Bethanyology

Happy Father's Day!

Tags: Dad, Family, Father's Day, Holidays

Degen and Maggie are dressed and fed, Heidi is dressed and fed and napping, Colin is at an Elder’s Quorum service project (dressed, hopefully fed, and surely not napping). The kids are baking me a “cake” in their pretend kitchen while I’m being a nerd in my pjs and watching an old John Bytheway Education Week speech. I hereby relinquish any rights I had to complain about not having time to shower and dress this morning (future mornings excepted).  My, sitting around is so luxurious.  Any minute now I’m going to think of all the things I need to get done today.

Ha! Maggie is singing Electric Light Orchestra’s “Oh Oh It’s Magic” while she cooks. I think that song is on one of the latest F00s (if you don’t know what our F00 CDs are, check Colin’s website on the topic here).  Maggie is a singer, no doubt about it.  She composes songs whenever and where ever she is, and about whatever she wants.  And she likes to ask us to sing along, and gets upset if we don’t sing the right lyrics (even when she’s making them up as we go along).  Oh, to be two and have everyone tolerate your whims!  Now Degen’s in on the singing action, debating with Maggie about whether “Row Row Row Your Boat” or “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is the song to sing at the moment, as they drop the red cord of my previous post down the back of the couch in true preschooler fishing style.

Tags: children, Family, Kids, lyrics, music, saturday, singing

We just caught Heidi scooting across the floor, almost crawling, up on both knees and falling forward with her face! I pulled out the video camera and sorta got it on film, though she wasn’t really interested in a repeat performance. Fun to get some memories on tape, especially with Maggie in the background for additional commentary and entertainment. Maggie even composed and performed an original song for us on the spot!

Tags: crawling, development, Kids, scooting

I’ve been meaning for a long time to try my hand at painting again. Once in high school I did a watercolor under the expert supervision of my grandmother and it was successful enough to win a prize at a competition. A few years later I tried to do another watercolor unsupervised. It turned out as a piece of paper completely covered in purpley-brown. No, it was not a modern art piece. It was supposed to be beautiful snow-capped mountains. Didn’t work out that way.

I have several talented award-winning painter sisters, one of them who was a high school art teacher all this last school year. A while back I asked her why my latest attempt at painting was such a failure, and she decided that it wasn’t so much me as it was my choice of materials. I’d used sketch paper instead of watercolor paper, spiral bound instead of taped to a board. Apparently that’s going to nearly guarantee watercolor failure. I also used one of those plastic brushes that comes with sets of kids watercolors. Also not setting myself up for success.

So, another nearly decade later, I decided to try again, this time with guidance from my more experienced sisters. Emily (the art teacher) told me to start with acrylics this time, since they’re apparently a more forgiving medium than watercolor.  She passed on some of her paints to me, and told me to get a canvas board (less than $5 at Michaels for a 3-pack) in a smaller size (8×10) and to get some better brushes.  I watched a bunch of Bob Ross shows (I love his happy trees!) on the DVR in preparation, but when I mentioned that I was planning to try one of his shows as a starter painting, Emily recommended that I hold off on that for a little while in order to give me some instant gratification (i.e. decrease my chances of  discouragement).  Between her and Eliza, it was decided that my first try should be a black-and white painting to give me some experience with values.  I was a little disappointed about this at first since I like bright colors, but once we compared Bob Ross to calculus (or algebra or whatever) and my monochromatic option to addition, I decided to go with addition today.

Emily and Eliza suggested that I find a simply shaped picture to work from in black and white and grid-trace it onto a midtone-gray-painted canvas.  I went to old newspapers for inspiration, and found a small photo by Jeff Vendsel of fireworks at the county fair to work from. Thanks IJ!  I chose it because Eliza said that photos that are darker are more fun to do in monochrome, and because I liked the subject.  I didn’t do the tracing thing, as the proportions didn’t really fit (maybe you can tell…), but I found the mid-points and generally stuck to the shapes as much as I could.

Determined to get some paint on canvas, I waited until nap time during the half-hour all three kids were asleep, gathered my supplies, put on the grey base coat, and sketched out my shapes.  I pulled out my still-inexpensive brushes ($5 for about 15 of various shapes and sizes)  and got to work.

By the time Maggie woke up two hours later, I had finished what you see in the photo above.  The first to admit it’s no masterpiece, I think it’s a really good first try, given naptime constraints and phone-only coaching.  And when I asked Maggie and Degen what the stripes were, they knew they were fireworks, and that the roundish thing on the right was a “merry-go-round” and that the bottom part was water.  So it’s at least recognizable, and I’m pleased to have taken a step toward my aspirations to paint as a hobby.

P.S.  Like my background for my photo?  It’s my desk, complete with an offer I’ve been reluctantly sort of ignoring for a discount subscription to Cook’s Illustrated.  Someday when I have lots of money lying around, I’m going to buy subscriptions to Cook’s Illustrated, Popular Science, and the Economist–hey, and while we’re at it probably seven-day/week subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, since we have unlimited money in my dream world here.

I just rescued myself and my children by stepping on a sneaky camouflaged spider skulking across the carpet.  Gross.  It was so color-coordinated that I now can’t find its carcass.  Grosser.  Degen asked me if I killed it, and I said yes, then he asked me if it went home, and I said yes.  Then he asked if it was telling its mommy that it got killed.  I didn’t know what to say.  I said ”I don’t know about that.” 

On the other hand, it occurred to me today that I still have never seen a firefly or other biolumenescent insect and I went online to look up where to find them.  Apparently not often West of the Mississippi.  I missed my chance while we were in Arkansas!  Also, I found out that fireflies are carnivores, or at least omnivores.  That’s okay with me, as I like ladybugs and they eat other bugs, but for some reason I think it’s a little more gross in a firefly.  A lot of grossness in this post.

Speaking of bugs, one of my favorite bits of literature on the subject is a piece about spiders that exactly describes my feelings about spider webs.  It’s in Robert Fulghum’s book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, which I have read and re-read and I consider it a treasure in humorous reading.  When I lived in my own place I kept it near my bed for reading when I had a bad day.  Definitely recommended reading.

Tags: bugs, fireflies, kindergarten, reading, robert fulghum, spiders

I’ve been actively encouraging my kids to practice trying new things, even when the new things are hard to do or green-eggs-and-ham unattractive. I think trying new things is an important skill to learn, so I’m teaching it to my kids despite the inevitable hassle it creates for yours truly. Interestingly, the whole world seems to have lined up with my curriculum lately, a favorite TV show the other day had a catchy “Keep Trying” song that’s worked its way into Maggie & Degen’s repertoire. So, the other day my father-in-law reported that as he worked on some fairly mundane task the kids constantly chimed in encouragingly with a chorus of “Keep trying! Keep trying! Don’t give up, dont give up!”

Degen decided yesterday that it would be fun to try to learn to tie knots in a short piece of thin, red cord he found on the floor. Great! Knots are something any four-year-old can work on independently, no effort from Mom, right? WRONG! Tying the knots is something he does himself, but what happens when his string is all knotted up? He asks mommy to untie all the knots (now!) so he can re-tie them.

Red cord, untangled

The thing is, I feel guilty about my impatience with this process, not only because I’ve encouraged him to try and practice, but because I remember doing the same thing to my own mother! I think it involved knots in what must have been much more irritating and challenging thin chain necklaces. And my sometimes unreliable memory tells me that my own mother patiently unraveled those chains multiple times. So now I spend my time straightening 14 inches of tangled red string again and again and again.

Thanks Mom.

Tags: challenges, Kids, trying

Last night Colin and I got to go to the Oakland Temple and work for a couple of hours.  Kim willingly watched all three kids for us with very little notice.  Yay Kim!  Of course, the kids LOVE having their aunt babysit, and we’re always grateful for her generosity.  It’s a strangely big deal for us to go anywhere more than a couple minutes away without the kids.  When we went to the opera last week we had to hire a babysitter for eight hours in order to go to a location that’s about 40 minutes away.  When we went to the temple yesterday, I left the house around 5:30 and we didn’t get home until 11:30.  Six hours for a two-hour event that’s only 40 minutes away.  It was a huge realization for me after I had Degen that everything takes longer with kids, and it takes even longer with three kids (but not three times longer, thank goodness!). 

Anyway, it ended up that the temple session we attended was in Spanish with subtitles and it was so good for my brain type and learning curve to have those subtitles!  And it’s always fun to listen to a foreign language.  I’m thinking I want to go to foreign language sessions from now on.  The temple is a comforting, peaceful place and it did my heart good to go to my first full session in eight months. 

Yesterday I also tried my hand at indexing for FamilySearch for the first time.  FamilySearchIndexing.org has a program where they’ve scanned millions of microfilms of census and other records and regular people like you and I volunteer to transcribe them from home, then they make the searchable images available for free online.  It’s really fun to think of being part of a huge collaborative effort like that.  And I was surprised at how easy it is.  You go to the web site and register, download a little program, and then pull down a “batch” to transcribe on- or offline at your leisure into a form they’ve prepared with detailed instructions, then click a button to send your transcription back.  They have it all triple-checked for accuracy, then they publish it to share with the world!  This is something even I, with three little kids and sharing a car, can do as a meaningful service to others.  Simple, easy, and doable in small time segments.  I totally recommend it to anyone who wants to get outside themselves for a few minutes a day.

We went to the ophthalmologist today to check and make sure Maggie’s glasses were the right prescription, that we got good glasses, and that they were doing their job. All of the above were good to go. Yay! I was pleased and relieved to find out we won’t have to do patching or surgery to correct her eyes.

Between my last post on the subject and now we decided to order some glasses for both me and Maggie from zennioptical.com. It seemed pretty risky since they’re made and shipped from overseas, but after reading the reviews and paying over $100 for Maggie’s first pair that were scratched within the month, we decided to try it out. We really needed to find a way to get her inexpensive enough glasses that we wouldn’t all panic and/or yell every time she acts her age and takes her glasses off and leaves them on the floor. I ordered a pair of $8 glasses (all of the glasses include the bullet-proof polycarbonate lenses) for me and a pair of $20 glasses for Maggie. Hers were the memory titanium type, where you can bend them and they don’t need to be re-adjusted (). They combine shipping for however many glasses you order, so it cost me $5 in shipping for both of us. About three weeks later (they say to expect them to arrive in no less than four weeks) the glasses arrived. Maggie likes the purple zennioptical glasses even more than her pink Lenscrafters ones, and they seemed to stay on better, and all the adults in the house have stopped flinching every time she gets mad and threatens to throw her glasses. Yay! Mine are also perfect and I like them better than my old ones–they’re lighter, thinner, and a better shape.

All that said, I think it was important that we went in person to stores and tried on real glasses and wrote down the measurements of the ones we liked. I wrote down the general shapes that looked good, the frame width (apparently the most important number), bridge length, the lens height and width, and the arm length. I got the optician in the store we’d already bought glasses at to give me our pupilary distances so we’d get that just right (especially important for Maggie with her lazy eye). Then I used those numbers to find frames on zennioptical that were similar to the ones we knew we liked, which we could do because zennioptical gives you all those measurements for their glasses. So, if you’re considering buying glasses online, I definitely recommend you go through that process first.

Anyway, I was still a little worried this morning before going to the doctor that we hadn’t gotten the right frames or that they’d turn out to be the wrong prescription. But the doctor confirmed that both pairs of glasses were just the right prescription. Later when we went to have them fitted by the optician, the optician (who was a 20-year specialist in fitting children’s glasses) commented that the frames I’d chosen for Maggie were practically indestructible, that they were great quality frames, and perfect for a two-year-old. When I told him I’d gotten both the frames and the lenses for $20 plus shipping, his jaw practically dropped to the floor and he ran around telling all the other opticians in the room. He told me that they sell similar frames in his office for less than other local places and they charge over $100 for the frames alone, plus over $100 for the lenses! Which means I got them for about 90% off. I’m okay with that.

Now that I have the endorsement of the ophthamologist and the optician, I’m ready to order about three more pairs of glasses for her from zennioptical just as backups. And since you can buy prescription sunglasses from them in any of their frames for an extra $5, maybe I’ll get some of those (for her or for me?). But probably in a few months when my wallet has recovered from her expensive glasses…

Oh, while I’m praising people, can I just say that our San Rafael Kaiser ophthamologist, Dr. Claiborne, is lovely and worked wonderfully well with my sometimes excitable two-year-old?  And our awesome child-friendly and impressively experienced optician’s name was George, so ask for him if you need to have your child’s glasses adjusted in the San Rafael Kaiser glasses store.

Tags: doctor, eyes, glasses, Kids, sunglasses

I’ve got a garden this year. Actually, I share a garden with my father-in-law, but that seems to be a better way than doing it myself anyway since the garden gets water more often. Gardens are a lot more fun now than when I was little and tired of hoeing weeds out of Grandpa Bushman’s green beans. Once he was showing my sisters and I a big green tomato worm (or was it a caterpillar?) and he stepped on it and some of the worm-juice got in my eye. A very distressing circumstance for a 10-year-old girl, but no one seemed too sympathetic at the time. I’d probably tried too many of my tricks to get out of helping in the garden that day.

I’m not interested in getting out of my gardening responsibilities anymore. In fact, gardening is surprisingly satisfying and fun. Eating veggies from the garden, sunburned though they sometimes are, is more tasty than grocery store fare. Maybe it’s because I care, or maybe they actually taste better, but I like them better.

The garden is in the spot where the swimming pool used to be. It’s surrounded by a wooden deck where the kids like to play tag. Between Dick and I, we’ve planted broccoli, radishes, carrots, lettuce, spinach, corn, sunflowers, strawberries, zucchini, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

How do I keep the kids from trampling the plants? I don’t, always, but Degen helped me come up with an idea one day that has worked pretty well. We picked a small part of the garden where there are no plants and put some little toys and small gardening tools there, and Maggie and Degen are allowed to dig and bury their stuff there. Degen calls it burying (and digging up) his treasures and he marks it with a big X. That keeps them from digging up and burying our plants. The only problem is keeping them from bringing mud in the house…

So, we go outside together nearly every day and water the garden and do a little weeding. The other day I found some of those green worms on my broccoli plants. I care enough about that broccoli that I actually pulled a few of those worms off the plants and threw them away (I still have enough memory of my childhood to avoid stepping on them).

Tags: Gardening, Kids, water

Nutella

Falafel balls from Costco

Updating my blog

Trying new recipes

Painting shows (Bob Ross’ happy trees…)

Checking on the garden every day…some of those plants grow fast, and some of those pests eat my veggies fast!

Listening to Colin practice the piano

Planning for the next family get-together

Tags: favorites, Reviews