They Like to Sew.

My family and I have a little code phrase when we're saying someone is gay. We say that "they like to sew." I'm not sure where that came from, but it makes us giggle. My mom and both mothers-in-law like to sew, but they're not gay. :)

My mom is an amazing seamstress. When I was in high school, she sewed all of my prom dresses, and though I make fun of them now (because they have poofy sleeves and white appliques - popular in the early nineties, but not now), at the time, I was thrilled with them. She made her own dresses while she was in high school. Every summer, she would have me do a sewing project. And every summer, I messed the project up. I just really hate sewing. I don't have enough patience. I can hem stuff and sew patches on, but that's about it.

Ben's stepmom has started making dresses and selling them online. Ben says she's been doing really well. I really need to start my own etsy to sell my cards. It's on my To Do list. My mom recently made some dresses for Sadie, as well, and I wanted to show the dresses from both moms on here. They are soooo cute.

The dresses Ben's stepmom, Brenda, made:

And three dresses my mom made:

Thank you so much, Mom and Bren! Those dresses are the CUTEST. I love little girl clothes soooo much.

Not Quite Yet.

Hey, fun friends.

I'm not quite ready to go private yet. But what I've done is deleted the post and comments about going private, so that those of you who gave me your e-mail address as a comment won't get weird people e-mailing you. I made a little contacts group on my e-mail entitled "If I Go Private," and if I indeed decide to go private in the future, I've got ya in there.

And I've obviously turned off the anonymous comment feature. I honestly didn't know it was enabled! Until I got a mean comment.

Thanks for all of the kind comments. My friends and family mean the world to me. I think I just kind of had a knee-jerk reaction to the mean comment, like, "Oh YEAH? Well then I'm going PRIIIIIIIIIIVVAAAAAAATE!!" I should have sat on it for a few days before making a decision. And now that I have done just that, I'm going to keep it public. Unless I get more mean comments. :)

Love you guys!!

Kar

On My Mom's Side

When my grandma died a few years ago, my mom caught Gramps trying to throw away old photo albums. I think he was just...really upset, and not really thinking about his actions. Or maybe he's not as into pictures as I am.

Anywho, I recently scanned all of the photos which were almost sent to the city dump, and I wanted to put a few on my blog. I love vintage pictures. They're my favorite. These are all people on my mom's side of the family.

This is my great- great grandma, Annie S:

I believe she was Swedish and immigrated to the U.S. as a child. (You'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, Mom.)

This is her husband, my great-great grandfather, Hyrum S:

He was an Idaho state senator. True story. And he was Norwegian, and immigrated to the U.S. as a child.

This is one of their daughters, my great grandma, Elva W:

I actually knew her. :) She paid us to work in her garden every summer. Five dollars an hour, in the early eighties. That was unheard-of wealth. She loved her garden. She always had her fridge stocked with cold twinkies, cold twix bars, and cold Coke. As a younger woman, she taught school in a one-room schoolhouse on the Antelope Flats.

This is her first husband, Something A:

His first name escapes me. He and my grandma got divorced, which is why she had to support herself and children by teaching. She remarried later to a wonderful man named Ralph W.

Elva and Something had my grandma, Nathell S:

She's the one who died three years ago. She didn't have a mean bone in her body. She was an amazing wife - she and my gramps were almost like one person. They did everything together and were truly best friends. It's no wonder he has such a hard time without her.

This is my gramps as a younger man:

What a babe, huh? He looks like a dark-haired Marlon Brando. He has some native American in him, I believe. I get the dark circles under my eyes from him. He loves to cook, putter around his yard, and listen to operas on his CD player. I told him he should get an iPod, and he scoffed at me. He's very proud of his CD collection.

Grandpa and Grandma S. had my mom. This is her in high school:

She was a dancer, just like I was. She is really fun to be around and extremely giving and creative. I love the woman.

Just wanted to share some of my family with you. :)

Cards I've Made Lately

Wedding cards:

Mother's Day cards:

And Father's Day cards:

Running Uphill - Big Fun.

I ran in a race today called To Bone and Back. Bone is a little "city" forty miles outside of Idaho Falls. I put "city" in quotes, because there's just a store. That's it. I've never been to Bone, and I pictured maybe a store and a couple of houses or whatever, but it was just a store and a grain silo. I also pictured it being in a hot, dry, flat desert, but it was in these lush, rolling, green hills. Quite a beautiful spot.

Anywho, NO, I did not run the entire forty miles. Though word on the street was that there were some buff guys who did that. I cannot imagine. I was on a team with 8 people - each person ran a five-mile leg. My friend Megann organized it. Here are Megann, her husband, Dustin, our friend Kat, and me, before the race started:

We were the first four joggers on our team, and we all rode in one car, following each jogger. Here's the funniest thing - the baton we passed to one another was a little plastic bone. Kat is modeling it here:

Isn't that funny?

At every pass-off point were port-a-potties, and I was just so dang nervous that I had to pee at every single one. Megann was really nervous, too. But once you get jogging, the nerves go away, and they are replaced with stitches in your side and raggedy breath. The air gets pretty thin up there.


What a gorgeous jog, though. It's nothing but green, rolling hills, spotted with windmills. So beautiful:

We all did so, so well. We surprised ourselves. I ran five miles every few days to get prepared for running such a long distance, and on flat ground, it took me an hour and fifteen minutes every time. My leg of the race was quite hilly, and some of the hills were BRUTAL. I had to walk parts of the steep hills. But then on the down parts of the hills, I got going pretty fast. So those fast parts saved me, as far as time is concerned. I jogged it in an hour!

Here I am waiting my fourth leg mark:

Here is Megann, passing the bone to me:

Dustin said something to make me laugh when they took this picture of me, but I can't remember what, now:

There I am, on the left, walking:

That hill was a KILLER. And it was LOOOOOOOOOOONG. So Karlenn the Wimp walked a couple of times.


And here I am, finally passing the bone off to Kat's sister-in-law:

The Store in Bone is behind that little makeshift tent.


Here is a slideshow of all the pictures we took along the way. I know Megann wanted to blognap them. If you have problems downloading them onto your computer, Megs, give me a call:

Dylie is Six!

Dylan turned six a couple of weeks ago. I've decided only to give my kids "friend parties" every other year. Too stressful and expensive. So this was the "off year." We just had my family over, which was great.

Ben is really into making cakes lately, which I'm fine with. He concocted this beauty for Dylan's birthday:

It's a layer of brownie, a layer of vanilla ice cream, another layer of brownie, with hot fudge drizzled over the whole thing. I'm not much of a chocolate lover, but this was pretty dang good.

Here is Dyls, blowing out the candles:

And unwrapping one of his presents - a new bat:

And a slide show of some more gifts and of everyone that was at the party:

T-Ball

I signed Dylan up for T-Ball with the YMCA this year, because the games were in the evenings, and I wanted to be able to go. When I went in to sign him up, they begged me to be a coach. I really didn't want to do it, but my guilt won out, as usual. I played softball all through school, so I know the basics. So I said, oh, alriiiiiiiiiight....

And it has actually been really fun. I felt retarded at first, but now I feel less self-conscious trying to coach these kidlets in front of their fathers. It feels so good to throw and catch a ball again. The kids are so cute and funny. And they're pretty talented! They aren't scared of the ball, and some of them throw and catch pretty decently.

T-Ball is hilarious. If you are ever in need of some cheap entertainment, come to one of our games. It's a crack-up.

Here is me and the team:

Ugh. Just when I think I've lost enough weight, I see a picture like that. Dang.

Anyways, the team decided to name themselves the Eagles. Dylan was disappointed that they didn't name themselves the BLUE Eagles, and he spent the better part of a week trying to talk me into changing the name. I told him that it was a democratic process, not a dictatorial process. He looked at me quizzically.

I make our team do cheers before they go out on the field. At first, they thought I was nuts. Now it's all they want to do. I actually plaigerized their favorite cheer from a team I heard last year: "We are the EAGles! We're flying HIGH!!!" The lady who coached the Eagles last year (when Dylan played in the Iona league) did that cheer REALLY loudly. You could hear her clear across two fields: "WE ARE THE EEEEEEAGLES!!!! WE'RE FLYING HIGHHHHHH!!!" Nat and Arin, you remember.

I'm all paranoid about making sure that the kids get equal time in the outfield and in the infield, so I keep a pretty good record of who played what during what inning. Every kid wants to play first base, every inning. Except for my two scaredy-cat kids, who have now stopped coming to all practices and games. I rotate everyone equally. And everyone wants to bat first. I don't see that it really matters, but again, because it matters to the kids, I rotate the batting order.

Here's me, with my chubby belly. And a weird look on my face:

Perhaps I'm thinking, "What on EARTH have I gotten myself into this time??"

I love how the kids from opposing teams totally talk to each other while one is on base, waiting to run to the next base. They ask each other where they go to school, how old they are, what month they were born in (Just in case one is a teeny bit older than the other. Then they can enthusiastically point that out to the kid the next time he's on base), and if the runner plays first base. They don't ask names. They don't care about names.

Another funny thing is that the kids think that, because they play first, second, or third base, they are supposed to stand RIGHT ON THE BASE, like the kid in green is doing below:

Not so, my little green-shirted man. Not so. So we have been teaching our kids where their "area" is and to stand in the middle of it. They're doing well with not standing on their base, but they are very concerned about going into another kids' "area." If a ball is coming between two kids, they both look uncertainly at the ball and then at each other, and then neither kid goes for it. I think we'll work on "calling" the ball. And on hustling. They stand and wait for the ball to come to them. Don't we wish that was the way it works?

The way the field is situated, when you're in the field, you're squinting into the sun:

It's a good thing those t-balls are soft, because more than one kid has been beaned in the head because he couldn't see the ball.

Most of the kids are in la-la land when they're playing in the field. They don't pay terribly close attention, and they are never in the "ready" position. Dylan's demonstrating the stare-into-space look that most kids have when fielding:

At least he wasn't making nests out of grass, or throwing his mitt in the air and catching it. Those two are my team's specialty. And throwing grass at each other. And at me. I came home last night with a bunch of grass in my bra. Sigh. Dylan's not the only kid I know whom I suspect of ADHD. I'll just say that much.

Dylan, batting:

I've been working like crazy on their batting stance (being squared away so that you actually hit the ball into the field, instead of into the unsuspecting parents) and on holding the bat properly, and as you can see, Dylan doesn't really get it yet. Nor do most of the kids. I just keep positioning them and positioning them. It helps to draw a pretend square in the mud and tell them to stand on the two corners of the square.

We've got some crazy-good throwers on our team. One kid always overthrows the ball because he gets really excited and just launches it to first base as hard as he can. He reminds me of me. Overthrowing was always a problem for me. Which was why I made a good outfielder. This kid will be a really good outfielder someday. I keep telling him that when he complains about sometimes needing to play in the outfield. I keep telling him it's the best position, because you have to be the best runner and the best thrower. He doesn't believe me. I don't think he'll believe me for another few years, because I've seen the 2nd- and 3rd-grade teams, and none of them hit it into the outfield, either.

Dylan doesn't necessarily throw far, but at least he aims well. And he throws kind of pidgeon-toed, which is cute:

I really need to practice with him, one-on-one. I'm excited to do more one-on-one action with him when I quit my job. I will have the perfect thing to do when he's bored - practice throwing, catching, and hitting.

Spectators who have come to visit - Mom and Dad:

Micah:

Sadie:

Sadie makes a bit of a nuisance of herself when she comes to games. She wants to be by mommy. Often, when I'm in the field with the kids, she is next to me, holding my hand. She's such a lover.

And Lex:

The poor girl had to come in a wheelchair last week. And it was a hard day for her. Lex had knee surgery, as you may recall, and then she got pneumonia. It was a toughie. She's doing much better now, but it was a tough couple of weeks. Thanks for coming to our game, Tex. Love ya.

If the pot's a-rockin...

...it's warped. I tried to boil water in this pot a couple of weeks ago, and it never boiled. It acted like it wanted to boil, but maybe all of the energy went into making the pot rock like crazy. I waited for like half an hour, and it never boiled. It just did this:

I finally transferred the water to a different pot, and it boiled almost immediately. I decided to throw the warped pot away. Goodbye, pot. You were lovely.

You gotta love this beautiful 40-degree weather...

A few weeks ago, Dylan's teacher threw a little Kindergarten graduation party at a local park. It was cold. As usual. All of the mommies knew each other, except for me. I think they're all in the same ward over there. We're kind of on the outer edges of the school boundaries - most of our ward goes to a different school, except for Dylan and like one other kid. So... Ben and I just hung out and talked to each other. :) Here are some photos from that evening: