More Creatures under the Sea

We finished making our ocean and added a few other creatures.

A whale . . .

a family of starfish . . .

two sea cucumbers . . .

and a family of hammerhead sharks . . .

Next time you are in the area, grab your snorkeling equipment and your bathing suit and stop by for a swim.

Under the Sea

I've noticed in the past few weeks that I have become a "NO!" person. The oldest does things like barrel into his little brother or turn on the tv or throw toys or hit or . . . and I tell him no. Can he have a cookie? NO! Will I play trains with him? NO! Can he watch another movie? NO! (You get the picture?) So I decided that I would try and be less of a nay-sayer for a day. And I also decided that the best way to start was by saying no to the tv. So instead of letting him watch movies while I worked during the youngest's nap, we played together.

I pulled out some craft ideas and asked what he wanted to do. While he liked the idea of making a bumble bee, he loved playing with scissors. (Don't worry. He doesn't really understand how they work, but I like letting him try.) So I asked him what he wanted to make.

A fish.

Then he wanted to make more fish.

Then he wanted to make some jellyfish (a mom and a baby).

This was yesterday. In the end we created part of a nice little ocean for fun. And he likes to stand on a chair and get stung by the jellyfish's tenticles. (If you are wondering, it is high so that the youngest won't be able to get at it.)

Today he asked for a shark, so maybe our ocean will be more populated later.

As for saying no and having it be a good day. It was great! The best we've had in a while.

You wonder why I don't like to commute?

(I realized as I was writing that I really needed a map to fully explain how frustrating this was. G=home, B=preschool, C=university, D=college, E=Target)

Yesterday my husband was feeling pretty ill (he's on medicine for bronchitis) and it was cold enough we decided to take him to school, and since our oldest had preschool near the university, I didn't think it would be much of a problem. He checked the oil and started warming up the car, but we had to scrape windows and get the boys buckled in. So even though we were out of the house by 9:12, we didn't get on our way until closer to 9:20. Which shouldn't have been a problem. The longest it has ever taken to get to this preschool home (not including rush hour) is 10 minutes. But it was.

One lane was closed for construction. Normally this shouldn't be a problem. You could see that the right lane was closed when you crested the hill before the lane closed--quite a bit before the lane closed. But instead of doing what the majority of cars were doing, merging into the left lane, there were a few cars who changed into the right lane to speed past everyone else. This frustrates me. I always want to ask the person who sped by 20 cars to try and pull in front of me why I should let them in, and I always want to just drive in the middle of the two lanes so that no one can pass me. (My mom told us a story of a semi-trailer doing that exact thing during construction in Utah.) After the fifteenth car passed us on the right and we were still not moving, I told my husband, and he decided that he was going to drive in the middle. Another car a few cars behind us decided to do the same thing. Two things happened: we finally started moving, and cars stopped speeding up the right lane.


So we got to preschool a few minutes late. Then we drove to the university so that my husband could pick up the work he needed to take with him to the college he also teaches at. But the library elevator wasn't working and he had to walk the eight flights to his cubical to pick up his stuff and walk eight flights back down. Then we drove to the college. And we followed the signs to his college, rather than following the way that we normally go. And there was a train on the track, not speeding down the track, slowly crawling along the track, and crawling so slowly it stopped for a few minutes.


By the time we got him there (Time 10:45), there wasn't really a point in going home, especially since I knew about the traffic situation. I would be able to pull the youngest out of the car seat for 15 minutes and then need to be back in the car. So I decided to drive to Target and pick up some socks. I was going in the right direction to miss the heavy traffic in front of the VA hospital, but we did go down to one lane for a fire engine. At Target, I let the youngest walk around as I found the socks for his brother. Then we got back in the car to drive to preschool. (Time 11:20)


But once again there was traffic. I didn't find out until I had made it to the end, but construction had closed one lane, so the two lane highway had to share the construction portion, but hey had closed it so close to a traffic light that anytime more than three cars were waiting to go north, they would stop the south direction and let the north cars go. Which meant that 15 cars would go north, then 3 would go south, then 8 would go north, then 3 would go south, then 20 would go north, then 3 would go south. (Get the idea.) I finally made it to preschool at 11:46 and picked up my boy. Then drove home to feed the starving one-year-old.


All in all, it reaffirmed my desire to commute as little as possible.

First Haircut

I always have a hard time putting scissors to my boys' hair for the first time. So, as many of you could tell from the most recent pictures of the youngest, his hair was getting a little long. But we/I didn't want to cut of the beautiful curl at the back of his hair. Well, since he is really interested in feeding himself, and since his hair was long enough to get in the way of eating (and get really dirty in the process), I decided to trim his bangs.


The only problem with that simple move was that afterwards (and you can't really tell from this picture) he looked a lot like a girl—long flowing locks of hair in the back and cute bangs in front. Since a number of people at church already tell me,"She is so beautiful," even though he is wearing a dress shirt, vest, and slacks, we/I decided that we were going to have to cut the back too.

My husband had already gotten the boys in the bathtub and wetted their hair, so there is no real before picture. But here is my little boy with as much of a Dutch boy haircut as I could muster with wet hair, a bad bang job, and a squirming body.

They grow up far too quickly!

Say "cheese"

I confess that I have dreams of living on a farm--a working farm, complete with cows, chickens, goats, sheep, pigs, an orchard, a greenhouse, and a large garden. And reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle didn't help. Now, don't get me wrong; I didn't always appreciate Kingsolver's attitude, but I loved the idea of what she was doing and I looked up heirloom vegetable and animal sites (and ultimately decided that I want a Dutch Belted cow for my farm).

My younger sister and I often talk farm talk. So I was really excited when for Christmas this year she gave us cheesemaking kit. Since I was ill over Christmas and finally got the medicine from the doctor on Janurary 2, we didn't get to try out our kit right away. But my husband and I pulled out our gallon of milk and made mozarella chesse on Sunday night and then I made ricotta a few days later. We made pizza, lasagna, quesadillas, and the preschool children kept asking for "that cheese you made" during snack. I finally used up the rest of the ricotta last night making some amazing ricotta cookies.

My husband and I now dream up what kind of cheese we would like to make--Gruere, Brie, Manchego, etc.--there are all sorts of recipes for us to try. I'll keep you posted on the next batch.

Bored and imaginative

If you must wonder why my prospectus is taking so long to write, I will give you an example of what happened today when I turned on a movie for my oldest and sat down at the computer to write. First, the oldest had to get dressed up like Backpack Jack (a narrator character on my son's dinosaur movie): shoes, socks, hoodie sweatshirt, and his dad's puffy red vest. (Of course he needed help with this.) Then the puffy vest and the hoodie came off, and he had to put on swimming goggles. First blue, then clear. (Yep, help with these too, especially when they "fell off.") Then he brought me some fossils (toy cars) in his sifter (his dad's tennis racket). Then he needed to watch the horse movie. Then he brought me the car jacks that were in the coat closet, which I had already known he had ransacked in order to find the puffy vest, the goggles, and the tennis rackets. At this point I went out and found this:


In case you can't tell, half of the coats and closet stuff are missing.

Oh, there they all are. (Three coats, two vests, a baby backpack, the church bag, the diaper bag, two jacks . . .

. . . the swimming bag, with everything removed, the tennis bag, with all tennis rackets removed, the racketball racket and it's cover (removed) . . .

. . . and, finally, the tennis rackets.

And here's Mr. Creative who went on a dinosaur hunt and swimming in the ocean, all while I tried to work on my prospectus. And the final result on the prospectus? Here is the paragraph I was working on.

While at least three dissertations and ten articles have addressed anti-Mormon literature in one way or another, the majority of these studies focus on the thematic elements of the novels (mysteries, Danites, the West). Megan Sanbourn Jones’s 2004 dissertation, “Rapists, Murderers, and Turks: Anti-Mormon Melodrama and American Identity, 1845-1900”, and Terryl Givens’ article “Caricature as Containment: Orientalism, Bondage, and the Construction of Mormon Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Fiction” are the only recent works that will impact my research. Earlier studies on anti-Mormon novels have described the mesmerism existent in the novels but have not made any connections between mesmerism and the belief that Mormons were anti-national.

Pink Pig

For New Year's this year, we decided to visit the Pink Pig at Macy's. Fifty years ago this original pink pig took children around the department store's Christmas tree, and five years ago, when we moved here, they brought it back. We figured, since this is our last year here (fingers crossed), why not go out with a bang.

We had a coupon for buy one get one free rides, and we went at 10:00 New Year's Day to ride, and somehow Macy's and the operators of the pig had miscommunicated. Macy's had opening time listed as 10:00 and were selling tickets inside the mall. The operators had opening time listed as 12:00 and were no where to be found. Both times were posted all over the mall. So we had to kill time in the mall (thanks Pottery Barn Kids for being tolerant) for two hours. But we were the first in line and got to ride at the front of the train for the first ride.

The boys, big and small, had fun.

So did I.

Happy New Year!