i

Ok, it’s been 3 months, and I’m finally ready to talk about it. Back in November, I got an iPad mini. Before then, I had never had or used any sort of i-device for more than 5 minutes. It’s true. I was utterly i-illiterate.

Jeff has had a school-issued iPad for the past 2 years, but I never really cared about it. I have always found iPads to be pointless because they are huge! Where do you stash something that big and expensive and breakable? I had zero interest. I was fine with our old school first-gen Kindle Fire. Then the iPad mini came out. Finally, the ideal size with the superior touch screen! My thoughts were stirred. But psh, the things are more than twice the cost of a Kindle Fire. That is SO not in the budget.

But then I got paid for a long spurt of long babysitting days…and the Kindle got slower…and I started using Evernote to journal…and the LDS church app is awesome for scripture study…and my mind was slowly turning in favor of the iPad. I thought I’d just get a refurbished iPad mini for about the same price as a new Kindle Fire. When Apple revealed the latest model of the iPad mini, however, Jeff convinced me that it would be much smarter long-term to get the new one. I got as far as putting it in my shopping cart on apple.com, but I could not physically click “order” on such an expensive, utterly frivolous purchase. I just couldn’t! Jeff came over and clicked it really fast and boom. I became an i.

About a week later, a small box came to my door. Inside was a sleek, shiny, intimidating brand-new iPad mini. Slowly over the next few weeks, I grew accustomed to all things iPad. I downloaded apps. I got a bluetooth keyboard so I could type in my journal easily on the iPad. It took me a solid 6 weeks before I was completely reconciled to my iPad. For the entire first month of ownership, I kept having these insecure “what on earth was I thinking—this isn’t worth it!” moments. It was cool and everything, but there was nothing on the iPad that I couldn’t have done on a Kindle Fire for a third the price.

Enter: Paper 53, my true i-Love. This drawing app stole my heart and made me love my iPad. It is so cool and so fun! All those drawings I’ve been posting lately were done using Paper 53.

I have a special Pencil stylus to use in the app, and I can sketch with one end and erase with the back end just like a real pencil. I can even blend and smudge with my finger!

The app has sketch, pencil, marker, pen, and even watercolor tools. I can mix and swirl colors in a little pallet. It is all the fun of art with zero mess! Perfect for a Mom with lots of little hands reaching and grabbing constantly.

I have always liked to draw and “make art,” but I never took any real art classes after high school, so I’m kind of frozen in my 2-dimensional juvenile artistic style. I got a how-to-draw book and every now and then I do a sketching lesson. But mostly I just doodle and goof off on my iPad when the mood strikes.

That’s my confession: I have an iPad. And iLike it.

Bun-t Beds

Rose has not figured out how to make any sounds in the back of her throat yet—phonetically speaking, she can’t do a glottal stop (I loved my Spanish Phonetics class at SVU so much, but I’m still amazed to have unearthed that term after all this time). SO, Rose converts the hard G, the K, and all other sounds produced in the glottal region to a D or a T sound, depending on the word and her fancy. Cat is Tat. Dog is Dod. Cake is Tate. Book is Boot. Tickle is Tittle. Bunk is Bunt. We got some bunt beds last week.

The idea of a bundt bed tickled my cartoony fancy. Sometimes Rose drops the end consonant entirely and simply says bun-bed...

Hehehee, I’m really starting to have fun now! There are so many possibilities!

Anyways, babysitting money funds pretty much all of our extravagances. Jeff’s teaching job covers the necessities of life,  plus a drop or two in the savings bucket. Anything extra comes either from those savings or from babysitting. Getting paid for babysitting is an extravagance in my book, so I use that extravagant money for extravagant purposes. By extravagant I mean: things we can easily live without, but which soften the edges of stark, straight-up budgetary (provident?) living.

While I often feel guilty about getting paid for taking care of my sweet cute niece and nephew, it is nice to have a little monetary cushion. I guess the only time I am glad I’m getting paid for such a delightful job is at diaper time. Or when Tate won’t burp. What it comes down to is: Steph is determined to pay me, and in spite of my qualms, I am grateful for the blessing that little extra income is.

Ok, that’s enough; I don’t want to get awkward—is it just me or do people often get awkward when they talk about money? Maybe because we are the quickest to judge in regards to money—how much people have, how much they save, how much they spend, what they spend it on, what they say about it, etc. Money is an annoying necessity. I’m rambling now. Sorry, Em—my sister Em doesn’t read my ramblings. She skims them at best, ha ha. Next!

Now back to the real reason for this post: we extravagantly replaced Jay’s and Rose’s old beds with shiny new bunk beds last week. They had been using my childhood bed—a rickety metal daybed with a pull-out pop-up frame for Rose’s mattress. They pushed them together into the classic SuperBed:

Allow me to recycle some December pictures.

Jay says “I love to be next Rose when we sleep.” I wondered what they would think about bunk beds, when they could no longer push their mattresses together. We’ve been talking about bunk beds for a year now, since my first (and only) attempt at kids’ bedroom décor (painting the walls).

Actually I ended up choosing a child’s loft bed instead of real bunk beds, because it was lower and cozier-looking to me. I saw the idea online to simply slide a mattress on the floor underneath a low loft bed to create lower height, lower priced bunk beds. The highest bar is about shoulder-height on me (but then again, I am 6 feet tall). I can step up on the bottom mattress and kiss Jay goodnight when he’s laying up top.

There it is. We ordered it from Walmart.com of all places, and it came surprisingly fast for such a pathetic store. Jeff screwed the wood together with lots of “help” and supervision from the kids. Those electric blue walls I painted a year ago are much less overwhelming now that there’s a big white bed to break up the blues. Maybe next I’ll find the cute orange polka-dot bedspreads of my dreams, and this room will look even more put together. Maybe.

Fort!

 

A semi-panorama of their room—there’s so much more floor space now.

They lasted one, maybe two nights apart and now they’re back to sharing. Sometimes they sleep up top…

…and sometimes they sleep down low.

It’s nice for me to see these pictures of my kids actually asleep. Everything comes in phases, and the past few weeks have not been a good sleeping phase for these kids, mostly Rose. One bleak night last week, Rose woke me up 4 times and Jay woke me up once, totaling five wake-up calls between 11pm and 6am. That is borderline sleep torture. We’ll get through it. I could ramble on about all my hopeful plans and methods and possible reasons for their waking up, but I started to type out those thoughts just now and it bored even me. Plus, it seems like every time I post about a PLAN of something I want to do, I change my mind soon after posting it and then feel like a bloggy liar. Example: my family photo-recordkeeping plans changed the day after I posted that rambly blurb about what I thought would be a great system. Ha! And now I appear to be rambling about rambling…

Summary, if you skimmed my ramblings: we got low loft bunk beds for Jay and Rose using babysitting money that I’m usually conflicted about being paid, except during stinky diaper changes. Oh, and Rose calls them bunt beds.

Good evening, Valentine

Valentine’s Day is the anniversary of mine and Jeff’s first date. It’s been EIGHT years now! We met 9 years ago, went on our first date 8 years ago, and got married just over 7 years ago. That’s getting to be quite the countdown. This year for our Valentine’s date we actually went OUT. On a date. To a DANCE, of all places! It was all my crazy idea.

Our book club met the night before Valentine’s Day to discuss Shannon Hale’s fluffy Austenland books and then watch the newly released movie. I decided it would be fun to dress up for the meeting. I mean, I have had these Regency dresses crumpled in my box since our Boone Home days. So why not break one out and wear it to show a little Jane Austen solidarity?

I washed my best dress and even ironed it. Then I altered a few of my more pathetic seams and it was ready to go. However, when I sewed this dress 5 years ago, I had to modify the traditional swooping low neckline to a higher version to stay covered. I’m not good enough at sewing to deviate from the pattern too drastically, so I ended up with a slightly too high neckline. Consequently, the dress doesn’t scream Regency at first glance. Ebay to the rescue! I ordered a pair of $5 white elbow gloves to complete the ensemble. The result was as elegant as cotton, bad sewing and high necklines can be. It felt superb to swoosh around in my dear old dress once more.

Ready to go clubbing! Book clubbing, that is.

So, I wore my dress to the book club and got some grins and laughs out of it. I love playing dress-up!

When I was fixing up my dress earlier this week, I tried it on with the gloves to show Jeff. It awakened in us our long-lost desire to waltz. So we double-checked the steps online and then waltzed around the basement. I had a crazy idea while we waltzed: I asked Jeff—“If I figured out how to make you a tailcoat, would you wear it and waltz with me at the stake Valentine’s dance?” He said yes. My husband is pure gold.

A few weeks ago, I drew a little picture of how I wish we looked when we dance. [inspiration: Dance, Dance, Dance by the Steve Miller Band] Maybe it really is all about the dress and suit!

I did some research online and then got to work on Jeff’s tailcoat. My plan was to turn an old suit coat he’s had for over a decade into the tailcoat of our dreams. For a non-patterned sewing project, it went surprisingly smoothly! I was giddy with success by the time I finished sewing.

Here’s what I did:

1. Cut off the front half of the coat and rip the seams up the middle of the back part to turn it into two tails.

2. I pinned those pieces from the front onto the bottom of the back tails and trim them to size. Then I sewed them on.

Are you impressed that I actually took pictures during this process? I was pleased with my presence of mind.

3. I requisitioned the cuff buttons to convert the front into a double-breasted look.

4. I hemmed up the raw edges and sewed on the buttons, matching two of them with the pre-existing button holes so they could be used to fasten the coat and I didn’t have to sew any extra button holes. I was feeling like quite the button-ninja at this point.

Since I used the front of the coat for the tails, one of them has a secret pocket in it. Even better. The one flaw with this coat is the tails have that horizontal seam running straight through the middle of them, but it is a trifling concern.

I unearthed some of the awful orange and yellow flowered upholstery fabric that my sister covered our old kitchen chairs in years ago. When she bequeathed them to us, I removed that hideous stuff but saved it because you never know when sturdy, ugly fabric may be useful.

There are chairs of doom, in our old Birch Street apartment back in College Place, coated in amazing awfulness, days before I vengefully ripped that fabric off.

That shiny chair fabric made a killer vest. I ordered Jeff a $9 felt top hat from amazon and used a length of old curtain fabric for his cravat. We looked up how to tie the cravat online. Jeff looked like dignity personified in his tailcoat, top hat, and cravat. We were ready for our waltz!

Let me quickly add that Jeff and I do not enjoy dances. The loud music and large crowds repel us quiet introverts. We do enjoy dancing together, however, even though we’re not very good at it. It was a strange twist of events that persuaded us that it would be FUN to dress up like Mr. and Mrs. Darcy and attend a dance. But we did, for the sheer novelty of it. Our plan was to stay until they played a song in 3/4 time, at which point we would waltz and then go home. Actually I’d rather be Emma and Mr. Knightley (they are less stiff and more fun), but they’re not quite as iconic as the Darcys.

The stake calendar listed the Adult Sweetheart Valentine Dance as starting at 7:30pm in Benton City, 30 minutes away. So we left at a comfortable 7:15pm for the dance. When we arrived, however, the parking lot was virtually empty, and we were informed by one of the three people in the building that the dance had been moved to start at 8:30pm instead. That left us with 40 minutes to burn before we could do our one waltz and go home. We spent it standing in the foyer talking with our fellow misinformed Grandview buddies, the Kartchners, because there is not anything to do that will take up 40 minutes in little Benton City.

Finally people started arriving. Our stake president probably officially thinks we’re crazy. We were in his company on the handcart trek this summer, so he got used to us in our old-fashioned clothes. But then we show up to the regular stake dance in different era old-fashioned clothes. He shook our hands, grinned, and said “what is going on with the Whites?” It was golden.

Jeff and I danced two non-waltz slow songs and escaped the gym during the non-slow songs. There were these tissue paper puff balls strung from the ceiling, dangling about 5 feet 9 inches from the floor. We kept crashing into them. They tickled my nose. At last the speakers were blaring a waltz-able song (Open Arms, by Journey). We got to work 1-2-3, 1-2-3-ing, and  I only stepped on Jeff’s feet  4 or 5 times. When the song ended, we made a dash for the side door, sprinted hand in hand across the church lawn, and soon were safely settled in our van’s heated seats, heading home.

Although it was more than we bargained for, I’m glad we actually went OUT somewhere, all dressed up. It was different and silly and fun. I love Jeff.

Good morning, Valentine

Friday Feb 14-Monday Feb 16 is mid-winter break for Sunnyside High School so Jeff was home for Valentine’s Day. On the morning of the Day of Love, we had some quality family fun. First Jeff and I took turns running. Then we convened for a much-anticipated family moose hunt. Last week we checked out a book from the library called Looking for a  Moose by Phyllis Root:

Jay fell in love with this silly spin off of the classic “going on a bear hunt.” He has been asking to go on a moose hunt for over a week. On Valentine’s Day morning, we finally did.

One more background bit before we go on a moose hunt: we never got rid of our old camera from 6 years ago. It has been sitting unused for over 2 years in its bag, gathering dust. Jeff put new batteries and an old memory card in it and gave it to Jay to play with this week, and Jay has become a photography machine. That was part of his motivation for going on a moose hunt: fresh subjects for his photography.

Every time Jay takes a picture, he says “look!” to the nearest person. I have seen more pictures of the floor and furniture over the past few days than I ever wanted to.

On to the moose hunt. Jeff said Jay could lead us wherever he wanted on our walk through town. We decided that moose like trees, and Jay picked out a destination where a few trees line the bike path. So we walked a mile and a half to the trees, following  our fearless leader Jay, pausing every now and then for him to snap a picture. It was 50 degrees and super windy, and we were walking at 4-year old pace, so the blood never really got pumping. Burrr.

I couldn’t resist taking pictures of Jay taking pictures.

 

Here’s how this picture went: Jay said “Rose, stand right there. No—over right here. Ok, say cheese!” Nice composition for a 4.5 year old.

Rose started lagging about half a mile into the walk, so Jeff carried her on his shoulders.

Jay took this picture of the train we were rewarded with along the way. When we asked Jay how much further we were going to walk, he picked a sign up ahead on the bike path and said “We’ll walk to that sign and if we see a moose, we’ll say ‘yay!’ and then go home. If we don’t see a moose, we’ll just go home.”

We reached Jay’s appointed sign and turned back towards home, with no moose in sight. Jay wasn’t upset. He is hard to read sometimes. I could tell he knew that it was very unlikely for us to find a moose in Grandview, but at the same time he seemed so hopeful and determined!

“Look, Mommy, I took a picture of my shadow!”

We ended up walking 3 whole miles! About half a mile from home, Jeff and I each put a kid on our backs and power walked for it. Thank goodness for that brisk walk with a Rose-backpack because it warmed me up at last.

Here are a few of Jay’s other pictures:

Family scripture in the morning…ugh, I look like a dead person in that bed…in my defense, Rose had woken me up at least 3 times the night before, for various reasons.

Jeff leaving for work

Jay: “Mommy, look at this picture of Rose! Isn’t it cute?”

Me sewing…actually, picking stitches out (far more common than actual sewing in this house)

Cornbread for dinner

I could go on, but we’ll leave it at that.