put him away after Kate was born, for fear of further damage. *sniff*

5. I have the same thing for breakfast practically every day--oatmeal with raisins and banana. It has to be old fashioned oatmeal, and it has to be done a certain way. I used to put honey and cinnamon in it too, but somewhere along the way I stopped doing that.

6. I made up a Korean name for myself, Im Ha Gyoung (임하경), based on the meaning of my own name. My maiden name means "elm by the stream" and Helena means "light," so I used Im (also spelled Lim), a Korean surname that means forest, and then Ha, meaning stream, and Gyoung, meaning light. Not that I've ever gotten to use it for anything.

7. I enjoy puzzle games, like Nisqually (one I'm proud of having solved) and also stuff like Blix and Hexic. (Hexic is much more complex than it looks.) Though I hardly ever do stuff like this anymore, since discovering Photoshop.

8. I would love to get a copy of Sandra Boynton's Hester in the Wild. It is very out of print. I can recite large stretches from memory, but it's not quite the same.

Now I'm supposed to come up with eight people to tag. Ummm... if you haven't done this one, and you'd like to, have at it!

Woof?

Kate found this odd scrap in Doug's leather working stuff, and decided it was a dog. It does have a kind of blocky, terrier-ish look to it. She has adopted it as her new friend. We call it "leatherdog."

Random Acts of Kindness

During the week that Doug was gone, Kate and I went to Trader Joe's one day. It was promising to be beastly hot, so I wanted to get it done early, but Kate was fractious and I, feeling harried and apparently more scatterbrained than usual, left the house without my debit card. I did not realize this until later, of course. We got to Trader Joe's and did our shopping--ran into Jessica from church and her kids, and said hi--then we got up to the checkout line and as the cashier was ringing up my stuff it suddenly hit me. That awful realization: Oh no! My card is in my other pants! Aaaaargh!

I reluctantly pictured dragging Kate all the way home and back again (nap time was fast approaching) and then I remembered Jessica. After a quick consultation with the cashier I ran and found Jessica (fortunately they were not very busy and there wasn't anyone waiting behind me at that point) and asked her if she would be able to cover me and I'd pay her back later that day. Jessica was agreeable, so we went back up to the register together, only to discover that the cashier on the next lane had paid for me. Seventeen dollars, minus some change. I was astounded. My cashier said, "Isn't Dagmar awesome? I think I owe her about two grand by now." As I stood there gaping and stammering, Dagmar waved it aside and said, "No no, it's good. Seriously. I'm a mom." I asked about her schedule for the day, so I could bring her the money, and she said, "You can pay me back, or just do something nice for somebody else." She told me she was going to Oregon for the weekend but would be back after that.

I drove home feeling rather stunned. I've had experiences, at times, of having someone there to help me right when I needed something, and I've felt blessed and grateful. Little things, usually. Never a complete stranger to the tune of seventeen dollars. I decided to make Dagmar a card to give her along with the money. She struck me as something of an artistic, free-spirit type (she had long dreadlocks adorned with big ceramic beads) so I thought she might appreciate something like that.

It took me a few days before I got the card done, what with one thing and another (Kate wanted to help, which was not helpful). I put the money inside and wrote her a little note, and wrapped it up pretty. I called to see if Dagmar was working, and we went down to give it to her. She loved the card (said I really didn't have to pay her back), got a hug, and then as I was trying to tell her how much I appreciated it I got all teary-eyed and she said, "Aww! Give me another hug!" When we left she said, "You made me happy! Thank you!"

The funny thing is that when I handed Dagmar the card she had no idea what it was for, and when I reminded her about what she'd done she said, "Oh! That was you?" I honestly think that if I hadn't paid her back she wouldn't have thought of it again. How many people would do something like that for someone they'd never met? I'll think of Dagmar next time I'm able to help out someone who needs a hand. In the economics of kindness, it's a gain to be able to pay it back and pay it forward.

Point and Click

Kate has learned to use the computer mouse! Our baby is growing up so fast. *sniff*



We had a week without Doug, while he was away at scout camp (not this last week but the week before). That was an interesting experience. It was also about the hottest week ever. Boy, we're glad that's over. (On both counts--Kate and I were kind of getting on each other's nerves.) When Doug left Monday morning, Kate was just barely starting to figure out how to use the mouse, and by the time he got home on Saturday she was clicking away like a pro. There's a lot of fun stuff on noggin.com and on starfall that she enjoys playing with.

There are several "Scribblevision" games on Noggin where you color in pictures and then it animates your coloring within a larger scene. That's some pretty cool programing. It's also fun because you don't have to stay in the lines, but can make the picture look like something else. (One page has a bird flying by, flapping its wings--Doug turned it into a flying boy who flaps his arms.) There's also the Upside Down Show's Schmancy Schmashup Game where you create your own drawing and it inserts it into a video. We've had some fun with that one.

Seasons of Discovery

I have a couple of circle journals that have been in my possession for waaaay too long. I got this one done today. The theme is seasons. Instead of doing a page about my favorite season, I decided to take a different approach.



I used some of Anita Stergiou's papers from her Floriade Collection, and decorated it with my Potato Prints and other stuff.

Killer Bunnies and Cooking Rats

Friday we we over to the Tracys' house to play Killer Bunnies. They discovered this game recently and had been telling us what crazy fun it was, so they invited us over to play. It certainly is a complicated, wacky game. I didn't really get a good sense of it, just playing it the one time (and we had to cut our game short because it was past Kate's bedtime), but I was intrigued enough to want to give it another go.



We found the font on the cards kind of annoying, which was one drawback, and we also spotted an "effect" that should have been "affect." Oops. It's one of those games that has multiple expansion packs, and some of the cards refer to other cards that haven't been created yet. Now that's planning ahead.

Saturday we went to see Ratatouille. We don't get to the theater very often--the last movie we went to see was Serenity, almost two years ago. But we are fans of Pixar in general and of Brad Bird in particular, and we'd been looking forward to Ratatouille since we first saw the teasers. We decide to take Kate along, figuring that two-and-a-half might be old enough for her first "big movie," and that a cute little rat might capture her attention. Well, the movie experience turned out much like the wading pool experience--she didn't want to be there. I eventually got her to go to sleep (which messed up her nap schedule for the rest of the day), but at least Doug and I had a good time.

This movie may not be particularly engaging for young kids, but we enjoyed it and will probably buy it when it comes out on DVD. In fact, while I was watching I found myself wishing we had it on DVD already so I could listen to the commentary. The story was solid and the execution masterful, as expected. We particularly enjoyed the stylized animation in the end credits. As my own art tends to lean heavily on the representational (essentially just copying what I see, most of the time), I am impressed by the pure artistry in this sort of thing. It's like a really good dish that you want to savor and study to figure out if you can reproduce it yourself.

Lois McMaster Bujold, and a pigeon (coo!)

We went up to the University of Washington last night to see Lois McMaster Bujold, one of our favorite authors. This was the second "reading and book signing" that we've attended there which turned out not to be a reading, but she spoke and answered questions for a while before signing books. Kate was very interested in the toys at the bookstore and not at all interested in listening to these strange grown-ups, so unfortunately Doug didn't get to hear any of it. I suppose next time we do something like this we really should get a babysitter.



Here's Kate with a big Mo Willems pigeon. We currently have Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and The Pigeon Finds a Hotdog out from the library, and Kate has been enjoying reading them over and over. (She's been practicing saying "Oh for Pete's sake!" and "Hey, I'm a curious bird!") So I was tickled when I saw this big pigeon at the bookstore. Apparently it was some kind of promotional prop, but they did say that there should be smaller versions for sale later this year.

The pigeon has his own website! Kate and I were much amused by the hotdog game.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes science fiction and fantasy and is best known for her Miles Vorkosigan series, which you could describe as space opera, but very good space opera. The "science" is mostly social and biological, with a few space battles thrown in for good measure. They're very character-driven, thoughtful, touching, at times very funny. And just so well-written. I can't give these books a blanket recommendation, because of some of the content, but I love them and keep coming back to them over and over. Memory is probably my favorite. A Civil Campaign, a close second, is absolutely charming and has been favorably compared to Jane Austen, with its regency romance flavor. We took along our copy of A Civil Campaign and got it signed. (I didn't want to drag the whole stack of books along, so we just picked out that one.)



It's been a few years since the last Miles book--Lois has been working on other things. We have enjoyed her fantasy works as well, but we are eagerly awaiting the next Miles installment next year. Yippee!

Hair today

I donated my hair! I've been thinking about doing this for a while--the last time I got my hair trimmed was right after Kate was born, and it had gotten all ragged and uneven, plus it was taking forever to dry after I took a shower (which can make things difficult when you're, say, trying to get to church on time). So I finally bit the bullet and went and did it. They took off about twelve inches. I wanted it long enough that I could still put it back in a ponytail, for swimming and stuff. I haven't figured out yet exactly what I'm going to do with it, but I imagine it'll be nice for summer. Here are the after pictures:



I told Doug that last one was my Alan Doyle impersonation, but his hair is cooler than mine.

The big 2.5

Kate is officially two and a half today! A quarter of a decade. Wow. I took this picture this morning. She looks so serious and grown up. We can see little differences every day, in the way she's developing more control over her coloring, and stringing more words together in new ways all the time.

Kate has been very interested in letters lately. She points out letters on things and we tell her what they are. We've also been playing with the Starfall site a lot. She knows A, B, O, and S, and probably a few others as well. Her newest thing is that whenever I hold her up to the sink to wash her hands, she points to the knobs and says "C for cold, H for hot!" Except she keeps getting it wrong and says "H for cold."

A couple of pictures of Kate and letters:




At Kids Zone at the zoo (or, as Kate calls it, "the looz,") there's a big rubber-paved area that has words like "SWING!" "JUMP!" "SLIDE!" Kate points to the letters one at a time, and we say them out loud. "W-I-G-G-L-E," and then when we get to the end we say, "exclamation point--dot!" I think she likes that part.

Duck on my head

We've been watching some of the music videos on noggin.com with Kate. There's one called "Pig on Her Head" that has a catchy tune and quite adaptable, if somewhat unlikely, lyrics. We've been playing around with it a bit, like the time Doug was carrying a box of books on his head and started singing "My dad has a box on his head."

So today, we were sitting in church and Kate was playing with the little bean-bag animals that Rebecca brings in her bag. There's a monkey, a koala, a rat, and a duck. It helps to keep Kate occupied, to have toys that she only sees on Sundays. She stood up on the pew next to me and started bouncing the duck on my head and singing "My mom has a duck on her head." Ha! This child is just too clever sometimes. I think that's the first time I've heard her put her own words in a song.

Here, kitty kitty kitty!

The latest project!

Waiting Pool

We've been saying, for a long time, that we should take Kate swimming. She loves playing in the bath and will stay in there for an hour if we let her. She's also fascinated by fountains. We found out that the wading pool at Fircrest pool is free (and open to non-Fircrest residents after 4:00), so we figured this would be a good time to try it out.

I haven't had a swimsuit for years. I found one online that I want to get, but they're out of stock in my size. So, at the moment I am still swim-less. So Doug took Kate into the water. Or not so much into as near unto. It turned out she was not as eager as we'd hoped. She does tend to be a bit on the cautious side. They spent a lot of time sitting on the edge of the pool, watching the other kids. I suppose we should have tried last year. I was impressed by some of the teeny-tiny kids that were just toddling right into the water, and having a great time. Maybe next time Kate will be ready to actually go in the water.

As I was writing this I checked the swimsuit site again, and they had what I wanted, so I ordered it! Woo hoo! I'm getting this top (pink and black) and these bottoms. I have thigh issues and... err... shaving issues, so this should be just right.

What's the magic word?

"Toast!"
"Can you say please?"
"Toast!"
"Say 'Toast please!'"
"Okay!"
"You say it. 'Toast please!'"
"Okay!"
"Say 'Toast please!'"
"Okay!"
*sigh*

Father's Day

I hope all the daddies out there had a great Father's Day! At church they gave out candy bars. (For Mother's Day we got potted phlox plants. Mine isn't doing very well.) When the Primary kids went up to sing for the dads, Kate ran up on the stand too. Doug took her over to stand with the other kids. He said she wanted to sing the ABC song.

We got Doug a make-your-own-tie kit. Now he's trying to decide what to put on it. So many possibilities!

Grandma Mary and Grandpa Al

Doug's parents left yesterday. They were here for almost a week. We got to spend some fun time together, and I particularly enjoyed having someone around to watch Kate while I took a shower in the mornings. One morning they went out for a walk with the stroller and were gone for rather a long time, and when they got back they were pushing a different stroller! That was a surprise. They'd been up near Kmart, going up a curb when a wheel snapped right off. They went into Kmart and got us a new stroller. (The other one was a hand-me-down--the plastic buckle on the seat belt also broke recently, so we'd been resorting to tying the strap around Kate.) They also got a little toy piano keyboard for Kate, that she's been having a lot of fun with. It's the grandparents' job to get noisy toys, right?



We went downtown to ride the Link (the light rail), which Kate calls "the little train." She gets very excited about it. We went to the library, and then ended up at this fountain where we let Kate walk around on the blocks and watch the water for a while. She loves fountains.



We also went to the beach, on another day, and sifted sand while Doug graded papers. Kate likes to walk on the big driftwood logs. Sometimes she climbs up too high and makes us nervous.



On Friday we went to the Indian buffet in Lakewood for lunch, and then went to Fort Steilacoom park. This park has the coolest playground.



On previous outings we'd gotten Kate to go down this slide with a lot of coaxing, but this time she was just zipping down it all by herself. Wheee!



Here's Kate at the top and bottom of the slide. When going in at the top she would turn around and wave and say "See you later!" Too cute.

Living so far from our families, Kate doesn't get to see either set of grandparents very often. We weren't sure how she was going to react to having extra people in the house, but she quickly figured out who her new play-buddy was, and learned to say "Damma!" for Grandma. When she saw these pictures she said "That's Damma!"

Recalling Korea (longing and nausea)

A couple of weeks ago we went down to Lakewood for a Korean dinner with our friends Don and Jill Tracy, who had never had Korean food before. I made this layout and just felt compelled to do all the journaling in Korean (on my tablet). I was waxing nostalgic.

My very favorite meal is a good kimchi jjigae bek pan ("bek pan" is the rice and side dish part), but to be really, really good it has to have kim (roasted laver seaweed) as well. Restaurants generally don't provide kim in their side dishes, so when I'm going to have kimchi jjigae I get my own kim and take it along. This always seems to amuse the waitresses. (Look! It's an American eating kimchi jjigae! With kim!) I tried giving Kate some kim before and she didn't like it, but this time she decided it was good and ate several pieces.

This is not where the nausea comes in (though much as I like Korean food, my stomach often does feel a little weird afterwards, especially if I haven't eaten it in a while). Yesterday we got out our home movies from Korea, which we hadn't watched in years. When Doug and I were teaching in Chonan, we borrowed a video camera and shot a few hours' worth of footage. It was fun to watch our ten-years-younger selves and remember all the fun things that we did, and our teeny apartment with the black-tiled bathroom, and Doug's hilarious bit with the green syrup ("My mama always said that one should always put melon syrup on one's pancakes"). Unfortunately, with the hand-held camera shake, I can only watch a few minutes before I start feeling queasy. Motion sickness is not generally a pervasive problem for me, but there are certain things that get to me. It's a shame. I'm sure I'd watch these videos more often if they didn't make me want to toss my cookies. Maybe one of these day we'll get them digitized and I can post short clips of the good parts.

I've been thinking about Korea a lot. Something will come up--a smell, a feeling in the air, a stand of cosmos flowers in somebody's yard, and it takes me right back. Sometimes I miss it so badly it hurts. Actually as the weather has been warming up, my desire to go to Korea has been waning somewhat, thinking about how beastly hot and humid it gets there in the summer. The urge seems to strike mostly in the Spring and Fall. Fall in Korea is just so heart-achingly beautiful. I always get kind of wistful in the fall, anyway.

I've been lucky--after my mission, I got to go back to Korea twice. Many people never get to go back at all. But it's been ten years now, almost, and the itch returns. I've been trying to figure out how we could go back again. When Doug and I went and taught in Chonan, we'd only been married about six weeks when we arrived. People were surprised that we would do something like that so soon after getting married, but really, when else are you going to do it? We had both recently graduated (Doug had finished his M.A.), had no house, no jobs, no kids--sure, let's run off and see the world! We did, and it was great fun. And after Korea, we got to spend three years in Newfoundland. I miss Newfoundland a lot too, though I don't dream about it very much. But settling down (sort of), accumulating lots of stuff and obligations and two large and complex computer systems, not to mention a child, makes uprooting and taking off a rather more daunting prospect.

I find myself drawn to stories about families who get to raise their kids in more than one culture. There's something very appealing in the idea, an increased richness of experience, a different understanding, perhaps a focusing of priorities, after seeing what things are important to people in different places. I recently ran across the story of this American girl (at least I guess she's American--Belgian father, American mother) graduating from high school in Korea. Rural Korea, even. There's also a video at the bottom of this page. She just sounds so astonishingly Korean to me. I am intrigued. I would love for my kids to have an opportunity like that. Maybe not actually attending a Korean high school, knowing what they go through, but, well, it is intriguing.

I've felt a sense of urgency, for some reason, to go, go, do it now before life gets even more complicated. But I have to keep telling myself that Korea will still be there. It changes, but it will still be there. I'll get back somehow, eventually. Maybe to stay for a while, maybe just to visit--long enough to walk the mountains, to explore, to eat, and of course take lots of pictures. Someday.

Putting the Fun back in Fungi

A couple of years ago, when my family was visiting for the occasion of Kate's birth, I sent my dad out for salad makings and we got into a discussion about who did and didn't like mushrooms. After identifying the fungophobes and fungophiles, we got a little wacky.

If you're afraid of mushrooms you're a fungophobe.
If you like mushrooms you're a fungophile.

Which means...

If you're afraid of people who like mushrooms you're a fungophilophobe
and if you like people who are afraid of mushrooms you're a fungophobophile.

This can, of course, be applied to lots of other words. Think of the possibilities!

Ramblings

I was just commenting on my sister-in-law Karen's poetry blog, and said that "Tim'rous Beastie" would be a great screen name. Things like this pop into my brain every once in a while, and I think, "Wow, that would be a great screen name!" but can I remember them later? I really need to start writing them down. Not that I really need a lot of alternate screen names. But you never know when one might come in handy.

Yesterday Kate woke up around 6:30--much earlier than she usually gets up--and was able to spend a little time with Daddy before he left for his morning classes. That was nice. She sure loves her Daddy. Then when I got out of the shower I found her sound asleep on the floor, right outside the bathroom, with her bum up in the air. She never does this (never falls asleep on the floor, I mean. She does sleep in this position sometimes). I just had to take a picture.



We discovered that Doug doesn't have any classes for summer quarter at his main school, and he's not hopeful of getting any at the other places he teaches either. I guess enrollment is down this summer. So he'll be looking for something else to do for a few months. I suppose there's a chance that he might find something that could end up being a better job for him. Though we do enjoy the amount of time he gets to spend at home, with his teaching schedule. I was contemplating that the other day--there's the uncertainty of the part-time teaching position, but on the other hand we get to do a lot of things together. Yesterday we spent a couple of hours at the beach. Kate and I played in the sand while Doug graded papers. Now we just need somebody to hire him full time. It's not that he doesn't want to teach, he'd just like to do it with a little more stability.

Doug's parents are coming on Monday. I need to finish getting the place cleaned up. Good incentive.