Notebooks

For a Mia Maid activity my friend, Monica, came and helped he girls make these super cute notebooks. They are made from dvd cases.  These were never made for that express purpose so there isn't the place to snap your dvd into.  These cases were specifically made for crafting purposes.  They are so great.  They fit a notepad (you've got to cut it down) and a slim pen.  We decorated them with some super cute paper and used my handy sticker maker and added a good dose of fun and voila.  It was our first class activity since being called back into yw and it was a blast.  I love the girls so much and have so much fun teaching them.  Now I've got to write a play for them to act out for our next activity.  It should be fun because we are acting out the story of Ammon.  :0)

Ice Princesses

 Jordyn and her friend Sarah started ice skating lessons this week.  She has been able to talk of nothing else since we signed up.  It was so cute sitting there watching them learn to skate.  Jordyn had the cutest little bum wiggle when they were trying to skate backwards.  I was dying it was so darn cute.  Her little body was made for wiggling.  That's what makes her a natural at the butterfly stroke on the swim team. Towards the end she fell and really hurt her bum.  I hadn't seen the fall so when she came and sat down by me in the stands I thought she was just tired or her feet hurt.  Sarah's mom, Kim, went and did the thing you don't do....ask if she was all right.  Well, the tears started flowing and she told me that she had fallen and her bum was hurting real bad.  I let her sit next to me and I gave her some love and encouragement and then tried to talk her into going back out for the last 20 minutes of class.  She didn't want to go because she was hurting too bad and probably afraid that she would fall again.  I didn't want her to be afraid of falling so I kept encouraging her to go out.  I stood up and put my hand out and pleaded with her to go back out.  This only made her ascend the stairs further and cross her arms and shake her head at me.  That's when tough Mom came out and told her that I spent a lot of money on these lessons that she begged for months for and she needed to shake off getting hurt because part of ice skating is getting hurt.  She reluctantly held out her hand and made the slow motion descend to the ice. I told her that she could stay on the wall but she had to go around one time and then she could come out and take off her skates and we would go home.  She played around on the ice right next to the door while giving me sad, dirty looks and then finally took off around the rink.  Half of the rink was netted off so you either had to turn around to come back or cross the middle of the ice to make a circle around the rink.  Well, she decided to cross the middle and then stopped at the door giving me that sad dirty look some more.  I thought for sure she would come out and put her shoes on completing all that she was required to do, but the next thing I knew she took off around the rink again.  Stubborn little thing.  She had to give me those faces so that it didn't look like she was ok and having fun.  That's ok, that's what moms are for.  Knowing when to push and having courage not to back down and melt when you see the mad/sad face.  

That night after I had put the kids to bed I noticed something sitting on my bed.  It was this big card.  The front of it reads: "I love you dearly and I love how you comfort me and you don't give up on me and you try hard xoxoxox I love mom."  The second page read: "I love Dad, I love you dearly and I miss you every day.  I love how you make money so we can go on vacations and I love you dad."  This girl was sent straight from Heaven.  She is only 8 but when she does and says stuff like this she reveals herself as an old and wise soul.  I am grateful everyday that even though I wasn't sure how on earth I could handle having a 4th kid so soon after our 3rd, Ethan, we decided to take a leap of faith and go for it before I changed my mind.  How grateful I am for that decision.  She has been a blessing to our family and I couldn't imagine her not with us.  I feel the same about each of my children and feel so blessed to me a Mother who gets to nurture and strengthen 4 precious souls who have been entrusted to my care.  They make me a better person every day I spend with them.  

The Many Adventures of G

Remind me again why we have a hamster.....  I had heard the rumors that hamsters are escape artists, but I thought that the cage we got was sound and there was no way for this little beady eyed rodent to escape its incarceration.  I believe there is a saying that goes something like this "fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."  I think I'm up for the academy award for shame on me.  Becoming a hamster bounty hunter is becoming second nature to us now.  Ok so lets start from the beginning of Gryphon's taste of freedom.  It was probably around thursday.  I guess I could check my fb status for an exact date, but who really cares that much?  So G had been missing for 2 days and we had given up hope and were preparing ourselves for the day we found her rotten Caracas behind some piece of furniture so we could call up hoarders for their money shot of people living with dead animals. On Saturday Emma, Nate and I went to a concert and when we got home we were met by Jordyn jumping up and down telling us to hurry because they found G.  I dropped everything and ran up the stairs where Jared said "dangers afoot, the hunt is on dear Watson."  I followed him into the laundry room where Ethan was trying to coax her out from under the dryer.  They had been chasing her all over the upstairs for an hour and a half.  I guess they first found her in the cyber room munching on some popcorn that Jordyn likes to leave on the floor.  We blocked off the laundry room and used a hanger to try and sweep her out from under the appliances.  She finally ran out and I caught her.  It was pretty thrilling.  We yelled out like our favorite animal hunter on tv, eyeyeyeyeye.  We figured that the day she escaped was also the day I finally got Jared to clean the cage and he was having difficulty putting it back together so a couple of wires got bent just enough for the great escape.  I put some duck tape on the wires (see my handiwork there?)  and I had to make sure there was no sticky side facing the cage because Jared was worried that G would get stuck to it like fly paper and die.  Wait, I thought he didn't care about G anymore.....maybe it was just a rouse to get out of cleaning the cage?  Anyway we put her back in and she seemed happy to have some food and water and we thought Yea! problem solved.....

Well, she made it a whole day before she bolted for freedom again.  Could we really be this stupid?  Apparently.  I found another weak spot in the cage and duct taped that off and prayed we would find G again.  On Tuesday morning find her we did.....In Zazzles mouth.  Ethan caught site of the cat with something in her mouth so he went to investigate.  Sure enough, it was G looking very much dead.  Ethan was pretty sad and said "oh well, goodbye G, I'll miss you."  resigned to the fate of the hamster.  I got ahold of Zazzles and tried to get her to give me G but she wouldn't let go and that hamster was not moving at all.  The legs didn't even so much as twitch, nor did her body move for breathing.  I decided to take them out on the porch incase there was some blood when I managed to get her from the clutches of Zazzles mouth.  As soon as G hit the ground she was off and running.  It was hilarious.  Luckily I managed to corner her and grab onto her.  We put her back in the cage thinking surely this time there was no escaping especially after the traumatic events that left her shaking in her cage for quite some time......

Guess what we found this morning?  You guessed it.  She was gone once again.  See, I'm telling you.  We deserve the stupidity award.  I guess Jared didn't get everything put back together because there was a gap between where the hole in the cage is for the wheel so that was her escape route.  This was the shortest time she was on the lam.  Somehow she managed to get into the closet in the cyber room (the room the 2 older ones do their school work during the day) and she was scratching at the door.  Those little legs get those things moving at lightning speed.  We lost her and started chasing her all over the upstairs.  We called Ethan and his friend Gabe upstairs to help us. We have officially knighted Gabe as a hamster bounty hunter because he cornered her and grabbed her with one hand around the neck.  G was so mad that she bit his hand and a squeaked and squawked and he still didn't let go.  What a stud!  That move earned him a double high five from me.  We fixed the problem with the wheel and decided to stick the cage in the bathtub for a few days until we find out if she has any other escape routes because she can't climb the sides of the tub.....and yes I closed the drain.  Phew, I think we are finally using those brain cells.  On a positive note, we know our cat is born to hunt and can do it well which will come in handy now that it is warming up and the mice are gonna start scavenging for food and shelter in my garage.....go ahead little mice, my kitty wants to play with you :0)

Thank You Books

As I mentioned earlier, I am now back in the yw program at my church.  All of the old presidency was released and a new group of women were put in, one of which was me.  In an effort to have the girls show their appreciation for their previous leaders I thought it would be nice to do a little thank you book for them.  Who doesn't like hearing nice things about themselves?  I also included a class picture in each of the books.  One of the leaders has given me 2 hugs while she blinked back tears in her eyes for the wonderful gift.  It wasn't me, I just bound the words the girls said into a book and gave it to them.  Our group of girls is really sweet and kind and I am looking forward to working with them and helping them become great and strong leaders themselves.

To make these adorable books you just need the mini size packs of fancy papers.  You can also get a solid card stock pack in the same size for the pages of the book.  Then you just punch 2 holes and bind it with ribbon and embellish to your hearts content.  So cute and simple and most importantly....cheap :0)

Bigger, Better?

I have been married for 18 years now and it still bugs my husband that I overfill my cereal bowl.  It doesn't matter that it took years of training to become this way, he just wants me to get a bigger bowl.  See, we had a rule in my house growing up that you could only have 1 bowl of cereal in the morning for breakfast, so if you didn't want to go hungry you filled that bowl to the brim!  It has just become a part of my psyche, I can't help it.  Well, Nate is hardly ever around when I engage in this overfilling practice so it has gone unremarked about for quite some time now.  On this particular day I was having my favorite dinner, cereal with chopped banana and it was witnessed.  Now in my defense, the bowl wasn't technically overfilled until the banana entered the picture....and then of course the addition of the milk sealed the deal and there may have been a couple of o's that fell onto the counter.  Well Nate couldn't handle it so he walked to the cupboard with the mixing bowls, grabbed one and proceeded to dump my bowl of cereal into it.  Sheesh!  BTW ruining the cemetery of the entire milk cereal banana configuration! Can't a girl eat an overfilled bowl of cereal without filling like some sort of pig eating from a trough?  Apparently not!  For the record I also have an annoying habit of overfilling my tortillas so that it busts open when I try to roll it and leaving glasses of water all over the house.

Yeee Haaaawwww

Emma had been lamenting for weeks that she wanted to go to this country concert that sold out in the first day the tickets were available.  I was feeling bad for her but never really thought about it again until the night of the concert.  Apparently Nate neglected to inform me that he and I were going to the concert with our friends.  I wasn't sure how I was going to pull the knife out of Emma's back if I went to this concert and she didn't.  Her favorite young make country star HH was going to be there and she was going to be pretty bummed.  I told Nate I didn't know how I could possibly go.  Nate had a rough week and he was not up for a concert.  His idea was for me and her to go, but his friend was having none of that.  The next idea I had was for none of us to go, but we already had the tickets.  Poor Emma went from not going, to going, to not going, to finally going.  Our final plan was that Nate would take Emma and then I would just go pick him up after an hour and leave the car for Emma to drive herself home when it was over.  That plan was what we were going to do up until right before it was time to leave and there was an extra ticket so I got to go too.  Yay!  The deal was still the same though, Nate wasn't staying for the entire concert.  Those fish faces were for fun and seemed appropriate considering how old HH looked.  He is a baby I tell you, so young, but so talented.  In the end, we got to hang out with our friends and meet some new ones and Nate entertained everyone with his earplugs in....which I'm thinking was a brilliant idea.  HH's set was nice and clear and sounded good, But on CU's the background music was super loud and drowning out her voice and almost on the verge of sounding like blown speakers....I guess her tour really was blown away!  ha ha.  We stayed for 3 of her songs and then headed home because we are old and lame and tired.

More Family History

* I totally forgot to add the above picture when I did this post.  That is my Family History Tub that I have to cart around with me whenever I am working on it.  That is the family history center in the background.  I went from knowing nothing to a tub full in a matter of months.  Pretty rockin!  

So, I decided to write about my journey doing family history.  It is not here on my blog, although I have written a few posts about it.  It is turning into a rather long kinda sorta book, I guess.  I've barely begun and I am 15 pages in, but I didn't want to neglect a little check in on the subject just to keep everyone in the loop.

The pictures on the left are of me finally deciding to go back to the family history center to see if I could get some help with some overseas ancestors.  Help was not what I was going to get on this day.  There were too many people there already and quite the line to talk to the expert of all experts, Pat.  I did manage to weasel my way into a question on how to find a passenger log and some advice about how to go about my overseas stuff.  I need to look in Germany and Russia for some ancestors and I don't have access to those records without paying big bucks to do it.  I got a few tips to try before I cough up the money and how to find where my ancestors would have come into the americas.

When I got back home I tried to find my Mom's Grandfather, David Wagner who came over from Russia in 1913.  I actually found the ship.  I have a picture of it with all the specs like: it was steam, 14.5 knots, 3,830 passengers, it had one funnel and six mats, a steel hull and four decks.  He departed in the port of Hamburg on the President Grant as an 18 year old with.  He had been living in Nasielce, Russia and was single when he boarded the ship.  He arrived at Ellis Island on July 9, 1913.  I need to talk with my Mom to see if she remembers anything about his wife's maiden name or their parents names.  I am at a dead end.  I know that his wife Elizabeth was also from Russia and she came over the same year, but I couldn't find her on the passenger list so she must have come on a different ship or a different time.  Without her maiden name there is no way to find her family.  I have searched everywhere for a marriage license for the 2 of them and can't find it.  It will be a gold mine when I do.  So that was a fun little adventure that I went on.  I have many, many more of those.

The 2 pictures on the right were from our FHE lesson last night.  We hooked up the laptop to the tv and Jared gave Nate and the 2 little ones a lesson in genealogy.  Technology is so much fun.  We also finally hooked Nathan's side of the family up to my tree.  The pain is that even though Nate has an account and Emma and Jared do as well, the information doesn't link up until you come to a deceased ancestor.  So we put in all the information so his line would link up to mine.  It is pretty cool to see my line now that I have done so much work and Nate's is now attached.

When I am finished writing out my journey I will probably get it published by a company like the one that does my blog for posterity.

Make Over

With Emma and Jordyn sharing a room, space is at a premium.  They were having some trouble keeping things organized and needed little more space to do it.  I was at one of my favorite hobby stores and found some great pieces that I thought would not only look great, but serve a purpose.  I took Emma over to check them out because we don't see eye to eye when it comes to decorating so I had to make sure she approved.  We got the cute chair with matching mirror and the multi-colored dresser.  It looks great in their room.  Those pictures over the white dresser were from a project I did when they first moved into the room.  You just decoupage craft paper onto wood and stain the edges.  I also did their names the same way.
I was in the organizing mood and my office is always my nemesis.  I love to do craft projects and with that comes oodles of craft crap that has to be stored somewhere.  Every couple of years I have to redo this bookcase so that it functions better.  There really aren't any books left on my bookcase anymore.  But as you can see, I do love containers and my trusty label maker.  Ah organization makes me happy :0)

The Force Has Been Disconnected....

I'm gonna let you all in on a little secret.  If I am asked to do something my response is always the same...sure no problem!  Need a house built, sure no problem.  Need an ice sculpture, sure no problem.    Need a mural painted, sure no problem.  Now here's the secret part.  I have no business doing these things because I have never in my life attempted them before, but I seem to have this disease where I think, "how hard can it be?"  I have gotten myself into this situation so many times that my husband finds it highly entertaining.  The first time he learned of this disease was when we were first married and my church needed a teacher for a candy making class for an activity we were having.  What was my response......you guessed it.  Had I ever made candy before?  Nope.  When I was standing in the kitchen crying an hour before I was supposed to teach this class not having any success with my test batch my husband asked why I was teaching a class when I didn't know what I was doing?  Because, I said,  I thought, how hard could it be?  Well, hard enough that a teacher was required for teaching this class.  This is the first time my husband found my cocky can do attitude entertaining.  

So, here we are almost 2 decades later and our cub scout troop was having a blue and gold banquet.  I forgot to attend the meeting where we planned the activity, so what did I get stuck doing?  The decorations.  Oh boy!  Well, I had been to an Enchantment Under the Sea party my friend had the week before where she had all this seaweed.  While standing under the seaweed at her house her and I came up with a plan to reuse it so that I at least had some sort of decoration.  The theme had already been selected so I knew just how to use the seaweed.  The swamp scene of course!   Now what to do to put it into context.  I needed a mural of some sort and an x-wing so the seaweed made sense.  Make a mural?  No problem!  HA!

 Luckily I started the project a week before the event.  I had my husband set up the projector so that I could just outline the characters and it would be easy peasy from there.....  Excuse me while I try and get my laughter under control.......So here's the thing about projectors.  Detail work is not your friend.  The closer you are standing to the image the more pixilated it becomes and you have no idea what you are tracing anymore.  If there is one other thing that I am, it's committed.  This mural was not going to beat me.  Next idea was to just go with a more water color look. So I picked up my paints and just started going at it, trying to channel a mad artist...or the force...or some semblance of talent....anything.  I got to the picture with the creepy outlined eyes and had to walk away.  There was no hiding it now.  I was in serious trouble and could not figure out how to get out of it.

I decided to move on to my x-wing project.  That surely had to be much easier.  No serious artistic abilities involved in that, right?  Oh man I just crack myself up sometimes.  I got the design off of someones blog who had terrible directions so I got the jest of it and then was on my own.  It was a several day undertaking of cardboard cutting and engineering skills and 6 bottles of spray paint, a finger with carpal tunnel syndrome from said 6 cans, drying time, assembling time, more engineering, kicking my husband out of his side of the garage for 2 days.....you get the picture.  It is making my head hurt just thinking about it.  It went fairly well except the wings were pretty flimsy especially with the added weight of the burners and guns, so Jared helped me tie some string on it and then we tried to make the string stand out less by adding c3p0 on it.  Now, that I was proud of, my mural.....not so much.  I kept telling everyone that at least my little 8-10 year old boys would be like "hey, that sister Ivey is all right, she is just like us."  Because that mural was right at their skill level!  hahaha

Back to the Mural.  I had to deal with those eyes whether I liked it or not.  I tried 3 different times and each time it got worse and worse.  Surprisingly I never shed a tear over poor luke's badly mangled face.    Finally I had a moment of genius / desperation, however you choose to look at it, sunglasses!  I could just make his creepy eyes into sunglasses.  And hey!  His face could look a little mangled because remember he was in some sort of accident where he really did mangle his face?  So, I think things are looking up.  I called my daughter into the room to get her honest reaction.  It wasn't good.  My plan was completely transparent.  What could any self respecting artist do?  Have their daughter pretend to kill it with a light saber and have a good laugh!

The time came for pulling all of these pieces together.  Now the death star was not made by me, but the super artistic guy that used to do all these things that I apparently had the need to out do because I am crazy competitive even when I am way out of my league. He, btw, was very kind to me and my art that night.  We used Nate's gully suit to "submerge" the xwing into the swamp and I had little yoda head boxes that were on clearance from valentines day that made excellent center pieces.  I tried to cover up as much of the mural as possible with the swampy vines and someone moved them to see the picture better.  So there you have it.  That was my crowning moment on my stint in the cub scout program because I had been called to serve in the young women's program again before the event.  I am going to miss my boys terribly.  They are so sweet and super cute.  Just as I thought, my boys thought my artwork was wicked awesome and loved me for the effort, which is all I really cared about anyway.