Anecdotes for the day

Today was Sarah's last day of first grade. She had fun at the park field trip yesterday, but was much more subdued today. She cried in the car when I picked her up. We'll miss Mrs. T.









Noah is a cutie. The Wii is teaching him to read. Specifically, Animal Crossing. There is a lot of text-based interaction with characters. He still makes me read a lot to him, but he's recognizing more words every day.





Karen makes a good grumpy face on command. Her story for the day: she left her binky on the table at the library while she was making sure she had one of each flyer available. More than one of the really important flyers. Anyway, on the way home, she realized she'd left the binky behind and demanded that Mommy 'go get it at the library so the bad guys don't get my binky!' Fortunately for Mommy, we had a duplicate binky at home.

Noah

Noah didn't get an update on the previous post, so I'll just add a quick note.


Wow, I love this kid. He is so funny, and he thinks about interesting things. Lately, his fixation has been on quantifying everything. "How much is a minute?" "So, 10 minutes is 10 sixty seconds?" "How much is an hour?" "So it's sixty sixty seconds?" And 3 days from now is "tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow."

We've also been having interesting discussions about resurrection (When does it happen? Where will we live? When will we see people again?) and accountability ("If I'm bad right now, it doesn't really count, but if I keep being bad, when I get older I'll be used to being bad, and then I'll get in trouble.").

Today we were discussing a pending shopping trip. He wanted to know when we were going, and I wasn't sure. I told him it depended on how long it took to change Karen and get lunch and whether we'd have enough time before Sarah's school concert... Anyway. His response was "I'll take whatever is in life."

I'm not dead yet!

Yes, the blog lives. It's just sadly neglected. What's a good excuse...? Er...we'll blame it on 'having a two-year-old.'

Speaking of two-year-olds... This was a fun project of Karen's. That's vegetable oil, with a healthy dose of olive oil, all over my kitchen floor. She was 'making a birthday cake for Mommy.' And then she realized that it was, in fact, a mess instead of a cake and she got some sponges and rags to clean it up. Points for effort Karen. But that was absolutely disgusting to clean up. The second picture shows how she's lived this long. She's so darn cute. (Especially wearing lots of chapstick all over her face.)

While Noah and Daddy were on the Father Son campout, and Karen was occupied with Blues Clues, Sarah got a sewing lesson. I helped make sure the fabric was straight a couple of times, and I did the square reenforcements on the straps for her, but other than that, she did it herself.

(Hint: It's a tote bag. Not a dress.)

Zoo trip!

Perfect capture of the kids. Sarah hamming it up, Noah trying to avoid pictures, Karen oblivious and patting another child: "Aww. Cute baby!"

New blog

I'm still keeping this blog open for my usual sporadic posting sprees of the kids' hijinx. But I'm also starting a new one with other random stuff. :)

New blog here!

Awesome Freeness!

Or Free Awesomeness...I'm not sure which I like better.

Anyway, this is not a shameless plug, since I don't get anything, but I wanted to pass on a cool freebie. If you go to the Walden Media site, there's a banner in the center of the page for a free calendar and a free copy of the DVD Amazing Grace (Yay Horatio!) for registering at their site.

I'm not sure if it's necessary, but my username there is Euphrasie if you want to put it in the referrer field. But that's probably just for their tracking purposes.

Gratuitous YouTube

This clip is awesome. It's a British public service announcement.

Shameless Plug

Okay, so...I was over reading the Money Saving Mom blog, and she had a post up about Swagbucks.

Apparently, the deal is that you sign up, and they award you points for making searches through their site. You get 3 points when you sign up, and can win 1-5 points for each search (Apparently it's random, but it didn't take me more than a couple searches to win one for 2 points). A $5 Amazon electronic gift code is 45 points, which seems pretty easy to earn in a month. You can save up to get cards for other stores, but I did a couple of point-per-dollar comparisons, and Amazon has the best return on investment.

They also have toolbars you can add to your browser (including Firefox--yay!) to make it easier to use. It's powered by Google (yay!) and Ask.com. Not a bad deal overall.

What are you waiting for? Sign up here.

To my sisters...I'm looking at you. You know how I make you sign up for things so I can get points? Yeah. And you love My Points, right? Do it.

Pumpkins

1, 2, 3 little pumpkins.

Noah's is a regular scary face he designed. It looks a lot like last year's model. Karen's is a puppy dog with floppy ears. And Sarah's is a vampire pumpkin.

I was fully planning to cook them all up after Halloween, but there was some melted wax I didn't want to deal with...and eventually they were goners. They went in the trash today.

ePatterns

A little late for Halloween, I came across Sense & Sensibility, a website offering digitized ePatterns for vintage clothing, like a Regency dress (with an additional neckline supplement for those who don't want to bare all), children's pinafores and bloomers, Regency underwear (!), Spencer and Pelisse, embroidery patterns...I am so ready for a Jane Austen costume party!

There are also Edwardian, 1910's, 1940's, and Swing items that the owner of the site will eventually have all digitized.