September 2008 archive

Exercise

Today my primary class was full with all the kids present. It was a workout. Way more intense than yoga or aerobics. Not as hard as a marathon though I am sure. I never want to find out about that comparison really. We had 8 busy little 4 year olds and some of them are challenging. I prayed hard this morning that I could be patient with them all. It worked! More or less. I didn’t yell at anyone at least. Hmmm…. Except my own children who tried to refuse to go to church today. OK, so that nullifies the whole being patient thing. Forget I even mentioned it.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all went. Even though I forgot to bring them a snack, which they have been used to, they didn’t mutiny against me. They seemed a lot better than I expected overall. So my new motto these days should be “set your expectations low and then be pleasantly surprised.”

Bryan and I also went on a date yesterday afternoon that included us exercising together. We went to to pool at our fitness club to swim laps. My friend Maresa has been coaching me on my technique and skills and I have shaved at least 10 seconds off my 50 meter swim time in the 10 months that I have been swimming with her. I was excited to show Bryan my progress. So this is the cool thing: I am faster than him now! Shocking I know. He was handi-capped by the fact that he had already received a free weight lifting class that morning (AKA help someone move into an apartment) and he hadn’t been swimming for a few months… But I will bask in my glory when I can! And I won’t encourage a re-match… can’t give him a chance to steal the Fastest Murdock title.

Posted by Ily on September 28, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment

Ha, ha, ha! Don't ever follow my example

I had a neighbor who is a carpenter make some nightstands for our bedroom last month. They turned out beautiful. After he made them, I got the privilege of staining and finishing them. It took me a a few weeks (I only work on them if I have energy and free time during naps and after the kids go to bed) and I had to give up the coveted parking spot in the garage. But now they are wonderful and I figure that I am awesome because I can finish furniture.

Here are some pictures of the nightstands as I got them and the how they are beginning the look with the first coat of stain. My room is too dark right now to take a picture of the finished product… why don’t I ever think about that during the day?

Remember back to February when I decided to refinish a dresser for Micah who then refused to have it? It sits downstairs instead being very useful holding craft supplies.

This just was an illustration to Micah that I can paint furniture because this week he decided that I need to paint his red dresser because he doesn’t like red. He likes blue. Only blue. So he started stripping the dresser of its paint with his fingernails. Sigh. I have a new project to finish now. So now our garage is littered with dresser parts and I have a bonus project from a neighbor who now thinks I love to refinish furniture so they gave me a cute little china hutch to refinish and keep. (I can’t say I love to refinish furniture-it is hard work, but I love to be busy and more importantly I love the finished project.)

So thanks son. Next time, PLEASE don’t follow my example and destroy the finish on a dresser so that it can be changed to a preferred color unless you get my approval first.

I only got to park in my garage for a few days and now it is full of furniture again.

Posted by Ily on September 28, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment

Let's go back in time one month

Remember how Isaac had a birthday this month? And how I blogged that he had the coolest party ever? Well, the month has flown by with lots of adventures and I have not even posted pictures of that party. So let’s go back in time to look at them. Pretend it is the end of August. Humor me.

We really had a great time. I have forgotten how dangerous it was to take 10 kids to a place where they could plummet to their deaths in icy cold swiftly moving water at this point. Right now I only remember how happy Isaac was to have the party he wanted and how excited he was to show his friends this cool place. It was definitely a great memory maker.

Posted by Ily on September 21, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Pictures from the baby shower

One of the little ladies from the party, Krista Anderson (age 10), was put in charge of taking pictures at the baby shower. She did a great job! Here are the pictures. The bad ones I took, the good ones she took. And she doesn’t even know my camera. Krista is amazing!

Posted by Ily on September 21, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

table pictures

I had a request for pictures of the table, so here it is. Enjoy!

Posted by Ily on September 21, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Why do a little when you can do a lot?

This weekend was action packed and ended up with me passing out on the couch after church from exhaustion. All because my motto seems to be “why do a little when you can do a lot?”

Micah has been anxiously awaiting the ward camp-out. He has been wanting to go camping this summer and because we have been busy, the boys have only been able to go to the Stake Fathers and Sons camp out until this weekend. Our poor ward activities chair had been railroaded into having a ward camp out even thought she isn’t a camper herself and we were actually excited to go. Bryan got sick this week, and I started to feel a bit awful too, but luckily we were able to go. If we wouldn’t have been able to we would have been in terrible trouble with Micah and never heard the end of it!

So the camp out was fun. Highlights include the getting lost finding the camp ground, the boys running around with glow sticks and flashlights and playing games with their friends, watching a small bit of entertainment from ward members, sleeping in a tent, getting rained on of course, Reece touching a hot lantern, eating a yummy pancake breakfast with great friends, dirty stinky sweet children with smudges all over, and exploring nature. You may have noticed that I mentioned how Reece touched a hot lantern. I can guarantee he won’t be doing that again. He has a few burn marks, but he seems to be recovering quickly.

Afterwards we came home, unpacked, took some cat naps and then Benj and Melinda came to visit. We let the boys watch movies since they were tired and the little guys went out to play in the back yard. Bryan and Benj went on a mission to try to print some really cool huge posters and failed, and another mission to replace some broken Lego mindstorm robot parts… which failed also. They did give a valiant effort. Melinda and I prepared tomatoes and pears for canning. Here is the run down on that process: Peel, Peel, Peel, slice, peel, peel, peel some more. It took a while. At least we got to chat about lots of stuff while we peeled and peeled. It was much more fun with her helping than me trying to do it by myself. She is a great peeler. And a great chatter. I am SO glad she helped! All said and done, after HOURS of work, we were able to process 16 quart size jars of asian pears and tomatoes combined. Ok, so a can of whole tomatoes is way cheaper to drive to the store and buy than to take the hours to process them yourself. The only reason it is really worth it is because they taste soooooooooooo much better. I hope I have the energy to process the rest of my garden produce this year. That first bit was just the beginning and I have a ton more to do.

After that, I worked to bathe the boys and clean up the house after a day of kids playing and canning. It was a lot of work, but it was so nice to be on time to church for once thanks to us being mostly ready and having fewer distractions on the floor to slow us down.

I started teaching Sunbeams today. They will be my new Sunday workout. So far they were easy… but I have seen them in action when they all are there. Some kids were absent today. It will be a challenging calling!

Also, we have some news from church. They are organizing two new wards in our stake from 3 very large ones. One of those new wards will be meeting in our building and we get to move to a different building. The nice thing about the new building is that it is beautiful, though a bit small, and it has a really nice mother’s lounge. Unfortunately I have no babies to nurse in the mother’s lounge, nor is there very much parking at the new building. We still will have the 11 am time slot for church. At least we don’t have to share a building with 3 other wards now.

So our weekend was action packed and very productive. Now that I have woken from my nap, I am definitely thinking about paying someone else to can all my produce next weekend and going away to a spa instead.

Posted by Ily on September 21, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 2 comments

I always need some sort of motivation to get stuff done

I bought a really cool table and chair set at Goodwill last winter for $200. It came with 12 chairs and 5 leaves. It is enormous when all the leaves are in! It seats 6 at it’s smallest. All the chairs have these neat circle details on the backs and they look retro and fabulous. The table is the sturdiest table we have ever had. It has to be somewhere between 30 and 40 years old I am guessing. It is in amazing condition too.

The only downside is that all the chairs are beautifully upholstered in Lavender silk. Water spots ruin it easily. Guess who drools on them each time he climbs up onto one? Yep, Reece is a prolific drooler still and he happens to love climbing on things.

I came up with a way to make slip covers for each chair using marine vinyl with ribbon trim so they can be wipe-able. They look really cute and they are much more kid friendly now. It took a lot of effort to get around to finishing the first 4 chairs. There were only 8 more to do. And then along comes a reason to finish them…

My friend Maresa is having her first baby and I wanted to throw her a shower. She is very shy and hates to impose on anyone. For someone so shy who claims she doesn’t know that many people, we ended up with about 20+ people coming to the party and I needed seats for them all. Hence, I had to get around to fixing up the rest of the chairs!

Long story made short, I also decided all the bathrooms needed scrubbing too, the kitchen counter needed to be unearthed from the jumble of toys and junk mail that have collected there, the office furniture needed to be found under the collection of papers strewn all over AND dusted AND polished, a cake needed decorating for the party, and then whoops, I am teaching preschool this week too so I better budget my time well so I can plan lessons and teach them AND get everything else done.

I did choose not to can pears or tomatoes before the party. I will put that off until tomorrow even though it is getting to be an urgent need now because everything ripened at once. I had to set some limits, I can’t do everything. Along with that, I found I just couldn’t get all the chairs done in time so I begged some friends for help and they are amazing to have come to my rescue by doing some last minute sewing for me. And thank you Bri for cleaning my stove, it hasn’t looked that good in ages! I did get everything else done… all because of the motivation that 20 people would be at my house today.

So sign me up to host the next party just so that I can have a dang good excuse to finally clean up around here.

PS: The most gratifying thing about hosting a party for adults is that they don’t leave huge messes behind them when they all leave. My house is still clean except for a few that my own kid did. No cake smeared across the floor and couch thanks to the women who came (how did Reece escape from upstairs to make those messes anyhow?).

Posted by Ily on September 17, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment

Impromptu Soccer

Friday night I did some quick calls and some knocks on doors to invite anyone who was free to come play soccer at our neighborhood park and we had a ton of fun. It ended up being 6 parents versus 12+ kids (the toddlers wandering around don’t count for a full player, more like a handicap to the adults) and there were some awesome moves to be seen on the playing field! Alas, the kids creamed the adults.

The parents may be “old,” but I was amazed. Our friend Jonathan Hale was dressed in business clothes even. And our neighbor Bruce had some moves as he blocked the ball right and left. And Paco, our neighbor from Guadalajara, says he doesn’t play soccer. That high kick he did to save the ball says otherwise. If he is the worst player from Mexico, then I am afraid that everyone over there must be formidable on the field.

I can’t believe just how much fun we had. It was fun to run around out there with the kids and have a little bit of friendly competition. We drew kids from all over the park and they all had fun and were even careful of the toddlers who were wandering around on the playing field. In fact, some of these kids were the most behaved that I had ever seen them! We really felt a sense of community that night. It was great!

Posted by Ily on September 15, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

DrawBot

We did a little engineering project this evening. Micah, Isaac, and I used a motor from a gamecube controller to power a Drawbot (Ily took Reece outside so that he wouldn’t get too close to the soldering iron or anything like that). It was pretty fun. The controller broke a few months ago and we took it apart to try at fix it. We gave up on fixing it, mainly because the motor that makes it vibrate was so cool. Time went by and I found the Drawbot on the internet. I knew it was the perfect thing for us to use that motor with. We took a trip to Radio Shack to get some wire, a switch, and a battery holder and prototyped our circuit on a breadboard a few Saturdays ago, and finally built the whole thing tonight. Here are pictures and video of the project:

Posted by Bryan on September 9, 2008 | Filed under: Family News Geek | 6 comments

Home improvements

Family comes to visit for a major religious event. So what do we do? Party. And go to home Depot, buy a few supplies, and do some home maintenance stuff.

Some home improvements we have done this week that have needed to be done for a really long while.

New thermostat. So easy, so effective. Why didn’t we do it before? Because we didn’t realize a) how easy it was, b) how much better it would work, and c) lack of motivation. Our home has been either way too hot or way too cold for as long as we have lived in it. We could never get the thermostat to work right. Winter time is actually quite warm and toasty in here… too warm. Summer is usually cool, need a sweater cool. We just thought it was something we had to live with. Natural gas prices are projected to rise 40% this winter. With last winter’s highest bill being around $250+, I didn’t want to be heating my house to 85 degrees or higher every day this winter because my thermostat is wonky. Talk about motivation! And for the first time ever we have been comfortable in our house, not too hot or too cold. Nice! New spigot thingy outside for the hose. Now the Scarecrow sprinkler can actually be used without water leaking all over and creating a swamp under the spigot. As a bonus, Bryan and his dad got to feel really cool because they succeeded attempting a slightly involved plumbing job. We fixed the lock on our bathroom door that has been broken for almost all of the 5 years we have lived in this house. We bought a lock to replace it finally only to realize that is was really easy to fix if you actually took the thing apart. Too bad we never took the thing apart before. We could have avoided a lot of embarrassing moments with a lock on that door! Funny how a lack of knowledge of how to fix something makes you willing to live with something undesirable for a long time. I am realizing that job specialization in our society has lead to a great loss of what used to be common knowledge for the greater portion of the populace. I can solve a complicated math problem thanks to my college degree, but not change a lock or fix a running toilet. Now I know that I can do both things and not have to pay someone to come jiggle the handle on the toilet because I have a lack of handiness. I am handy now. Oh yes I am. There should be a college course on “Simple stuff to fix around the house” for people like me who didn’t get taught that stuff while growing up. My parents were too specialized in their own fields to know how to do that stuff I guess. Someday we will get around to finally texturizing and painting that patch on the bathroom wall from when we had to have a plumber come fix the pipe we drilled through. My mother in-law admits that she will show up someday with a can of orangepeel and more paint to fix it if I don’t get around to it soon. How long has that patch been there anyhow? Six months maybe? Probably longer. And the hole that the plumber cut in the wall was probably there for a month until Doug and Diane (the home improving parents-in-law) came over and fixed it for us. I have a lack of motivation right now. I am motivated to do lots of other stuff, just not finish patching that wall. Watch us switch jobs and need to sell the house. Then I would be really motivated to do it.

Posted by Ily on September 9, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment

Our first son is now officially a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

This is the abbreviated version of what happened at Isaac’s baptism:

Songs, prayers, talks, Isaac gets “dunked by Dad” as Micah put it, confirmed a member, given the gift of the holy ghost… All the normal elements of a baptism. It just didn’t feel normal to us. It was all just too great to do justice in describing it. You just had to be there. Isaac probably will not remember as much as we will. I just hope he remembers the intense feeling of the Holy Spirit as it bore witness to many there that choosing to be baptized is the correct choice and that the Lord truly smiles down on his children who follow that commandment.

Posted by Ily on September 8, 2008 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 2 comments

The New BYU Rival

This article on the the rivalry between BYU and Wheaton College over the title of “Number One Stone Cold Sober” school is hilarious. The reporter in the video thinks there may have been a party or two at Wheaton last year that allowed BYU to claim the title, but any BYU alum watching the video will see the real reason BYU wins. If the reporter had done his job and visited both schools maybe he would have seen it too—the facial hair and tank tops being worn by the Wheaton kids are obviously what knocked them out of the top spot. Your going to have to go all the way to be the champ, Wheaton. Bare shoulders and stubble just don’t cut it! :-)

Posted by Bryan on September 7, 2008 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 1 comment

Wild Party

We threw Isaac a party today for his 8th birthday. He really wanted to go to Lucia Falls with his 3 best friends and climb on rocks. Wow, simple in theory. Not much prep. I can do that…. Kind of dangerous. Difficult when you have a 2 year old who refuses to be carried or put in a stroller or strapped to me in a mei tai. Hmmm…. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.

I did have 2 moms join me, but they then had to bring their other kids (so then we had 10 kids total to watch over). So it wasn’t any easier. It was a wash really. But we still had fun and no one drowned nor fell in the water. Luck was with us today.

All of the kids agreed it was the best birthday party they have ever gone to… Sorry to all you moms out there who now have too much to live up to. They spent time climbing rocks, catching tiny frogs, running around a trail, throwing rocks, fighting with tiny fake swords, and eating cupcakes. What could be better? Um that the sun would shine you say? Well it did eventually. It was a great party!

Posted by Ily on September 2, 2008 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments