Spring pictures

Last Friday we went to the church parking lot to ride bikes. This spring has been so beautiful. I wish it could last forever. I brought my camera and took some pictures of the boys.

Totally blown out picture of Brigham, but I still love it.



Mosey asked me today, "Mom, do you think I'm getting too big for my Big Wheels?" Yeah, I guess he could probably use a two-wheeler by now. But he's so cute on the Big Wheel!


The boys went out on the field next to the parking lot. It's filled with dandelions and other wild flowers.




Mosey picked me a whole bouquet of these pretty, delicate flowers.


I LOVE this picture of Brigham and Joseph! I don't have all that many of the two of them together that I really love. It's blurry, but I don't care.


It's so interesting to me to see how different all 3 of my boys look. If I'd had another one, I wonder if he/she would have looked like any of the three boys, or if there would be a 4th completely different look?


I attempted some self-portraits. I leaned against the side of the van and pointed my camera at the side-view mirror. It's trickier than it seems! Especially when there is a little boy inside the car waiting to sabotage the picture. :-)

(that's Brigham's hand)


Managed to cut off half my face and miss the focus.



Brigham sabotages me again!! But the joke's on him, this is my favorite shot of the whole bunch.


Finally. This one is pretty good. Still got the camera lens in there, but it was pretty impossible to hide it.



This is kind of an odd shot, but I think I like it. Shall I change my avatar?

It occurred to me, this is how I see myself, since it is a mirror image, but no one else sees me this way. Isn't it funny that everyone in the world sees us one way, and we see ourselves flipped 180 degrees? There's got to be a metaphor in there somewhere.

projects

I've been working on a few projects the last several weeks. I made a quilt for the new grandbaby of the woman who cleans my house. Her son is her work partner, it's actually his baby girl. I think I like this best of the actual quilt-block quilts that I've made. It sure is time consuming, though.



And a few weeks ago we had a sewing basics class for Relief Society. Among other things, we made pillow cases. I found a really great pattern (easy!!) and went to Walmart to get cheap fabric. Mosey was my willing pillowcase model. I think I will donate them to the 1 million pillowcase challenge. The Relief Society activity went well, I think, although my sewing machine was a sad casualty. It fell while I was driving to church and didn't survive. At least it gave me an excuse to buy a new machine! :-)







(this one is upside down)

wheelchair blues

My FyuJon wheelchair broke again. The aluminum frame cracked several weeks ago, and we found someone to weld it back together. It worked just fine until a couple of days ago when I was sweeping the floor and *crack* it broke again. That's what I get for sweeping the floor.
It is very annoying. The chair is supposed to be good up to a 250 lb weight capacity, and I'm not even half that and I don't put any particularly strenuous use on the chair (unless you count sweeping the floor), so I'm pretty aggravated. It was an ebay purchase, so of course there is no warranty. I could get it repaired again, but I have a feeling this will just keep happening.



I got online to research other chairs and I'm pretty confused. I can do another ebay purchase, but then I'll have the same issue with no warranty. But on ebay I can get a demo model of a particular chair (a very nice one, the TiLite TR, pictured above) that retails at more than $2,000 MORE if I buy through a dealer. Ouch. Also, it's measurements are *almost* but not quite correct for me.



There is another chair available on ebay by the same manufacturer, but a different model (TiLite Zra, pictured above), that has exactly the right measurements, but it is $500 more (yes, these chairs are very expensive, which is why I'm pretty upset about mine breaking), and it is used-- not a demo model. And it's a slightly lower (less expensive) model than the demo one I'm looking at. But it has some really nice (and expensive) upgrades that would not be available on the demo model.
I have a hard time weighing the pros and cons in these situations. The auctions have a few days left on them, so I can think on it, I guess.
I might be able to get some insurance compensation, but that will be at least a several week process, and I don't want to wait that long. I'm stuck using my 40 lb medical wheelchair currently being paid for by insurance. It's big and bulky and really annoying. I can't put the foot rests on, because they stick out too far and I can't turn around in small spaces forcing me to lift my feet off the floor to keep them from dragging. Which is probably good exercise for me, but gets extremely tiring. But mainly, there is no way I can get this thing in and out of the van, so I can't go anyplace where I might need the chair until I get a new one.
Someone tell me what to do, please?

Life with Boys

Mosey: "Mom, I figured out that my two nostrils in my nose are connected to my mouth!"
Me: "Oh, really? How did you figure that out?"
Mosey: "I sniffed a booger really hard into the back of my nose, and it landed on my tongue!"

Circle of Love

So on Tuesday, I woke up, got ready, and headed out of my bedroom, hearing little voices already in the kitchen. But as soon as I emerged from my room, I was rushed by Joseph and Mosey, both yelling at me to "Get back in your room!" "We're doing something secret!" It was all very exciting, so I went back into my room, lay back down on my freshly-made bed and actually had 10 leisure minutes to read a book, half an ear listening to the goings-on in the kitchen. At one point there was a terrific crash and the tinkling sound of broken glass. "DON'T WORRY MOM, WE'LL CLEAN IT UP!" came wafting in under the door.
OK, then!
Mosey came in after a few minutes with a picture he had drawn for me-- wrapped up in paper towels with a Christmas bow on the top. A field of yellow and black flowers under a blue crayon sky. Joseph came in with a note saying, "Thank you for being so patient with me."
When all was ready, and I was released from my confinement, I came to find breakfast-- MY breakfast, laid out on the table. (About 3 times the normal amount of breakfast that I usually eat, but hey, I didn't have to make it!) The boys had laid out a bowl of granola with milk, a yogurt and granola parfait ("With a scoop of ice cream, mom!"), grape juice, and the offer from Mosey to share half of his cinnamon waffles.
It was so sweet! One glass plate was a sad casualty of the morning, but Brigham did a pretty darn good job of cleaning up almost all of the broken glass.
It turns out that in Joseph's and Brigham's church class, they were sent home with a dry erase marker and a laminated card printed on one side with, "Today I will include in my circle of love:" and a blank space to write the lucky name. I was the first recipient of the circle of love favors!
It was a sweet mommy-moment for me, and sorely needed coming the morning after a particularly challenging afternoon with Mosey who had punched me in the mouth after I had the audacity to insist on him completing one of his school worksheets. For which antic he lost the privilege of his "new Arctie" and his precious digital watch, as well as gaining the privilege of sitting on my lap and getting a good talking to. I'm pretty sure any of my boys would rather get a spanking than get "talked to" by their mom. :-)

St. Patrick's Day 2010

Well, another St. Patrick's Day has come and gone.
Our celebration actually began last night with Brigham and Joseph drawing green shamrocks on their hands with marker before they went to bed. They wanted to be absolutely sure to be "wearing" green at all times the next day! No fair waking up and pinching someone before they have a chance to get dressed! Brigham wore a green shirt to bed last night just to be sure.
We had Lucky Charms with green milk for breakfast this morning, and Joseph added a few drops of green food coloring to his noodles at lunch time.
In the afternoon we had our annual St. Patrick's Day photo shoot.

I think I got some pretty good ones this year!




Of course, most of the photo-shoot went something like this:

The boys are pretending to be star-nosed moles. Yeah, I don't understand, either.


A lot of squirreliness was going on (click on it to see it bigger):


Some mock-choking:


And lots and lots of bunny ears:



And other general weirdness:



For dinner I made pasta with pesto sauce:


Irish soda bread:


And green jello:


Not pictured is the green-dyed white grape juice.

Ben read us the St. Patrick's account from Wikipedia, and then we went off on a tangent reading about Gaelic and Welsh and Irish and how all those languages up there interrelate.

It was a fun day!

Spring is in the air

Spring has finally arrived in Austin. All over trees are blossoming and new leaves are sprouting. Spring is about 3 weeks later this year compared to last, I guess a reflection of the coooold winter we had (for Austin, anyway). So I'm going to really enjoy the next couple of months before it gets hot again. I hope it will not get as hot as last summer.
We've been doing a lot of our lessons outside.







It's a little harder to keep their attention when they're outside. The allure of the swing is sometimes too much. This $10 swing from Lowes is worth its weight in gold. I don't know how many hours the boys have spent on it. It's therapy.



The boys posed for some pictures.



Here's Mosey with his new Arcti. He got an Arctic Fox webkinz for Christmas, which sadly disappeared sometime about 3 weeks ago. He's been diligently working hard to earn $7.95 to buy a new one, and it finally arrived in the mail on Friday. Joy!! It hasn't left his side since. This will be the last picture taken with Arcti actually white.



My two Webkinz fanatics. Joseph has Rascal the raccoon on his shoulder.



The boys have been good about watering their little garden they planted with Grandma a month ago.


But we decided our little plants needed a bit more room, so on Saturday we went to Lowes and got cedar boards and 24 cubic feet of soil to make a couple of raised garden beds on the south side of the house.
It was a good project for the boys. They had to dig up the dirt where we put the beds, pulling out rocks and roots, and then rake it out smooth and even.
They helped Ben assemble the garden frames, and then mixed up and smoothed out the new soil.
Our onions and broccoli and lettuce and chard and beans and strawberries are now happy in their new home, and one of my lifetime goals of forcing giving my boys the opportunity to work in a garden is on its way to being fulfilled.
Here's to many hours pulling weeds in the hot sun and developing character. :-)

Bits and pieces, odds and ends

I don't have much interesting stuff for the blog recently. Things have been going as usual. Busy, busy, busy. But here are some things:

• We saw Alice in Wonderland last Friday (the new 3D movie). It was amazing and weird. Very weird. But the boys loved it. Mosey informed Ben, sotto voce in the middle of the movie, "This is the best movie I ever saw!"

• I'm getting ready for another Relief Society activity on Thursday. We're doing a sewing basics night, learning how to do some basic mending, and also making these cute pillow cases to help people learn how to use a sewing machine. I spent way too long trying out different patterns for pillow cases before coming across the perfect one here. Easy and cute. So far I've made 7 pillow cases. I guess everyone knows what I'll be giving for gifts in the next few months! :-)

• The boys have been playing Risk games online with Ben and a few other people. They are little strategists. I think that must be a male brain kind of thing, because it holds no interest to me at all. Brigham said to me a couple of nights ago, "Mom, you need to do something for fun! You need to play a Risk game!" I guess he doesn't consider my sweeping the floor fun. Hmm, neither do I, actually. Maybe he has a point.

• Speaking of sweeping, I swept the floors last night at about 11:00 PM (see what I mean about fun?), and by 10:00 AM this morning, here is what I swept up just in the small area in front of our back french doors. Aarrrggghhh.

This is what comes of 3 little boys and 2 dogs going in and out of the house about 30 times between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00 AM. (A note for prospective homeschooling moms-- be prepared for you house to basically never, ever, ever be clean, except for maybe between the hours of 11:30 PM when you finish cleaning up, and 7:30 AM when the kids roll out of bed-- this mess wouldn't have happened if they had all been safely at school! :-))
On a related note, do you have any idea how annoying it is to sweep the floor while in a wheelchair? I want everyone who comes to my house to give it a try, just for the sympathy points. I have cleaners that come once a week to help me clean, but as you can see from above, if that is what happens in 2 hours, you can imagine what things would be like if I did not sweep about 20 times between cleaning sessions.

• The boys ask me to take pictures of the most random things. (Although, really, I'm not one to talk about the weirdness of taking pictures of random things-- yes, I really did take a picture of the pile of dirt I swept up on the floor.) And I comply, with the hopes that they will be more willing to let me take pictures of less random things-- like them. Here are a couple from the last upload of my camera's memory card:

Mosey lined up these three stuffed animals and asked me to take a picture for posterity. So there you go, posterity, I hope you enjoy it!



Brigham "dressed up" this chair in his soldier costume-- complete with boots, sword, gun, belt, shirt, and hat. And then asked me to take a picture of it.

• Finally, Brigham finished "Toccatina," getting it signed off last Thursday. This is the first piece any of my boys have played that I remember playing as a kid. He's way better than I was at his age, I can tell you that right now. Here he is, for your listening enjoyment:

One of my favorite things

I got to photograph a brand-new 3 week old last weekend. Baby photography I can still do (mostly). As long as we can wait until the baby falls asleep! (This baby was pretty stubborn and took about an hour and a half before she was well and truly asleep. She was worth the wait, though.)







Baby hungry much? Oh, yes.