Mother's Day gifts

Kate made this for me at school. Isn't it sweet? I love the way she wrote on the fingers, too.



The decorated envelope, Kate-style.



She also gave me this pot that she painted, along with a peat pellet and three cosmos seeds. (Yay! I love cosmos. Maybe I can get them to actually grow.)

Many years ago, one of my siblings made a card at church with a bunch of dots, and this verse:

I love you Mother
I love you lots
I love you more
Than all these dots

We decided to this with the Nursery kids. Becki Foutz wrote out Andy's card, and he enthusiastically added his own dots.



(This was fairly unusual, as normally when he gets ahold of a crayon or pencil, he just wants us to write letters for him.)

Last year, Kate didn't go up and sing with the Primary kids in Sacrament Meeting. I was kindof disappointed. So this year I mentioned to her (more than once) that I was looking forward to hearing her sing. She went up with everyone else and sang "I Often Go Walking," and when she got to "remind me of you," she pointed at me and grinned.

Life with these kids is never boring!

I know Mother's Day is difficult for some people. Not everyone has a great relationship with their own mother. (I have a friend whose mom died on Mother's Day--it's not a happy day for her.) For some it seems to bring up their own feelings of inadequacy. I imagine my own mom probably has some things that she wishes she had done differently, but I like to think I turned out okay. Doug and I both called our moms after church, as is customary. Thanks for everything, Moms! We wouldn't be here without you!

Mod Prom Decorations

After helping out with all the painting for Modest Prom, I definitely wanted to see what it looked like all put together.  After Kate got home from school we drove out to Sumner to check it out.



Italian signage reminds guests that they are entering Venice.



Outside the main entrance.



Registration desk.



Inside the gym, where setup was nearing completion.






The DJ's table.






These window boxes were a great touch.



Refreshment table.



The backdrop on the stage.



I love the twisty topiaries.  They just look so cool.



The evening started with dinner at another church building in Puyallup, and then moved to Sumner for the dance.  We heard that everyone loved the decorations.  It was sure a big project!  Lots of work but a lot of fun, too.

Children's Day

May 5th is Children's Day in Korea--time for the annual pictures in the park. We got some great shots this year.

We headed down to Point Defiance as soon as Kate got home from school. It was really a lovely day and the lighting was great.



 "Hey look, this plant is called Dinosaur Food!"




This one's a little blurry (I seem to have pegged the focus on the bench rather than on the kids) but Andy's face is just so cute.




We've taken lots of pictures on this bridge, over the years.  I think this one is particularly sweet.



"Here, Mom, I'll pose for you!"




Pink petal snow.



Pretty Kate.



Squish! (Giggle)



After pictures in the Japanese garden, we headed over to the playground. (This is what the kids were waiting for, of course!)



This thing is fun--it can be a car, a trolley, a train, or even a blimp.



Andy helps turn the crank bar to make the trolley go.  He seemed quite fascinated by the mechanics.




I love this tree.  It's so cool and knobbly, and covered with moss and ferns.  




Kate checks out the irises. Pretty!

It occurred to me that this was Andy's third Children's Day, in a way, since it's three years since the day we found out we were expecting him. We sure do love being a family of four.



Outtake!

Andy's Nest

Andy often likes to wrap blankets around himself when we're reading a book together, or just when he's playing. Here he's on the bed just after waking up from a nap, listening to Daddy play the fiddle. Awww.

Painting Venice on cardboard

This is what I've been working on lately.  I was asked to help out on the decorating committee for the Modest Prom (popularly known as "Mod Prom"), a five-stake dance (it's a church thing) for the sixteen and seventeen year-olds.   Helen Christensen, who has done a lot of the painting for the Festival of the Nativity, has been the driving force, and we've had 6-9 other ladies helping out throughout the process.

We started out with forty 4' x 8' sheets of cardboard.  On the first day we laid them all out on tables in the gym and painted them white.  Then we used opaque projectors to trace scenes of Venice onto the cardboard with black marker, and painted them in.



This is our painting table and color chart. A very handy method! This way you don't have to keep opening containers to find the right color. I'll have to remember that for my future projects.



Helen shows off her plastic-wrap stuccoing technique. 




Mostly I helped out with water reflections, and then ended up designing some arches and filling in some other details as needed.



After painting, we added shading with pan pastels (and then took them outside to spray them with fixative).  Really quick and easy.



It's all been a big group effort. On this one I just did the water lines.



We also made some arches with vaguely Italian-looking scenery (not Venice, obviously) to go along the back of the stage and behind the DJ.



Sponge-stamped cobblestones.  This thing is about 90 feet long. Talk about back-breaking work.




These trees were painted black and then Helen added the greenery with big brush strokes.  They look great!  The black really makes the color pop.



I've been trying to do the same thing with these pots. 

The dance is this Friday at the chapel in Sumner. I'm going to try to get some pictures of it all set up. Should be very cool.

It's been fun, working on a project like this with a group of people, and also a good experience for me in figuring out ways to do things quickly and not sweat the details.  I haven't been there for all the painting--generally people get to the church around 10:00 and I don't make it there till after Doug gets home and we have lunch, so there have been several times when I was working on something one day and then I come in the next day and discover that someone else has finished it. And maybe they didn't do it exactly the way I would have, but it's done and it looks great. "Good enough for church work" has become a common mantra.