Rob's Birthday!

Some years I have a hard time deciding what to make for Rob's cake.  This year, I didn't have that problem...

Just FYI - this one is domesticated.  (And evidently well fed!)

Rob out in the boonies...poking around for a python.

The cake version.

"Happy Birthday to you!"

That last one didn't go out easily :)

Today, Rob's mom is showing off a newborn picture of Rob and his twin Ron. 

Probably more than you ever really wanted to know about flax...

I mentioned a long while back that I tried growing some of my flax seeds "just to see" what they would turn into.  I think flax is pretty fascinating because of its health benefits and its historic usefulness (linen is made of flax).  As it turns out, they have very pretty flowers.

Flax flower - I'm growing mine in a pot, they are probably 18 inches tall, I think they get about twice as tall in a field.

After the flower falls on, there is a "capsule" that swells and that is where the seeds are.  We've broken some open and I'm not sure how to tell when they are mature, but each capsule has about 10 seeds in it.  Each plant has 3 or more flower/capsules at the top. 

It looks like the threshing process is pretty involved, so I don't think we'll be making linen around here!  Although I am very curious about how the stalks will age.  I am a geek, aren't I?

The rest of our garden is doing ok.  Our new neighbor weed-bombed his yard and it leaked into our yard and killed the tomato plant :(  But actually that encouraged me b/c at first I thought I was just extremely bad at growing tomatoes!  We have little carrots - they are very cute, but not ready yet and a pretty good showing with our peas.  Our backyard gets limited sun this time of year and about half of it gets no sun at all.  Our front patch gets no sun except for the sunrise.  We will make up for all of that in the summer!


*****

Here is something completely different.  For just about ever I have overhead people gushing about how great Les Miserables is - the musical that is.  My parents saw the movie version and they liked it, but said it was kind of hard to follow since they were unfamiliar with the story.  That made me curious, but I don't want to see it without reading the book first...so I requested it from the library.  When I went to pick it up, the rubber band holding the hold tag onto the book was about to pop, this thing is ENORMOUS.  It is more than 1200 pages long and the type is small.  There is a very grim photograph of Victor Hugo on the cover.  I want to know - have any of you ever read this thing?  Am I going to be glad I slogged through twelve hundred pages?  I've read enough to just barely be able to see pages in front of the bookmark - and that's take me about 4 days.  I know I'm not really into the story yet because the main character (according to the book flap) hasn't even shown up yet. 

Cartwheels

Annalise's latest goal has been to learn how to turn a cartwheel.  Actually she'd like to stand on her head, but she kept flipping over, so I encouraged her to turn a cartwheel instead.  Her determination is inspiring :)

The approach - she goes for the running approach - (Natalie is doing her own version.)

She does sometimes get both feet in the air at the same time.

The exhilarating satisfaction!

Almost makes me want to go try to turn one myself!  Almost!!

Here is a better view of Natalie-style.  Princess shoes are optional.

Bleach Ts

Now that Christmas is past, I can post about the Bleach T-Shirts we made.  We made 8 t-shirts to give as gifts.  I follow the Craft Gossip web feed and that is where I learned about how to make the shirts.  I have looked a little at Pinterest, but I feel so overwhelmed visually when I do.

This is basically a 3 step project.  Step one I think is the hardest - choosing a design.  Some of them were easier than others, but some looked good as pictures and were indiscernible as silhouettes.

Step two is not as mentally taxing - that is cutting the design out of freezer paper.  I printed off the image we wanted, cut it out as a pattern, traced that onto the freezer paper and then cut it out again.

Step three - easy as pie.  You iron the design onto a t-shirt (waxy side down) (high for 30 seconds or so), stick a piece of cardboard inside the shirt...

Then you make a 70/30 bleach/water mix and spray it over the designs.  Trial and error showed us that you should try to mist it as lightly as possible and not soak the image.  The bleach water can drain under the freezer paper if there isn't a good seal and ruin the design.  Also (as we learned with the shirt we made for Caleb) if the shirt is heavily bleached the fabric will wear out very quickly.  (Which is kind of a plus when you are wearing a shark shirt and the tear makes it look like you escaped from one by the skin of your teeth!)

You just watch the shirts and see how it goes.  Some of them are ready in about 5 minutes, others need more time.

When they are done, you rinse them in the bathtub and then wash them, voila!  Since they all took different times and our bathtubs are upstairs and our washer is outside (garage) this got awfully tedious for me.  So we did our rinsing in the kiddie pool with the water hose.

Here are the other shirts:

This was a fun way to get specific with their interests.  This is a pikman plush, and I still am not sure what that means!  It is either a line of stuffed animals or a video game or both.  We had to make it twice b/c we started out trying to make it with eyes and wow - it looked creepy!

I made this same unicorn 3 times - once for Annalise and twice as a gift (one did not turn out right).  I had to draw in a 4th hoof because it was overlapped in the drawing, but that didn't look right as a silhouette.

This was probably the hardest one to choose the image.  I tried just Anakin Skywalker and none of those images were recognizable.  At least I think this is recognizable as a Star Wars scene!

White Elephant Party

It has become a little tradition at our church to have a white elephant party each January.  I've been to white elephant parties other places too and they are usually very fun and very funny.  I just think our church may be bending the unwritten rules for white elephanting.  It just doesn't seem to click in my mind.

The main issue is that not everyone understood that the gifts brought to white elephant parties are, for the large part, supposed to be awkward.  This is not the place to spend money on a gift.  Horrifically ugly centerpiece you are just glad to be rid of - yes, cute snowman ornament you found a JoAnn's, no.  The 2 people who come not knowing this rule provide the elusive desired gift that makes the game interesting.  In our church party, the break down occurs because only a very small minority of attendees bring strange things.  Of course if you bring a box of Russell Stover Chocolates and if I happen to bring them home, I will pardon this one person.

ahem...

This experience also has made me believe white elephant parties should be attended mostly by people about the same age.  When you get to the gift swiping part, it isn't much fun if you feel guilty for taking the item from someone else.  (And it isn't very interesting if no one swipes anything.)  I took a cherry blossom scented candle from an older lady last year and I still feel guilty about it.

Snowmen

Caleb's

Annalise's

Natalie's

Python-athon

Where do I start?  Rob is always looking for something outlandish to accent the morning show.  So they have formed a team to compete in the python challenge.  This weekend he had to attend an orientation at the UF/FAU campus in Davie, FL.  (Davie is west of Ft. Lauderdale, about an hour from us.)  The campus was also having their open house the same day, so the kids and I did that while he got orientated.

Media on hand to witness the start of the event.  There were hordes of news people (pictured), plenty of "characters"  i.e. people in camo unnecessarily wearing knives on their belts, and at least one guy filming a reality tv show.

This guy showed how to do a live catch - he was with The Nature Conservancy.  The Python Challenge is sponsored by Florida Fish and Wildlife and will only count dead pythons in the contest.

Checking out some of the research.

Termite lab - I learned something interesting about termites.  They do not know where they are going - can't smell out wood, they just keep trucking on until they hit wood and then pig out.  In this experiment not a single termite had found any wood!   Some of them missed it by just the tiniest bit and kept tunneling

I'm not sure if this is someone's PhD research project or what!

The kids got to pick a wood-roach with a colored dot on their back to be in the race.

Caleb's wood roach won twice :)

Scenes from Mattheson Hammocks Park

Mattheson Hammocks Park is one of our local parks that seems to me to be one of those things locals keep to themselves. There is an atoll, which is man made, but it is fed by the ocean, which you can see from path around the water. It is shallow, framed with palm trees, and really very beautiful. Wikipedia calls it an urban park, and it is near downtown, but it does not feel urban...especially during the weekdays when it is not crowded at all. As part of our kick off to summer, we took a visit there last week. (We are having our summer break from school from now until March.)

Note to self: picnic on the picnic tables, not in the sand, and actually that is what we did after we washed the sand out of the vegetables and skimmed off the hummus.

We'd never been to the other side of the park where there is access to some sea grass, but Rob told me about it and I took the kids over there too.

We found some small shrimp.

A horseshoe crab.

A Portuguese man o' war - fortunately this was a little one!

Now that's a Portuguese man o' war!  I don't know how we missed seeing this thing until the very end.  We walked all around it.

The Boxcar Children

Before Christmas I picked up The Boxcar Children on CD at the library.  The kids had listened to The Incredible Journey a few weeks earlier and enjoyed it (although the vocabulary was pretty advanced for them, following up with the movie helped a lot).  The Boxcar Children was much more enjoyable for them.  Annalise requested a repeat...twice.  They listened to it on the road trip and it was every bit as entertaining to them as the little DVD player.  The CD also included the two sequels Surprise Island and The Yellow House Mystery.

I can understand why these books are so endearing to children.  The Boxcar Children is about four orphaned children who hide in a boxcar, for the young reader/listener, they are basically playing house.  For the adult it is an incredibly questionable book to read!  For starters, the parents of the four children are dead and there is no one to take care of them because their grandfather has shunned the family.  There is no mention of any other grandparents, how (or how recently) the parents died, why the grandfather avoided the family (other than he "did not like" the mother, but it doesn't ever tell why), and the kids never show any grief over losing their parents.  The older boy and girl assume parental roles.  The girl cooks and directs home-life in the boxcar and the boy gets a job helping out at a wealthy man's house.  The wealthy man discovers who the kids are and who their grandfather is (he put an ad in the paper looking for them), but decides not to turn them over to him.  When the grandfather finds out he's not blinded with rage, he understands the doctor's decision.

The books cover 3 consecutive summers.  By the summer of Surprise Island the children are living happily with their grandfather and as a treat to them, he lets them spend the whole summer living on a small island (with extremely limited adult supervision - the eldest child is about 15 at this point, the youngest 6).  There they meet a strange man who turns out to be their cousin.  He wants his identity kept secret, but the reason for that is never given.  At the end of the book, he goes to live with them at their grandfather's too.

To me, The Yellow House Mystery was probably the best of the bunch.  It still had some hard to reconcile items, but for the most part didn't have any parts that left you wondering why no one had called the police.  The gist of it is that a man who had worked for their grandfather's father had disappeared years earlier.  The children and their cousin and his new wife go to Maine to hunt for clues about the man's disappearance.  By this time, the kids know the characters so well they can concentrate on the mystery and the adult listening with them has just given up on the difficulties, suspends her disbelief and begins to enjoy the story.

A Few Pretty Much Unrelated Christmas Pictures

In no particular order!

One day we went to Historic Washington State Park in, well, Washington, Arkansas!  As you can see Natalie was very interested in the tour.

Sleeping through the visit to the blacksmith shop.

Roadside flower.

Birthplace of Paul "Bear" Bryant.  I like these old "Birthplace of" homes - they always have the biggest trees!  I like to imagine that the person born there planted them.

Princess Candyland.  Thank you Brian, thank you very much.  Ok, I mean seriously the kids really like it, but I keep getting sent back to Cinderella's pumpkin coach.

My parents gave the kids $5 each (along with other gifts).  I love how Annalise looks like she won the lottery!

Stick on earrings.

Pinestraw house - I made this for them and assured them that it was fun.  Did anyone else build these?  I built them with my cousin in Holly Springs and with leaves with girls at school.

Skipper!