Andy's bath song

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day.

42

42 is, of course, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It's also how old I am now. (When did that happen? Time marches on!)




Dinner! We went to O Bok Jip and I got kimchi jjigae (again) and some leftovers to bring home. Yay! (Not the best jjigae I've had, but still quite tasty.)



Little Gulp tries out the chopsticks.

After dinner we went over to Paldo World to pick up a couple of things. Since I've been teaching Kate how to read Korean, I got her to practice on some of the signs. The best was the tank of geoducks (strange looking creatures, they are) with the sign saying "구이덕." That's "goo-ee-duk." Kate got a kick out of that.

While we were out my phone kept ringing with family calling to serenade me badly, as is traditional. What a great evening.

Hangul Lesson

Started teaching Kate how to read Korean.

Swamp Dragon

I was playing Drawing Dragons with Kate again, and out came this little guy.

Bee Mine

I came up with something cute and easy for Andy's valentines--thumbprint bees.  Easy is good, because I put it off till the night before Valentine's Day and had to get them done in a hurry.  Now that we have two kids in school there are more of these things to think about!



Kate made her own valentines again (I cut out the hearts for her). She drew a dragon on each one, and came up with a message for the inside. (Some of the things she comes up with are a bit unusual... I hope her classmates appreciated her creative efforts!)



Both kids came home with lots of candy. That seems to be the thing these days--valentines include candy. I don't think we really did that when I was in school.

Something else I discovered:  Kids + balloons = CRAZY GO NUTS!  They kept getting distracted by the balloons while we were getting ready for school, and then while I was taking pictures of Andy's valentines on the back porch, Andy tried to release the balloons into the wild.  Two of them did escape, while two more caught under the roof of our upstairs neighbor's balcony and were quickly retrieved.  So now we are down to four balloons.  Kate has given them all names and complex social relationships. 

I Heart You!

For Doug's birthday I picked up this bouquet of heart-shaped balloons.  The kids were more than happy to help Dad enjoy them.



The annual "pictures with the kids" shot--the balloons had to get in on the action.





Blowing away. ("Aaaaaaaaghhhh!")



Peekaboo!

We went to Southern Kitchen for dinner. Hadn't ever been there, but wanted to check it out. (It was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.)  I didn't take my camera but wished I had when they brought out the strawberry lemonade--it's served in a mason jar with a huge pile of whipped cream on top.  Andy was freaked out by the whipped cream and wouldn't get near it, so I had to pour some lemonade into another glass for him.  (Then it was okay.)  This was quite a departure for us, as pretty much the only time we "go out" for American food is when we're traveling and can't find anything else.  Usually it's Mexican, Vietnamese, or Japanese/Korean.  So this wasn't really our usual thing, but it was fun to check it out, anyway, as it's kind of a local specialty. 

Happy birthday Doug! We heart you!

Year of the Snake

(Not my graphic)

It's Doug's year! He's a snake. We did have some dduk guk, just a little early. We had a ward activity that was a soup night, so I made dduk guk for that. Kate actually had some this time. (Not a lot, but she tried it, and she said it was good!)

Window Writing

Andy writes letters on the foggy kitchen window. He always has to do this now, ever since I accompanied his preschool class on their field trip to the pumpkin patch and we were writing on the bus windows.

He's holding a red pipe cleaner, which he also uses to make letters.  He'll do this with just about anything--strips of paper, noodles, fruit leather....



Such concentration! I have seen him write  words, but usually it's just the alphabet (or occasionally numbers). The other day he was playing on the computer, writing out all the letters in some painting program, and when he was done he wrote "THE END."  (Ta da!)

Drawing Dragons with Kate

Andy and I were both sick yesterday and Kate ended up spending way too long on the computer, so in the evening we switched things up with some tag-team drawing.  We took turns starting the dragons and then adding parts.








We came up with quite a variety!  Kate was telling me about their names and habits while we created them. 

Andy at Preschool

I love this picture that Andy's teacher sent.  It's just so him.

Kate's Baptism

We've been preparing Kate to be baptized when she turned eight. It was a lovely evening.  Friends and family came (Grandma Mary was up in Everett visiting Aunt Erika, so she was able to be there). The water was very cold but Kate was brave.




Family picture! (And there's Grandma in the back.)

I asked Jill Tracy if she could play "Each Life That Touches Ours For Good" for me, in the prelude music.  In my mission we sang that at every single baptism.  (I remember singing it at a mission reunion and getting all choked up... and singing it in Relief Society when I was pregnant and pretty much bawling... darn hormones.) It wasn't part of the program, but I wanted to include it, just for me.  It was just a small, sweet moment--a brief surge of emotion, the echo of Korean lyrics, and then getting back to the matter  at hand, getting my daughter ready for her own baptism.  Nobody else knew.  But I appreciated Jill doing that for me. 

Grandma Mary gave the talk on baptism, and Sister Campbell (who's been sitting with on Sundays to help me out with the kids, since Doug's on the stand) gave the talk on the Holy Ghost.  Scott gave the opening prayer and Rebecca gave the closing prayer.  It was a nice way to include everybody.  And when we got home we skyped with my parents in Ohio.  Thanks for sharing our special evening with us!

Four Candles, Eight Candles

We started out the morning with birthday pancakes! (That last one is a dragon.)



Andy was rather freaked out by his pancakes and wouldn't eat them. He loves letters, but apparently letters are not for eating. (He had some non-letter pancakes instead.)



We repeated the cupcake idea from Kate's fourth birthday, with one candle one each of Andy's cupcakes and two candles on each of Kate's. I made banana muffins this time, with cream cheese frosting. I also did the letters (Doug made them last time), out of starbursts and flavored tootsie rolls. I discovered that this is not as easy as it looks. They take a bit of work to get them soft, but if you work them too long they get really messy.



It turns out Andy won't eat cupcakes with letters on them either. (As my friend Melany said, "I'm guessing alphabet soup is out of the question.")



Singing to Andy.  He was overcome.







Andy is starting to figure out what presents are about.



Kate is an old hand at this.



Another Elephant and Piggie book? Score!



Most of Andy's presents this year were books. Which means that we get to spend a lot of time reading them with him. He'll come up to me with a book, tug on my arm, and say, "Sit on the couch?" He sure loves his books.

I told Kate that we could have a big party for her this year (eight is a big deal), but then we found out about the How to Train Your Dragon Live Spectacular coming to the Tacoma Dome earlier this month, so we said she could either have a big party or go see the dragons. This was not a hard choice. Doug took her to the show. She wore her pink dragon costume and had a wonderful time.

So we just had our little family party at home and then we picked up Kate's friend Emma and took the kids to Odyssey for a couple of hours. (Low stress, no planning!  Yay!)  They've been a bit cooped up lately, so it was great to get out and run around for a while. I put together a little video: 



Happy birthday, kids! 

Gallery Glass Grimm

I've been head-down in a new project, making Grimm-inspired ornaments with Gallery Glass paints.  I wanted to do something for Jamie and Lindsey of  The Grimm Podcast, and once I came up with the idea I had to make a  few more for some friends in our Grimmsters group on Facebook.  And of course I took lots of pictures while I was at it!



The design comes from the stained glass window in Monroe's door (photo from the maker's site).  I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to freehand the wolf, so I was tossing around other ideas and came up with this solution:



I printed out the wolf in the size I needed and traced it with the liquid leading ("contains no lead!"). I used the back side of my cutting glass, which worked really well. (I did have some parallax issues, because of the thickness of the glass, but it didn't take long to get used to.)




It occurred to me that I could let the lines extend beyond the design, and then trim them afterwards. 



After letting them dry overnight, I cleaned up the edges with my microtip scissors.  (Craft knife doesn't work for this part--I tried.  The stuff is just too rubbery.)



Adding the paint. It comes in squeeze bottles, and you just squeeze it where you want it and then push it into the edges with a little pointy stick. 



After it dries overnight, you can peel it up (carefully) and apply it to the ornament.  This works really well--you can also make window clings!  Oooh! 

(Kate held the ornament for me to get a picture.  She was a bit wobbly.)



I planned to put a line around the top and bottom of the ornaments, but it was immediately obvious that I wouldn't be able to freehand them.



So I made some straight lines with the leading and let them dry overnight.  (Yep, that's another "overnight"--this was quite a long process!)



Applying the lines to the ornament is kind of a pain.  After doing a few I got the trick of it--hold the whole thing up at eye-level, hold the leading out to the side, and keep it straight while you turn the ornament. Still a pain. 



My second bottle of leading was pretty runny, and the lines spread.  I was able to peel it up and trim it with the scissors, but I wouldn't recommend this because it was really hard to get everything back in the right place.



Painting!  I had to do it in sections and let it dry before turning it, so this part took three or four days. 



The first completed ornament.  Total elapsed time:  nine days.  Once I got all the steps figured out the others went a little faster!



Working on the kitchen table.  (I went through a lot of paper towels.)



Ornaments in various stages of completion, drying on the top shelf of my computer desk. 



I got pretty good at freehanding the leading (especially the right side), but had trouble getting a consistent line out of the bottle.  It's rather awkward to work with. 



I thought the original design was a little too detailed for me to replicate at this scale, so I had to do some adapting.  After making several like this, I realized that I still wasn't completely happy with the left side...



...so I came up with this design that's closer to the original.  



Painting is fun.  I got some cool effects by swirling colors together.   For the sky I mixed Blue Diamond and Crystal Clear, and swirled in a little Snow White and Sapphire.



It looks very cool when it's dry!



Finishing up the final three.



This is my favorite part. The paint flattens out as it dries, but when it's wet it looks like round, shiny polished stone.  Pretty!  I love the Light Green.  It's opaque, which makes a nice contrast, and you can do some fun things mixing it with the transparent colors.  (I discovered that it's been discontinued, but I was able to get two bottles on Amazon.  Yay!)

About ten years ago I got to go to the HIA trade show, and I remember checking out the Gallery Glass booth.  When I was at Michael's  I recognized it and thought, "Oh yeah, that'll work!"  It was a lot of fun.  I do think the liquid leading could use some improvement (for ease of application or consistency of... well... consistency) but it's pretty cool stuff. 

Things I learned:

• It's hard to tell what a color (or mixture) will look like when it's dry.  I had to play around with this a bit.


• Even after drying overnight, the painted areas are very susceptible to nicks and fingerprints.  I had to make sure to only hold the ornaments by the top and bottom when working on them.


• It's easier to lift out air bubbles than to try to pop them. 


• These ornaments are dust magnets.  And the leading lines are lint-snaggers.  I eventually hit on wiping them off with my lens-cleaning cloth.  This works well. 


• It's hard to get a good picture on the tree.  I can't even tell you how many I went through!

So that's my Gallery Glass experiment.  It's been fun!  Maybe next I'll make some Pikmin window clings with Kate.