Not Crafty, Just Resourceful

Since moving, I’ve had (and still have) a list of projects to keep me busy. Among them have been some “crafts.” I’m really not crafty, but instead I try to use what is around me to my advantage.

My first project was Jack’s room. While pregnant I would hear about everyone getting their nurseries ready for when their babies come, but we couldn’t do that since Jack was going to be in our living room. Now that we’re in a two bedroom I could finally do a kid’s room. I made the name decoration and the boarder from junk mail and a lot of double stick tape. It took a long time to do all the shapes but it was fun and I’m pleased with how it turned out.

I also wanted a wreath on our front door to make it a little more homey. Since we have plenty of trees and fallen branches, I hot-glued a bunch of sticks together and made a wreath for $0. The fabric will rotate with the seasons and holidays, made from little tablecloths my mom gave me, which I converted to sashes for the wreath.

Jack finally outgrew the weight limit on his infant car seat so I had to find him a bigger one. We ended up with this sweet little thing. Seriously. 

I was not going to pay an extra $20 for a more “manly” color scheme, I figured I could take care of that myself and keep the money. We have a bunch of t-shirts that are someday going to be made into a quilt and so I stole some of the blank squares to come up with this cover. I sewed the squares together and then hand sewed them to the car seat. It works.

The last project doesn’t really qualify as resourceful, but it took up a lot of time and effort so I can’t not mention it. Originally I had a plan to sew a couch cover to make our couch match the décor of our living room better. All too quickly I decided I didn’t want to do that much work and so I just sewed the fabric directly onto the couch, kind of like I re-upholstered it.

Before (best picture I have, Jack was such a wee little baby!):

After:

It's like a brand new couch. Thanks again to my aunt who gave it to us when we got married, hopefully it will continue to last us long after we move.

My current project involves scraping 70 years worth of paint off our door jams so the doors will actually close. Hooray for lead paint exposure! 

continued...

Yeah, kids are fun, especially around large bodies of water, like lakes for instance. Mason Lake in particular. Hilary’s family has access to a cabin on Mason Lake and some of her fondest memories take place there. It was, therefore, a must for her to introduce Jack to the cabin on the lake.

     The history actually runs a little deeper. Hilary’s father has video evidence of Hilary, as a baby, playing on the shore by the cabin and putting rocks from the lake in her mouth. Fast forward a quarter of a century and you get this: 

That’s right. Jack playing on the same shore, and possible putting the same rocks in his mouth. Let me also draw your attention to the dark spots in the left-hand sky in the above picture. No, they aren’t UFOs. It’s just globs of lake mud Jack has pulled of the bottom and tried to throw out into the lake. You see, Jack likes to throw the rocks as well as taste them. But moving position takes a lot of work, so after you’ve thrown all the rocks that are right in front of you his opinion is keep on digging. Thus, we have and mud flung into the air. Notice that it doesn’t have much forward motion to it. In fact, for most of the day Jack had a huge drying blob of mud just above his forehead. He’s good at getting the dirt up but, not away.

     On the contrary, dirt and Jack usually stay quite close. Consider if you will, the aftermath of giving him a large piece of licorice.

We now have a fair guess of how Jack would look with a goatee. (Look, above his left eye. It’s the remnant of the lake mud he threw up there earlier. ) Before we move on to a more thorough discussion of candy on our trip, let me show you that Jack also went for his first boat ride. 

He described it as, “okay, but not something you’d want to do everyday.”

     Getting back to candy. There was a lot more candy being handed out than I would have expected. Jack tried marshmallows for the first time and instantly fell in lust with them.

 In this he was following in his cousin’s footsteps. Here we see Celia and Jack, who having found the marshmallow stash are now looking hopefully at those who give them out. Well, Jack is looking hopeful anyway. Celia is pictured riding the ring pop dragon. You can tell from the glazed look (get it?) in her eye that it’ll be a while before she needs another mallow.

     The best candy experience was without doubt the Lindor truffles in the car. One day we decided against all common sense to do some shopping at the mall. On the way we unexpectedly came into the possession of some Lindor truffles.

     Well, a wrapped piece of candy could make a fine distraction for a toddler confined to a car seat.  Unless your toddler goes all truffle vampire on you. It must have taken a fair amount of pressure to push his teeth through the wrapper, but I think Jack was willing to pay the price. He certainly didn’t want to give the thing up.

 With all that candy running around his bloodstream it’s no surprise Jack decided to take in some exercise at the mall. He decided that escalators are about the coolest thing there, but I wasn’t too keen on his climbing on them by himself. Thus it was that I escorted him onto the bottom of the down escalator in the hopes he would grow tired of its incessant backward motion. I was wrong. He took to it like a professional treadmiller (assuming there are such people) and with a determined look on his face walked on and on.

 That’s about it for the Seattle trip. Let’s end with a family pose to remind us that there are other people in the world than Jack. I see this picture as typifying the trip as a whole; the adults are seen as “normal” and the kids as “normal for children under the age of four.” 

Vacation to the Emerald City

I’m happy to announce that we made it home. It’s always nice to get away on a vacation, and it’s always nice to come home. Especially when the to and from involves lengthy flights with a 14 month old. To be fair Jack did pretty well. But no toddler likes to be confined to a pair of seats for five hours, and no parents (even those with the best of preparations) can convince them they don’t want to explore the rest of the plane but would rather, in fact, like a nap. 

Jack napped pretty well on our flight to Seattle (with layover in the beautiful LA X), but only napped for 15 or 20 minutes just prior to landing on the way home. This made the transition to Seattle not so bad, while the go home adjustment is ongoing.

     Let us not dwell on the travel. The most interesting part of the sandwich is what goes on between the slices of bread (usually), so let us move on to the meat, cheese, and maybe even the horseradish of our trip.

     The compelling reason to go to Seattle (other than 65 degree weather in the midst of a Maryland heat wave) was that both of Hilary’s siblings and their families would be there with us. This allowed Jack the opportunity to mix with his Alaskan cousins (they are in fact his only cousins) for the first time since he has become more interactive. For instance, he was able to hear his big cousin Celia sing on their great-grandmother’s hearth. Truth be told Jack didn’t seem to care much for the singing, but when people clapped he ran to join in.

  Jack also developed a relationship with his younger cousin Sabrina. They were set up with neighboring highchairs during meals. They soon became quite adept and stealing each other’s food. I believe it was clear to everyone that Jack started it. He remembers the good old days eating puffs and mum mums (Sabrina is still waiting on teeth) and was quick to purloin one or twelve from her tray. Sabrina fought back by snatching his orange juice and the rest, as they say, was history.

The three cousins all together were always a lot of “fun.” Consider the following story in pictures. It is a simple story, that of “Hey, let’s get a nice picture of all the cousins together.” I will let you fill in the between the shots action of various parents and grandparents who gave their all by seating, reseating, asking, imploring, pleading, and bribing the kids into the final shot, which we will dub “good enough.” I will for your enjoyment provide some probable thoughts of these young ones below each picture.

Celia: Can you believe they let me get away with sitting up here? I will look above and to the right of the camera until they offer me marshmallows.

Sabrina: I wonder just how far I can lean over before I pitch onto my face? I’ll bet my balance will improve if I look at the camera, but not the lens.

Jack: Man, did you see how fast I was. I went from sitting down to jumping off the couch in no time! Also, what camera?

 Celia: Ah Hahahaha! Hee hee hee!

Sabrina: I can’t believe I’m the only one whose eyes are even visible to the camera. It’s like you guys aren’t even trying to take a nice picture.

Jack: I’ll teach you to steal my juice.

Celia: Still holding out for marshmallows.

Sabrina: Hey, this thing I’m looking at is way more entertaining than this camera circus in front of me.

Jack: Hey, there’s a camera.

            Yeah, kids are fun, especially around large bodies of water.

*And so this post has been sitting on my computer since Sunday waiting for Chris to finish it, but it is just too hot hot hot to do anything so this will be posted now and continued later. 

Fireworks in DC

The Fourth of July has become perhaps my favorite holiday. I like that it still means what it is supposed to; you can’t go to an independence day celebration without feeling at least a little bit patriotic. Plus I really like fireworks. They are so fun and spectacular and the chemistry is pretty cool too. It would be so much fun to be a firework developer (something to look into…graduate programs?) I was actually a little sad to leave Provo because I really liked the freedom festival where we could go to the hot-air balloon launch, walk the parade route backwards, and sit outside the stadium for the stadium of fire. Then I remembered, we are moving to the nation’s capital, they should be able to throw some awesome celebration. I’ve been pushing back Jack’s schedule so that he would be able to stay up late for fireworks and be able to adjust to Pacific time when we go to Seattle on Thursday. So after Jack got up from his second nap (at 7:15 pm) we headed out to the metro and into the city. We went to the Jefferson Memorial to watch the fireworks along side the Washington monument and across the tidal basin.

After waiting half an hour, the fireworks started. I was so looking forward to Jack enjoying the fireworks, but actually, he was quite scared. We thought he would be well prepared because we’ve had several thunderstorms (with some very loud thunder, it’s made me jump) and Jack has done great. Jack really likes Dr. Seuss’s Mr. Brown making thunder; he will find the page and go “boo, boo, boo!” and so we say “boom boom boom!” when it thunders and he likes it. No such luck with the fireworks though. He kept trying to run away from them, and managed to get free and went to the lap of a stranger (luckily he was wearing a BYU shirt so at least Jack knows who he can trust!). Jack settled down after a bit and started to watch, he even clapped. It was a really neat experience to celebrate in DC at my favorite memorial along with other people clapping and cheering to celebrate our country.

And then we had to make the exodus back to the metro with everyone else. We had heard horror stories about getting out of the city, and luckily it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Getting into the metro station was the worst, we were crammed body to body with everyone trying to get down one escalator, but we were only in that crowd for about 10 minutes. We all made it home and were in bed before midnight, so we call the night a success. We will probably be staying more local for the rest of our stay in DC, but I needed to be in the city at least once just because we can. 

Jack's Favorite Things

Balls

The Vacuum

Tackling Levi for his pacifier

What kid doesn't like the tupperware drawer?

Pizza (and pasta)

Climbing on everything.

Playing with a bag of sequins 

Fleece. We have a snuggie and he loves it. At Jo-Anns he was so giddy with excitement with all the bulk fleece.

He loves playing with water, but this bounce house was a little too much for him. His face says it all. 

Watching grass grow...

is so exciting. We set out to transform our backyard from a weed infested, rooty, mosquito oasis into a lush, green, mosquito oasis. We brought in several bags of topsoil to level the ground, and then seeded. We had to repeat a few times to cover the bare spots, and still have a few of them, but overall we are satisfied with our product.
I wish our before picture (Jack was so little!) was better but you can kind of see all the weeds and roots among the shadows. The after picture is Chris and Jack during the maiden voyage of our cute new lawn mower. A very proud day.
Before:

After:

Several weeks ago we finally took the bikes from the attic and have been able to go on a few family bike rides. We bought this neat seat for Jack and he rides along in front with me. He even likes his helmet (sometimes). Chris has even begun to ride his bike to school occasionally. It is faster than the bus and he can be on his own schedule. If only it wasn't so hot or humid.

He Crawls

Jack has reached a new milestone. In church we use to be able to confine him to our row since we could block the only exit he knew of. A few weeks ago he learned how to bear crawl out, he would walk on his hands and feet under the pew (no knees touching the ground) and then he would continue to walk on his hands well after he was done just to make sure he cleared the bench. It was pretty amusing for us because he’d never done anything like it before and so it was a little distracting. By the next Sunday he had finally learned how to crawl on his knees. And now there is no way to contain him. People don’t mind a baby wandering under their feet right? He seems to quite enjoy crawling. He’ll be walking around just fine and then drop to the floor and start to crawl, just because he can. Then he quickly goes back to walking since it is so much faster.
Other updates:

Jack is now weaned. It’s been a long time coming so now it is over. No more eating for two, darn it. I’m missing that already. I had a bunch of breast milk stored in the freezer so I gradually mixed it with whole milk. Now he is all cow.

He is still a little boy, 25% for head and weight, 50% for height. He is 20.5 lbs, but I don’t remember the rest of the measurements, sorry. I didn’t realized how skinny he was until he was wearing a disposable diaper for his doctor’s appointment and his pants were falling off him. I forgot how much bulkier the cloth ones were.

Enough of Jack. My parents came to visit for a week in at the end of April. Amazingly, Levi’s family took a vacation the exact time my parents were here, so we got to see the sights with them instead of being confined at home. We went to the national arbouritum to see the azaleas and bonsai trees among other things, parts of various smithsonians, and spent a day in west Virginia. On the weekend when Chris could join us, we went to Mount Vernon to see George Washington’s house and plantation. It was neat, a lot more to see and do than I expected.

We welcome any visitors!