May 2009 archive

Fun times this week.

This was my LAST WEEK TO TEACH PRESCHOOL this year! Yes, there was much rejoicing at the end of the week. The kids declared it was ignore the teacher day on Thursday and spent the whole last 45 minutes blowing bubbles in the small inflatable pool we had up in the driveway instead of doing the last few activities I had planned. They were doing educational bubbles at least. They traced the letters in the water with their straws as they blew bubbles. They were having fun so I didn’t really care.

In Isaac’s class they have been studying some laws of motion so to wrap up the unit all the 2nd graders went roller skating. Any parents who wanted to come were invited. They needed tons of help getting all the skates tied up and picking up kids from the floor. We got to roller skate for free. I decided to try skating since I hadn’t really gone since I was 10 or 11. I was good back in the day. I could backwards skate, I could do a little turn, I could shoot the duck… Add 20 years and 100 pounds and you get one uncoordinated skater. It was like skating through a mine field cause there were kids going down everywhere. Like little bombs waiting to explode into a bunch of flailing arms and legs ready trip you and give you a broken bone or two. Many a parent was just walking the floor in street shoes just picking kids up again. It was quite hilarious. I loved how Isaac just got out there and started skating. I asked how he was doing once I finally was done helping kids get on skates and got to skate myself. He said “Great! I have gone around 8 times and I haven’t fallen since the 7th time around.” I asked how many times he had fallen and he replied “At least 20 times.” He had so much fun and even though he fell several times, he has been asking to go back just about every day!

On Friday it was the annual STAKE Father’s and suns. Our stake still thinks it is a ward for some reason and they can’t do anything hardly on the ward level. Every year Bryan says “I am not going if it is still at the stake level….” but he still goes because the boys would kill him if he didn’t. They have been counting down this entire month for it. I’ll let him tell you all about it. It was fun.

Since all my children are boys and Reece even went this year, I had a whole evening and morning to myself. What joy! What rapture! Oh how much time I had to do fun stuff! I went out to dinner and then dancing with my friend Ruth. When I say dancing, I don’t mean we went to a club and hung out with a ton of single people, we went to someone’s home in Portland who regularly holds folk dancing in her living room on Friday nights. It is a bit of a strange crew who attends, but pleasant. The dancing is definitely fun. I finally learned a dance that I never could do at BYU called Jove Malaj Mome and I count it a fabulous evening just because of that. After that I came home and watched Estonian Folk Dances on You Tube getting myself ready for a performance the following day. I joined this Estonian dance troupe and I can tell you, the costume was hot and itchy, but the performance was so fun and worth it! I got to know the other dancers a little better too. And I may even know the dances a little better today than I did before. I may just forget the dances, but I do ok with it as long as others are telling me which direction to go. What nice people to call the dances for me!

And the best part to end my week with was this: Reece went pee in the potty. He was in the middle of a diaper change, AKA half naked, and I suggested that if he has to go potty before I get back with his clean diaper he can go pee in the potty. I never expected him to do it. So I came back a few minutes later with his diaper and he was sitting on his potty in the living room and he had peed! Hurrah! We all cheered. We did a happy dance. We all had ice cream with Magic Shell on it to celebrate. If he potty trains this month, it will be about 6 months faster than the other two boys. I am not getting my hopes up, because I understand one pee in the potty is not the same as fully potty trained, but it sure is a baby step in the right direction!

So that is about all for our week. Whew! it was another busy one.

Posted by Ily on May 31, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Rough Commute

The two questions I get asked most often these days are, “How is the new job?” and, “How is the commute?” Well, I’ve had some amazing sunny days driving in the Gorge lately, so I decided to bring my camera along to document the “rough” commute. I kind of just held the camera out the window to take most of these, so they don’t totally do it justice, but hopefully you get the idea. I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of the views.

I brought my camera with me to document my rough commute from Vancouver to White Salmon.

I took most of these out the window of my car while driving.  You can probably tell I kept my eye on the road.
... See my Tabblo>

Posted by Bryan on May 19, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Oh woe is me

Yesterday was one of those awful sunny Sundays. I say awful because it was GLORIOUS and sunny and would have been a perfect day to go swimming in a river, or a pool in your driveway, or at the local pool, or go hiking, or ride bikes all day. I hate Sundays like that. They make me ill. All because it is the Sabbath and we don’t do those things on Sundays.

So because it was Bee-you-ti-ful, I was a little grumpy. Add to it that I was tired from the work in the garage (reorganizing) and the kitchen (when we removed some stuff and put it out in the garage we found lots of places that needed cleaning) and that the boys had potty accidents in bed and so I had like 4 loads of laundry to do on the Sabbath and you get one really unpleasant woman. We made it to church, late again because the boys horsed around instead of getting ready like we asked them to, and we were not in the best of moods. I fought the urge the whole time to just get up and leave and go take a nap out on the lawn instead of attending my meetings.

I suffer through the meetings with a totally bitter heart and then get called out of Primary because Reece has leaked through his diaper and his pants are totally wet. Never mind that his diaper is pretty much mostly dry. I had changed it in a hurry on the way out the door to church, I must have put it on wrong. Argh. I did have a clean diaper with me, but not pants for the kid other than sweatpants in the car. On an 83 degree day (I swear it was that hot in the church too) I worried he would overheat, not to mention, look really silly because the sweatpants didn’t fit anymore. Well, I took the opportunity to drive home and get him new pants. I was very tempted to stay there and take a nap. But I didn’t. Oh how I wanted too!

This whole entry is just my way to vent about how much I hate pee. It caused me lots of loads of agony on a sunny Sabbath day. Instead of having a day of rest, I had a day of drudgery cleaning up after the incontinence aftermath. I think I want everyone to wear pull-ups until they are 18 in my house from now on.

Posted by Ily on May 18, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment

WOMAN POSSESSED WITH CLEANING DEMON ATTACKS GARAGE

When I get motivated to do a project, it is usually only because it is a sunny day. We had a few of those this past week. Somehow the sun super charges me and gives me superhuman amounts of tenacity and helps me get projects done. Things like totally reorganizing our garage are totally do-able for me on a sunny day.

On a rainy day, it never happens. On rainy days I sit on the couch like a blob and do nothing, not even read, and wish I had motivation to do more than just sit and watch my kids do nothing also. I can’t even cook for us. I am pathetic on rainy days.

Ok, so the sun this last week really gave me the energy to become a woman who is all consumed with her goal to attack the garage and make it organized. Here are the results.

For Mother’s Day, Ily wanted the garage better organized.  This was
a two-Saturday project, with can-holder making time in-between.  It was
a lot of work, but the results feel good.

We searched the internet for ideas on how to better store our cans and found this idea .  Here you see Ily gluing together a bunch of cardboard can holders.

... See my Tabblo>

Posted by Ily and Bryan on May 18, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments

Our first Pinewood derby

We took pictures and here they are. We are so proud of Isaac and how well he did.

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Posted by Bryan and Ily on May 18, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 2 comments

Micah Rides

Micah has been getting closer and closer to getting up on two wheels. He is a very physical kid with good balance and coordination, so a month or so ago we started urging him into coasting down the driveway on his bike with his feet out to the side, just like we did with Isaac. We couldn’t get him to put is feet on the pedals though.

Saturday was a beautiful sunny day, so we put the bikes in the back of the van and went to the nearby middle school to ride around the running track. Micah didn’t want to at first. He saw right through our plan and got pretty grumpy with us, but Ily and I gently persisted while Isaac talked about how soft the track was, and how it wouldn’t even hurt if he fell. It wasn’t too long before I was holding onto his seat and running along side him while he pedaled. And then I let go. Unaware, Micah just kept on pedaling. I showed him both my hands, stopped running, and a reluctant grin spread across his face as he continued on without me. Ily and I cheered Micah on while he and Isaac rode lap after lap. Reece just chilled, playing in the sand of the long jump pit. It’s seems a little strange, but it has been really fulfilling for me as a parent to see both boys learn to ride their bike. For a little while there everything seems right in the world, and I feel like I’ve done my job well.

Micah also did some laps on a path around the nearby park, and then when we went home to make dinner he and Isaac did some laps around our neighborhood too. Here are a couple videos I shot:

And here are a few pics:

Micah learned to ride on two wheels! ... See my Tabblo>

Posted by Bryan on May 11, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 2 comments

Ok, we are alive. We just aren't posting much.

Facebook is going to be the death of this blog! Sorry all, just become my friend on Facebook. Then you can find out practically nothing about my life, but you can see what I had for breakfast. It is really a pathetic exchange for a blog entry.

Facebook is not the only reason our blog has not been updated. We have been really busy and had no time to write up anything! Here is what has been going on:

• My mom came to visit. We had a nice time with her. We took her to the farmers market here in town. We went to Powells’ City of Books, the bookstore that takes up an entire city block, and ate lunch at a cool Greek restaurant in downtown Portland with a giant purple octopus on it for attracting customers. We played at the park. We went too see some Estonian folk Dancers perform. We sewed. It was a nice visit.

• A woman I visit teach had back surgery at the end of April and she needed lots of help with her 6 year old who has down syndrome and her new baby. Can you guess who was there a lot? It was nice to serve. I am glad to have a good reason to be exhausted too.

• Also, we have been working on getting Isaac ready for his first PINEWOOD DERBY! He tied for second place. He was in the lead until he started racing his car backwards instead of frontwards. We are pretty proud of his car. He used the hand saw to cut it himself. He did the sanding. He did the drilling. He did the decorating. This car has googly eyes thanks to his creativity. Bryan helped him, but mainly Isaac did it himself.

• There have been more days without rain lately. That means we head outside. Micah has been working on learning to ride his bike outside on the non-rainy days… And Bryan is posting about this more later.

• We planted our garden last weekend and had to lay around the rest of the weekend to recover. It was a ton of work. We got the ground tilled and the compost added to the soil and then planted the plants and then it hailed in a freak storm that could only happen here. Luckily all the plants lived (until Isaac stepped on one yesterday when he was mowing- he owes me a new cherry tomato plant). It was so windy too that the weed barrier flew away. We will be going without weed barrier this year as a result. Here’s to too much weeding this summer. Also a random thing happened because of the garden. After we were all done with the garden I looked at Reece and his temples (the place on your face between your eyes and ears) swelled up and he looked like he got hit in the head on both sides and had big symmetrical lumps from it. We think it was because Reece got too involved with the steer compost that we added to the soil and he had some kind of allergic reaction that caused him to swell up. I got some pictures after he had taken Benedryl and was done with a bath to wash of any foreign substances off of him that might have made him swell. The swelling went down a bit before I took the picture. It was so weird to look at my little son with matching lumps on his head! I almost freaked out. Luckily he looks normal again.

• On Friday I watched a friends’ sleeping baby at her home while she volunteered at the school and got to admire her lovely organized food storage and camping gear in her garage while my kids played with the scooters and such in the garage. As a result, we tore our garage apart (literally) and reorganized a bit yesterday. I got new Gorilla Shelves for Mother’s Day as a result of my envy for Caryn Dewey’s garage. We are making our garage a super awesome place for our food storage and our other gear. Here is a a site that gave us a good idea for helping us rotate our can storage while utilizing up and down space rather than side to side space. We’ll let you know how it turns out. We hope it looks like this. Unfortunately, we will still not fit Bryan’s car into the garage with all of our organization. Two car garages are not made for two cars anymore…

• Did we ever blog about Bryan getting a car this month? Oh yeah he did in the Son of the Powerwagon entry. I am still not used to having another car in our driveway. We went one year and 2 months without a second car and I got used to parking very freely in our driveway… I hope I don’t hit his car anytime soon because I forget it is there!

• We found out that when you leave a company and have not even contributed your full amount to your Flexible Spending Account for the year (FSA- the account you can set up so you get money taken out of your paychecks pre-taxes to set aside for medical expenses… a use it or lose type of thing) you can still spend the FULL AMOUNT that you set aside without paying the company back. So we had $1700 left in our FSA for this year and I spent it all. Bryan is now sporting some prescription sun-glasses even (so he can drive into the sun on the way to and from work in comfort without having to switch to contacts so he can wear his cheapy sunglasses- and anything is cheapy to me after paying for prescription sunglasses-whoa!). After I bought all the glasses I could, and contacts, and prescriptions, and dental work, and paying for Reece’s tubes being removed I still had some money left to spend so I went and bought $100 worth of band-aids and first aid items. I used it all I am proud to say. Thanks HP for all the free medical stuff.

Let’s see… what else has kept me busy? Laundry maybe. Folk Dancing too. Also Yoga. I got my hair cut for the first time in 6 months. I took a free afternoon to make soft pretzels with the little boys because I found a recipe on Pioneer Woman for them and had to try it. Yum, they were good. I haven’t been busy cleaning so much since I have ignored that and my bathrooms can prove it. And the kids are pretty dirty too. The month passed in a big blur. It was like we living in a tornado. Whew, I am glad we are slowing down finally!

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Posted by Ily on May 10, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 1 comment

Happy Mother's Day, 2009

Grandmothers, if you haven’t checked your email, hurry up and do it. We sent you a link to a video of the boys singing you a song for Mother’s Day. Somehow, we got them to do it for family home evening this week. We aren’t going to make such a personal and heart-felt production public, so check your email for the link.

Posted by Bryan on May 10, 2009 | Filed under: Family News | 0 comments