Collage Teacher Gifts

Here are the teacher gifts that Jacob and Bekah and I had so much fun making! The idea for it came from the dragon picture Jacob and I made a long time ago, and that idea came from Eric Carle - the "Hungry Caterpillar," "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" author. Eric Carle layers tissue paper to illustrate his beautiful books.
To do the project the kids and I went to their school and took a picture of the front of the school.

We picked out the colors that we could see: Yellow, blue sky, blue mountains, grey, green, orange, bright blue for the school, black, white, and red
Then each kid got to paint a full sheet of one color - so Jacob painted a green page using bright green, regular green and dark green. Bekah painted a blue sheet with dark and light blues, some grays and a little purple thrown in. We did the same with all the other colors. Both kids painted with bubble wrap, stiff bristly brushes, a corn on the cob, their hands, and splattering paint with a toothbrush. Then when each of the full sheets were dry we cut them up into the right shapes for each part of the drawing. I used my silhouette to cut letters out of the yellow and black papers. I sketched a line drawing of the school on the base paper and then the kids glued on the shapes that I cut out for them.
Here is Jacob with his awesome teacher, Ms. Rozzell. She loved Jacob and he loved her too. We will miss her next year.

Here is the finished product next to the real thing for a comparison. Ours is way more interesting, don't you think? :) (The one below was Bekah's - a little different than Jacob's)

 Here are some close-ups.

When we were finished we framed and delivered them...The teachers loved them! Success!

Dog House

If the kids had it their way today I would have been fired and replaced by four highly trained and individualized caretakers. Let me elaborate (but not exaggerate):
A. Beau didn't like me for taking him to Hobby Lobby (aka "The Store That Turns My Child Into The Devil") because he would rather play with me at home in his room. He could play in his room for hours and wants me to, too, and no, it does not count if I am reading a book or talking on my phone or (heaven forbid!), falling asleep. I was also a mean mom for cleaning his bum because it stunk, telling him to get off the counter while I was making dinner, and not making soup for dinner (he hates soup but he thinks he likes it, see "E."). He was also mad at me for holding Marianne (see "D.")
B. Jacob was mad at me in his dark brooding way for a large part of the afternoon because I was unavailable to cut out dozens of circles for him so he could turn them into planets (see "C."), and because I don't have black paper and I was unwilling to paint his room black so it could properly replicate the solar system. He was also mad at me for making him empty the dishwasher and putting on a boring movie for quiet time (that he actually loved.) He was mad when I wouldn't take him back to the school to give his teacher her gift that we just finished, but was then happy when I caved and loaded everyone up and delivered said teacher gift.
C. Bekah was mad at me for giving her the wrong colored cup of chocolate milk for breakfast. I think I was still a little sore from a similar episode the night before because I just picked her untouched cup of milk up and threw it in the sink. Then she was mad at me for that. And then for telling her to choose between a fit and school. (She chose school, thank goodness...that's one of those threats that I really don't have the will to carry out.) After school I was mostly on her good side because I was helping her with her teacher gift all afternoon. "Helping" is a stretch because she was also very caught up in the "boring" movie (see "B."). But when I was not helping with her gift I was in trouble (see "D."). I was also in trouble for something before dinner...oh yeah, when I asked Beau to put his shoes away but Bekah grabbed them instead and Beau screamed at her to give them back but she just ran to his room and threw them in and then Beau allegedly threw them at her because he was so mad and then she collapsed on the floor screaming, "Someone help me!" for the next fifteen minutes but I couldn't (and didn't want to) because I was holding Marianne and making dinner (see "D." and "E.").
D. Marianne was mad at me for putting her on the floor. Period. Except for the blessed 30 minutes when she somehow dug deep within herself and found the will and the ability to happily exist among the toys, carpet, crumbs and trash on the floor. She did take a couple of naps during the day, too, but not at the times I would have chosen (still grateful though!). Read: I held her all day. Or sat next to her on the floor/couch/chair.
E. I made noodles for dinner. With sauce and meat and cheese all mixed in. With salad. Enough said, I am the devil. At least that was until they all tried the noodles with sauce and meat and cheese and loved it. Mom is not a crazy witch trying to make dinner miserable, thankyouverymuch.

So now it's 10:07 and the house is quiet with everyone in bed and I just can't bring myself to go to sleep because I finally have a minute to do anything I want and so I'm writing this post to get the rest of the day off my chest and now I'm going to go paint for a minute...want to see my latest creation? Look up "Eagle Nebula." This is that: (the left side is just scrap, fyi).

Total Eclipse of the Sun

 Today Marianne ate my SmartTaste Ronzoni pasta box while I shopped for our groceries. I thought she was just sucking on the box until I pulled it away from her mouth and realized half of the top was missing. I pointed this out to the check-out clerk so he wouldn't get grossed out by accidentally touching the top and he just shrugged and said, "It's okay. It's edible." (Um, really?), and then, "It'll pass." And then he chuckled to himself about his clever pun. I chuckled too, half at him, half at the pun that I'm sure I would have never heard before if I married someone refined and proper and not Rus. (I would have so missed out on bathroom humor without Rus.)
Anywho...what you're really here to see are our shots of last night's eclipse. It was just like the last eclipse I saw, except I'm not in middle school and I got to use these snazzy eclipse glasses instead of a slightly challenging pin-hole thingermajigger. Oh and I got to enjoy it with my kids, who were totally thrilled to watch the sun get slowly overtaken by the moon. Here is a progression.  

When the sun was fully eclipsed people in our neighborhood started cheering. It was fun and disconcerting - we thought we were alone in our yard enjoying the view and then suddenly we could hear, but not see, all these people nearby.
You can thank me later that I didn't post all the pics that Rus took of the sun by placing his glasses over the camera lens just like it says you're not supposed to on the warning label. It was a very convincing warning label; I almost felt like I was letting my children do something really dangerous. Another note about these glasses: They were made for Rus' head. See how perfectly they fit him?

 Everyone else had to hold theirs on the whole time or else they might fall off and simultaneously cause blindness - Not Rus. He was sporting the look the whole time just cause he could. Look closely at how they fit me - see all that overhang in the back? Maybe you can't...It was at least an inch. This just proves, once again, that Rus' head is huge.

 See the children holding theirs on? FYI Beau did wear his to look at the sun, just not in the picture where I ask him to. These pictures were taken just minutes before the full eclipse. I thought the lighting was awesome.

Back to the Future Bekah

What is cute and blue eyed, can spin indefinitely without getting dizzy, and knows every word to Johnny B. Goode?
Bekah.
Who can sing Johnny B. Goode two dozen times in a row without getting sick of it (and simultaneously drive everyone nearby crazy)?
Bekah.
Who knows every word to a dozen other 50s songs and likes to sing them in half time and has done so day in and day out for the last month?
Bekah.
Who sang Johnny B. Goode all day yesterday?
Nope, not Bekah.
Beau. He's been a good student.

Here is my spinning wonder. She loved that her poodle skirt could spin so high. And she wore shorts underneath to protect her modesty, dontyouworry.

 

And here she is, Chuck Berry in the flesh. I told her she needs to work on her moves. I even showed her the Chuck Berry, and Michael J. Fox.

Oh and just so you know, this girl recently made big bucks from the tooth fairy. (The tooth fairy that has incidentally been exposed. It turns out Bekah is a handwriting expert, and when the tooth fairy fills out the questionnaire that Bekah left for him in the middle of the night, it looks eerily similar to Dad's handwriting.) Check out this beautiful smile:

Mother's Day

Yesterday, of course was Mother's Day. I was sure to let Rus sleep in on Saturday morning, because what I really wanted most of all was to sleep in myself on Sunday. And HOORAY! Wish granted...Rus even woke me up (sometime after 8am hallelujah), saying that my breakfast of caramel rolls was done. Yum, sugary yum. I didn't have to change Marianne's stinky bum and I didn't have to clean up the monumental stack of dishes I made making dinner. Thank you Rus!
Bekah and Jacob also spoiled me with gifts they made at school. Their gifts were actually quite good! Jacob made me a beautiful clay sunflower - he shaped it and stamped it and painted it himself.

Then he hung it on a push-pin in my room, right above my bed so I could see it everyday. He also helped his teacher come up with this:

Bekah made me a beautiful sunflower drawing. The sunflowers were drawn with a hot glue gun and then she colored everything else with oil pastels. She also did some weaving with different colored yarns around a paper cup and attached a bead handle. I think it'll be my new coin jar in the van. So cute!

 
Her card cracked me up too:

The kids also helped Rus buy me some jammies. Did you know I loved Hello Kitty? Me neither, but they were soft and comfy. (I told Bekah they needed to be soft and no buttons. Mission accomplished.)
 And here I am with all my loot: Caramel Rolls, artwork, cards and pizza cutter.

I am a truly blessed woman.

Motherhood is...

Here is my non-winning essay for the NieNie Dialogues essay contest. The essay winners wrote really good and inspiring essays (and they all involved some life drama - adoption, illness, death - and I'm good staying out of those categories). 

Today as I loved on my six-month-old daughter’s neck and thought about how beautiful and amazing she was…she spit up on me. I grabbed the nearest thing, wiped up the spit-up, and scolded her in sing-song baby speak until she gurgled with laughter and started cooing. I was still over the moon for her, just slightly wetter and smellier than ten seconds before.

Motherhood.

Messes and bleach, mayhem and quiet time, wonder and futility. Motherhood is the mother of all contradictions. I have never loved a little person so completely, and I have never been so immobilized and furious at the same little person’s irrationality. The fact that God can both complete me and disassemble me with my own child is further evidence of his genius.

My own coming-to-motherhood story began like the grade school chant:

First came love, then came marriage, then came a bouncing baby girl who stripped me of any parenting ideals I might have had. She was beautiful and demanding, chubby and picky, happy and gloriously opinionated. At six months all eighteen pounds of her felt like the weight of the world – how amazing that I was allowed to hold her; how terrifying it was to be her world! I felt marvelously under-qualified. (She is seven now – I still feel the same way.)

Motherhood, she taught me, is about sick days and adventures, veggies and treats, early bedtimes and late night glow-sticks. One moment I was elated to claim that beautiful pigtailed girl singing in the front row of the program at church, and the next I realized that her brother (next to her) was proudly picking his nose. The son that could be Evel Knievel on his bicycle was reduced to tears when put on a t-ball team. Bandaids could heal anything and, “Go empty the dishwasher,” was a life sentence. My three-year-old once lamented after eating a ring pop, “My hands are going to be sticky forever!” I could relate. Sometimes, in hard times, I feared that everything would be the same way forever: boogers and tears and cries like chicken pecks on a weary mother hen. And then my daughter would paint me a picture, “That’s you and me momma,” and I would wish that I could package her in that moment, store her carefully in tissue and ribbons and keep her that way forever…Small hands with dirty chipped nails, skewed pigtails and a streak of pink paint on her cheek.

Slowly, painstakingly, the trickling streams of experience have deposited themselves into one simple pool and reflect the age old wisdom that grandmas like to share in the grocery store line: Being a mom is so hard. But once you are one, not being one is unimaginable. Being a mother is the contradictions – the constantly shifting ground, the heartache and bliss, the sneaking suspicion that you might be going crazy – and it is joy – the deeply felt happiness that in my house has four distinct names: Rebekah. Jacob. Beau. Marianne.

Need a Good Laugh? No Really...

Marianne has a funny face.
Well actually she has a super cute, super chubby face with beautiful blue eyes and full pink lips...
Lips that quite often like to do this:

She has started doing this face regularly in the last couple of weeks. Funky nose breathing accompanies it, (she could possibly suffocate herself just by doing this with her lips),...so I can usually tell when she's making this face even when I'm not looking at her because of the sound of her breathing. It totally cracks me up! I wondered where on earth this silly face came from! I told Rus about her silly lips and he said, "What, like this?"

BWAHAHAHA!!!

I can't even tell you how many fits of laughter I have had over this goofy face gene that Marianne and her daddy share! I can't make this face...neither can Bekah or Jacob or Beau...
Good thing they normally look like this or I might not be able to live with them!

Marianne at Eight Months EEK!

So the Bug is eight months old. She is silly, sometimes goofy, wiggly, squealy, and still undeniably squishy. She has great hair but some weird cowlicks, bright blue eyes, and rubber-band-everything. She loves water - spraying, dripping, trickling, puddling, pooling, splashing water. She hates food until it's in her mouth. Then she doesn't hate it but doesn't spit it out, either. If she did have a favorite food it would be avocados (unless you count the contraband brownies that Dad feeds her). She loves windows - especially our windows because they are at her level. She loves Colonel - his tail, his wet nose, his presence in the yard when she's looking out the window at him. (She freaks Colonel out for some reason, though - he'll jump up and move away if she gets too close.)
Marianne loves her Daddy. She lunges for him and gifts him with a radiant smile every day when he gets home from work. She loves to pull the hair on his arms until he calls for mercy, and then loves to do it even more. She loves Bekah and Jacob and Beau, too, but Jacob is probably her favorite because he gives her the most attention. Or maybe it's because he's found that his nose is really good at tickling her belly.
Marianne loves paper, lint, fuzz - the smaller the better - she can find it anywhere and everywhere. She explores the world around her through her mouth. The camera strap, toothbrushes, and oh, heaven - my wallet - she loves to suck on my wallet.
Marianne loves to look at books. She'll give them a full 90 seconds of her attention before they go in her mouth. She loves to throw things, drop things and crawl over things. She is becoming an explorer-extraordinaire.
She is bright and happy and owns 100% of my heart. (As do each of my other children. And Rus. You figure out the math.)

Love you, Bug.

Bring Light and Joy

So what do you do when a girl you know finds out her baby girl (who is the same age as your baby girl), has cancer? The first thing I did was wish that I knew this mother better so I could be a better friend. The second thing I did was look for opportunities to help her family out (because she has two older children, both boys). Our ward has made this really easy - they've set up a calendar filled with different needs and you can just sign up to help whenever you can. The third thing I did was pray for inspiration - although I've had a prayer in my mind for this sweet baby ever since I found out she was sick. And thankfully inspiration did come - the answer might not have been exactly what this mother or baby or family needed, but it was something to do, which was what I needed.
Our stake just had stake conference last weekend, and in the adult session the themes for the talks were temples and missionary work. One young mother-to-be talked about missionary work and service. She said that what the world needs from us LDS are just two things - light and love. She talked about how her father is the director for the Young Ambassadors at BYU and how they are in Africa right now on tour. Her dad sent her several text-pictures of some of the young ambassadors with children that are in the hospital with severe burns, and she noticed that one young woman in the group was crying in all the pictures. Then the speaker said this: "I told my dad that he needed to have a talk with that young lady because these children and people already know that it is sad. Everyone knows that. Her job is to bring them joy."
Well that thought really struck a chord with me, especially with this family on my mind who in a matter of days entered the fight with cancer with their baby girl. Her situation is undoubtedly sad. Everyone knows it is sad. So maybe something I can do is bring a little light, a little joy. Presumptuous, right? But better than nothing.
So I made these mobiles for the baby's hospital room and thought of her all morning while I was working on them. I held Marianne a little longer than I had been, any moment I could, and I thought a lot about the trials we all face in this world.

Bekah's Haircut

A few weeks ago Bekah and the other kids were able to spend the night with their cousins Zaya and Russel.  They had a wonderful time, and I could tell because when I picked them up they were all covered in dirt from head to toe. What I didn't realize until later was that Bekah's hair had also received a generous dose of sticky sap that refused to brush out. I'm sure somewhere in cyber space there is a solution for getting sap out of hair, but Bekah wanted a hair cut anyway and the sap was near the ends so it could easily be cut off. I decided to cut her hair myself because 1. Marianne had just laid down for a nap and I didn't want to wake her and take her to the hair cut place and 2. I kinda sortof want to know how to cut Bekah's hair myself and 3. Bekah lets me cut her hair - in fact she gets super excited.
So I spent fifteen minutes watching youtube videos on how to cut an a-line hair cut, and then started hacking away at Bekah's hair. An hour and a half later (Bekah was so, so patient with me!), this is what it looked like:
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but it definitely looks better curled under because then you can't see the choppiness. My plan now is to cut it regularly so that when she's in high school she'll let me cut it and I don't have to spend money to take her to a salon!
We'll see...
Before:

After:

Prepare to Be Floored!

I know you won't believe me...because flooring is not a necessity, right? But Rus and I just threw caution to the wind two weeks ago and blew a chunk of change on some wood flooring anyways. (We live on the edge.) I didn't hate living with concrete floors for the past nine months as much as I thought I would, but I am so SO happy that they are covered!
My parents were planning on being in town this past weekend for my niece's baptism and decided that there was nothing they'd like more than to help us install our flooring. (Seriously.) So Rus and I started trying to level the floor the Wednesday before. I don't know if any of you have ever leveled a concrete floor, but it is a horrible, messy, time consuming process, especially when your floor was apparently laid by drunk concrete workers. On Wednesday Rus and I used a six foot ruler to find any dips in the flooring that were more than 1/8". (There were many.) On Thursday while he was at work I read all of the instructions on the concrete mix that we were going to use and thought to myself, "Rus has never done this. He'll read the same instructions as me. Why can't I just start on this now before he gets home. Then he'll come home and it'll be almost done, I'm sure."
Ha.
So I made the mix, dumped it in the appropriate spot, and then spent 1.7 minutes confidently spreading it out.
And then it started drying at an unbelievable rate and I immediately realized that I had made everything worse, not better, and in a few minutes it would be hardened and stuck there and Rus would walk through the door and I'd have to find a hole to crawl in...
So I did the only logical thing...I ran to the garage, grabbed the flat shovel, and started scraping the crumbly stuff back into the bucket that I had just poured it from.
And then Rus walked in, I told him that the concrete people were idiots, cried for good measure, and sent him off to buy something that worked.
He came back with four more bags of the same product and later showed me exactly how to do it right.
Ug.
I think he will admit that the stuff was horrible to work with, too, though. We had to pour it, let it dry, and then sand any rough edges, and then remeasure, and then pour some more later. Our house was promptly covered in dust everywhere. You'll be happy to know that laying the actual flooring was really, really easy. We bought an engineered Quick-Click flooring and it was great to work with. It's Brazilian Koa.
Anyway, now that you have the saga, here are some pics:
Living Room BEFORE:

Living Room After:

 And another view, Before:

During:

After:

My mom paid the kids in animal cookies for helping.

 Oh, did I say kids? I meant everyone.

 Here is a close up of the wood. I am so happy with it!

 And here is a close up of the dust. Yuck.

 And a finished view looking back at the kitchen.

 We spent Wednesday night, Thursday night, and Friday leveling the concrete in these two rooms. We started laying the flooring at 10am on Saturday, took a break from 3 to 6pm, and finished at 10:30 that night. All that is left to do is putting the trim back on.
Hooray!
Thank you Mom and Dad! It was really fun to work with you!