Think Big

"Kate, would you like some grapes?"
"Okay!"
"How many grapes would you like?"
"One hundred!"

Pussy Willows and a Tantrum

There are a couple of big pussy willow trees behind our complex. I wanted to get some pictures before they blew, but when Kate and I went outside with the camera, most of them looked like this:



There were some branches that still had the soft fuzzy catkins.



Kate was having a good time with a teasel and a stick, and even wanted to sit down in the grass and take pictures. Her nose was running and I only had a teeny piece of tissue in my coat pocket, which quickly came to the end of its usefulness, so I suggested to Kate that we go back inside briefly to get some more tissue.

Well, you would have thought I'd just told her we were going to wash her hair, feed her brussel sprouts, and beat her repeatedly. She ran away from me screaming, "No! No! I want to stay outside! Aaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh!" Kate has a very piercing scream that we get to hear frequently. I ran after her and scooped her up, and carried her back to our apartment, where we got Doug to bring us some tissue at the back door.

Challenge #4 of the Amazing Digi-Scrapping Race was to do a layout with "spill it" journaling, and I decided this incident would be the perfect topic, especially since I had a cute picture of Kate taken just before she went nuts. (Challenge #3 ended up being optional, and I didn't do it, since it was an all-about-me layout and I already have one of those.)



(credits here.) This was my first attempt at the "tucking stuff in around the edges" technique that's so popular in digi-scrapping. I don't know if I've quite got the hang of it.

I've been working on a set of paper bag frames that have been a lot of fun (and considerably less time-consuming than a lot of the stuff I do). They should be done some time this week, hopefully.

Kids these days....

We were at Target on Monday and ran across this--a 50-pack of Play-Doh. Yep, that's fifty different colors. Why, back when I was a young 'un, we had to mix our own Play-Doh colors. And we liked it.

Paper animals

Recently we pulled out some brightly-colored cardstock that I'd bought for some paper piecing years ago. I thought it would be great for making some paper animals for Kate. I used to make things like this a lot, back in elementary school. (My desk was always a mess, and I went through a lot of glue.) We decided on a lion and a tiger.



I use my ruler to draw out patterns for boxes, complete with tabs for gluing.



Curious little hands. (Kate was "helping.")



I did the heads over again because I didn't like the first version.



The legs took a while. There are eight of them, and I put a little slant on top, which was a bit complicated.



The finished product.



And the back view. (Maybe I should make a bear to go with them. Oh my!)

I told Kate she could play with them after I took pictures. I don't expect them to last long.

Making animals out of paper boxes is a time-honored family tradition. Here's an old picture I dug up of Betsey with one of her creations. It's an Appaloosa uni-pegasus.

Collaboration

The second challenge in the Amazing Digi Scrapping Race was to create a layout with our partner. I was trying to come up with something that Karin and I could both scrap about, and thought that Ernie, our site ogre, would be a great subject.

I put together this basic idea and sent it to Karin:



Karin added a background and some other cool stuff and sent it back, and then I tweaked it just a little more and we called it done. Here's our final product:



This was a fun challenge!

Another Year Older

Yep, yesterday was my birthday. I've had a lot going on lately, putting stuff together for the March mega kit, and I've also started making a book for somebody (it's a surprise), which is going to take a while. And then there's the digi scrapping race. And having a sale for my birthday, and making the ad. And a few visiting teaching appointments squeezed in there (yeah, it's the end of the month). So if I haven't been posting much the past couple of weeks, that's why.

I wanted to get a picture with Kate, but she was in a bad mood most of the day. I finally got her to go outside and paint letters on the porch with me, and Doug snapped a couple shots. This was the best we could do.



We went out for Korean food for dinner. We stopped by the grocery store to get some kim (laver seaweed) first, and then went to the restaurant. This was the kind of pre-cut kim that's in little individual packages with maybe ten sheets in each one, and Kate snarfed down two of the packages before we even got our food. She's had kim before but I'd never seen her eat it in volume like that. Maybe she was just hungry.

My mom sent me Stardust on DVD for my birthday (thanks, Mom!) and everybody called and sang, of course. (Betsey really outdid herself this time. It was a truly astonishing performance.) Doug ordered something for me but it hasn't come yet. I know what it is, though, so it's not a surprise. Okay, it's a Wacom 6D art pen for my tablet.

And--surprise!--I got a summons for jury duty. I checked the box that said "I am a parent without child care" and sent it back. I did go in for jury duty back when I was pregnant with Kate, which was an interesting experience. I only had to report three or four times, and didn't get picked for the jury. I got a lot of reading and crocheting done.

It's getting warmer! Hooray! And the pussy willow tree behind our complex is budding. I must get pictures.

The Amazing Digi Scrapping Race

Season three of the Amazing Digi Scrapping Race is on! I didn't participate in the first two seasons, but sort of watched from the sidelines, so I thought this time I'd join in the fun! I have teamed up with Karin (in Australia) who is also a designer at NDISB (Karin M Designs). Teams go around to different sites and participate in challenges and win cool prizes, and hopefully have lots of fun in the process. I've been spending way more time designing than actually scrapping, so I figured this would be a good way to exercise those scrapping muscles.

Challenge #1 was to create a layout with this sketch, featuring our "favorite person or animal to scrap about," using our favorite color, and using a favorite element three times. Here's my layout:



I don't really have a favorite color. I like color. I find myself mostly drawn to greens, browns, golds, and dark reds. And I also have a lot of pink in my world these days. I struggled with the background for this a bit, but it works.

That white line frame was a last-minute addition. I was finishing this up last night, and looking at it and thinking, "That needs something else." So I took a crayon and drew a line and scanned it. If anyone wants the line you can grab it here (right-click and "save as").

When I was looking for a partner, I mentioned that I might be rather flaky. Karin said she'd flake with me. So we came up with the name "The Discombobulatorium" for our team. Karin made us a team blog and this cool blinkie:



For the next challenge we get to create a layout together. That should be interesting!

Framing Eddie

This is what I got Doug for his birthday--a frame for his brass rubbing of Edward the Black Prince. He did this rubbing back before we got married, at a traveling exhibit in Provo, and he's been carting it around with him for years.

Eddie went to Newfoundland with us, and resided in the living room in a poorly-fitting frame (with no glass) that he would periodically fall out of. We'd walk by and discover Eddie leaning out of his frame, bowed down and trying to touch his toes. We'd straighten him up and say, "We really have to get a proper frame one of these days."

When I started designing, I told Doug that I would get Eddie framed for him. It took a while. We did take Eddie over to Artco once, to look into framing there. That seemed prohibitively expensive. (We like Eddie, but I don't know that we like him that much.) Then Rebecca told us about a local guy who does framing out of his house, so we went to see him. We decided to go with this thin black frame, which I think sets it off nicely. You can't see it in the picture, but it has some nice detailing around the edges. So we brought Eddie back home and stuck him on the wall.

I imagine Eddie is pleased, after all these years, to be properly framed and hung.

Happy Birthday Doug!

Yesterday was Doug's birthday! We went down to the Indian buffet in Lakewood for lunch, and then went to the park. It was a beautiful day--the most sunshine we've seen for quite a while.

My family did the calling-and-singing (badly) thing--except for Barb and Kyle, who decided to buck tradition and sing nicely. Kate seemed rather bemused by the whole thing. ("Who are these people and why do they keep calling and singing Happy Birthday? And why do they sound like drowning cats?") When we sang to Barb (it was her birthday too) I asked Kate if she wanted to join in, but she didn't. She's recently learned the "Do as I'm doing" song--perhaps we should work on Happy Birthday next.

Seven for Monday

A few largely-unrelated things that I have nowhere else to post about:

1. The Primary thing isn't going so well. Kate hasn't been staying more than a few minutes before she wants to come back to the nursery to be with me. The past two weeks she didn't go to Primary at all. (I'm sure the only reason she wants to come in the nursery is because I'm there.) But she's little. There's time.

2. This afternoon we took Kate to Odyssey and spent two hours crawling through tunnels and ball pits. My knees are killing me.

3. Mpix is now carrying standouts. I am so pleased. I was looking for something like this a while back and couldn't find what I wanted. Just the thing for picture walls.

4. I asked Kate today if she would like to go swimming some time, and she said, "But I don't swim!"

5. I just happened to see that today is Mo Willem's birthday. Happy birthday, Mr. Willems!

6. Kate has apparently decided that pigeons say "honk." I have no idea where she got that from. I'm sure I never told her pigeons honk.

7. The Great South Gate in Seoul (Nam Dae Mun), Korea's National Treasure #1, was destroyed in a fire yesterday. A suspect has confessed to arson. So, so sad. At the time we were in Korea the gate wasn't open to the public, but we went past it many times. What a tragedy and a crime.

Eating your age

Kimberly in China recently posted on her blog about the Chinese age system. The year that you're born is your first year, and your age goes up at each new year. (They do celebrate their birthdays but they don't get older on their birthdays.) They do it the same way in Korea, and there's also a food tradition involved.

Dduk (sounds a lot like "duck," with what's called a "tense" d at the beginning) is rice cake made with glutinous rice flour. It comes in a lot of different forms. One form is little white oval-shaped pieces, that are cooked in soup called dduk guk. This is the traditional dish for the lunar new year in Korea. They say that when you eat dduk guk on the lunar new year, you get a year older. They call it eating age. (This of course leads to the expected jokes, like "So if I don't eat it I won't get any older?" and "What happens if I have two bowls?")

So yesterday I made dduk guk, and I thought I'd share the recipe here.



You probably won't be able to find dduk outside of a Korean grocery store, but if you're lucky enough to have one in the area, this is what it looks like. (Packaging varies.) The stores around here keep it near the produce section.

Other ingredients are:

beef (thinly sliced, if you can get it)
beef broth
garlic
green onion
soup soy sauce (called 국간장, or regular soy sauce in a pinch)
sesame oil
black pepper
eggs

I have this cookbook called A Korean Mother's Cooking Notes that explains how to boil some beef brisket with garlic and green onion for two hours. I didn't do that. I just used a carton of beef broth from the store and added a little more water.

Put the broth on to boil with little of the garlic and some of the green onion, and a couple tablespoons of the soup soy sauce.

Cut up your beef into thin strips, mix with garlic, a little sesame oil, a little soy sauce (this is actually supposed to be regular soy sauce, not soup soy sauce), some of the green onion (probably mostly the white bits), and black pepper, and stir fry it. (This all a "to taste" kind of thing. I put in lots of garlic. And lots of black pepper.)

Beat up the egg and add the rest of the green onion (mostly green bits). The book just calls for one egg, but I used three. My sister Betsey likes to use a lot of egg, too.

Rinse the dduk. This is supposed to keep the slices from dissolving in the soup. I'm not sure how it does that, but I guess it works.

Drop dduk slices into boiling beef broth. When the slices float to the top (which doesn't take long), turn the heat off, then add the egg mixture and stir it so the egg cooks in stringy bits.

Put in the stir-fried meat. (This can be added earlier, if you want.) Add a little more sesame oil to the soup, if you like it.



My dduk guk is thicker than what you'll generally see in Korean restaurants. It turned out really well. This batch was particularly tasty. I think it was the beef broth and all the garlic, and the dduk was a really good consistency, too. (It's easy to overcook, and then it gets slimy.) Kate was not impressed, though. I got her to taste the broth a little, and she said it was good, but she wasn't interested in actually eating it. Apparently I have been remiss in my food-acclimatization duties.

새해복 많이 받으세요!

That's what they say in Korea--"Receive many New Year's blessings." This is a picture of Kate at a recent ward activity. We have activities every month at church (usually), generally with some kind of theme, and they like to do a Chinese New Year themed dinner around this time of year. I think it's kind of too bad to focus exclusively on China, when there are other cultures that celebrate the holiday as well (especially since we do have Korean and Japanese members in the ward). We have been insinuating Korean foods into the Chinese dinner since we've been here. This year I'd been busy working on design stuff and didn't have time to prepare anything, so we just went down to Paldo World in Lakewood and picked up a few things.

This is the year of the earth rat. Our friend Scott was born in an earth rat year. He's been through the whole cycle and will be turning 60 this year. We'll have to throw him a rat-themed bash. We can watch Ratatouille. (I googled "rat-themed party," out of curiosity, and came up with a story about rat-themed panties. I don't think Scott wants any of those.)



They had these little dragon decoration things on the tables. Kate spent the entire time we were there playing with them. (You can see she's got her coat on--the heat had been off earlier and it was very cold in the building!) We're probably going to be flying somewhere this summer (either to Ohio or possibly California), so we've been keeping an eye out for things that occupy Kate's attention. The dragons were certainly a hit. I'm not sure if it was the dragon-ness or the accordian-effects of the honeycombed tissue paper that she especially liked. We ended up bringing a couple of them home. Maybe if we put them away they'll be new and exciting again by then, and she can play with them all the way to Ohio.

Waiting for Spring

I'm told that the groundhog saw his shadow. In the meantime, here's a rose from last year.

How to make a snow angel

We had snow on Monday! We've had some flurries (even some rather heavy flurries) but this was the most snow we've had this winter. It didn't last long!



Doug's morning classes were canceled, and the kids in the complex were on a two-hour delay. (I guess the roads were slippery.) We got Kate all bundled up and went out to play in the snow. She got to use her cute pink boots that she got for her birthday.











The snow on the trees was so pretty!








Kate and Daddy made a snowman. Err... snow bunny.



Some of the neighbor kids (Oleg, Tram, and Carol) were out playing, too, and riding Oleg's disk sled down the hill by the Seventh-Day Adventist church right behind our complex. Kate got to ride on Oleg's sled, too.




The kids made snow angels in the (very empty) church parking lot. Kate was admiring the snow angels and wanted to make one too, so Doug helped her. I made this layout of the pictures:



(Credits here)

It was pretty sunny while we were out and the snow was starting to melt already. By the next day it was raining and the snow was all gone. It was fun while it lasted!

"More medicine!"

This is not a post about medicine. This is actually a post about cinnamon. We have recently discovered that Kate really likes cinnamon, but she keeps calling it medicine. I suppose "cinnamon" and "medicine" might sound kind of similar, if you're not too familiar with either word. We have been correcting her, figuring it's probably a good idea to understand what medicine is and is not, but it hasn't sunk in yet. Tonight she asked for "more applesauce and medicine."

In the meal where the cinnamon was first introduced, Kate was having applesauce and horchata (a Mexican rice drink), which both go well with cinnamon, but she was also having a bit of a lime drink that Doug shared with her, and she wanted cinnamon in that too. She still sometimes asks for "lime juice and medicine." We try to tell her that lime and cinnamon don't really go together, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.

Elephant and Piggie

...or, more on the genius that is Mo Willems.

We have all become Mo Willems fans (creator of Knuffle Bunny and Kate's much-beloved pigeon). I had heard of his Elephant and Piggie books, but our library doesn't have any of them, so a few weeks ago I looked them up and requested a couple from another branch. There are currently four books in the series, with more on the way. The two we have checked out are Today I Will Fly! and My Friend is Sad. Since bringing them home we have read them over and over. These are written comic-book style, with no other text besides the dialog, and are great for early readers. A lot comes through in the characters' gestures and expressions.



Kate likes both of them but she especially loves My Friend is Sad (it has a robot in it) and has the whole thing memorized now. In fact last night I watched Doug and Kate act out the book, impromptu, on the bed. Kate was really getting into it, crying "THERE WAS MORE!" with great emotion, and saying "and my best friend was not there to see it with me" in her cute little voice. (And right after that she decided that the three of us were Diego, Alicia, and Baby Jaguar, so we played at rescuing her stuffed animals for a while.)



Recently I was looking at Mo Willems' blog and found this picture of a plush Elephant and Piggie. Kate came up behind me and saw the picture. I could see the wheels turning in her head for a minute, and then she said, "Play with them?" Unfortunately they aren't available quite yet.

Books are fun. We like them.

Oh, rats!

I haven't posted lately because I've been working on a few things. I'd been meaning to expand my Year of the Pig kit with the rest of the animals, but with the lunar new year quickly approaching it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to do all of them, so I just made a little Year of the Rat add-on.

I couldn't decide which rat pose I liked, so I just included both of them! He's a cute little guy.

The rat is the first animal in the Chinese zodiac cycle. There's a story about how this came to be. The Jade Emperor invited the animals to a party. Near the end of the journey, they animals had to cross a celestial river, and the rat tricked the ox into letting him ride on its head. When they were almost at their destination the rat jumped off the ox's head and arrived first. So the Year of the Rat comes first, and the Year of the Ox is second.

Last year I got a lot of hits from people looking for "papercut pig." I'll have to put my little rat over in the sidebar or something, for anybody looking for a papercut rat.

Stumpy the Dinosaur

Here's Kate's other crocheted friend, to go with her octopus. This one took rather longer. I got the body done in a couple of days and then got busy doing other things, and left the poor dinosaur with no feet for a while. (Kate kept picking it up and saying "It's not done yet!") I finally sat down and finished the feet while watching Stardust. Unlike the octopus, I couldn't do it all in one piece, so the feet had to be stitched on separately.

Doug named the dinosaur Stumpy, but Kate keeps calling him Bumpy. That works. Lumpy would also be appropriate.

More Elizabeth

Pictures here! That one of her crying is so expressive. Aww.

Elizabeth was a Monday baby, like Kate (I took pictures of Kate every Monday for the first two years). Monday's child is fair of face.

Elizabeth is Karen's middle name, as well as Kate's middle name, and Betsey's first name. We have a lot of Elizabeths in the family. I wonder if Barb feels left out.

Baby News

Our niece is here! Elizabeth Anne, born at 12:47, 8 pounds 10.4 ounces, 19 1/2 inches long. Her hair is red! And her eyelashes are very light, which the nurse said is a good sign of a redhead. Peter called and gave me the details this afternoon. They should have pictures soon. Hooray!