Thinking of You Cards - They're Done!

I told you last week that I was preparing to make some Thinking of You cards.  Thanks to the Olympics, I've gotten them done in record time!  I'm glued to that TV screen every evening during the Olympics.  (And I'm already working on my Bi-Yearly Olympics Observations post.  I've made several fantastic, funny-if-only-to-me observations thus far.)

Anywho, those Martha Stewart metallic stickers that I used in place of square metal-rimmed tags (which I can't find anywhere in Idaho Falls) turned out perfectly.  I was pleased.

I'd have to say the ones with the brown background are my favorite.  Which is yours?

This is for you, Kathleen.

Kay, so this is one of the Chinese shirts Benny bought me.  Sooo comfortable.  Kathleen wanted to see one on, so, voila.  That dang Dylan wouldn't get off the chair to take a proper picture, so you get to see a really awesome view of my double chin.  And I had just gotten out of the shower, so...no hair or makeup. Ah well.  You can't win 'em all.

I'd really like to find some cute fitted off-white capris to wear under this.  Or maybe red.

The Lesson on Councils - What I Did

I'm such a nerd.  I thought it was already August.  So I prepared one of the Sunday School lessons that was supposed to happen in August.  Ah well. 

The lesson is on councils - meaning, meetings that you have within the church.  I was a little worried at first - How am I going to teach a class for an entire hour on meetings??  But I did a lot of thinking and praying and research and came up with an outline and activities with which I was happy.

The online curriculum came up with this first idea, and I utilized it:

These are some scriptures on councils - why we have them, blessings we receive for having them, and the correct way in which to meet.  The summaries on the right don't necessarily match their counterparts on the left.  The curriculum suggested to have the kids look up all of the scriptures at one time and draw lines to match which scriptures go with which summary.  I tweaked it a bit.  We would look up scriptures at different times during the lesson - when the scripture demonstrated a certain point we were discussing - and then we would pause, read the scripture, and draw the lines bit by bit throughout the entire lesson.

The lesson talks about how important it is to listen to each others' ideas during councils.  Everyone should speak and contribute.  And everyone should be listened to.  I remembered an activity I did once in Young Women's - we each brought a white elephant gift to a Christmas party, and to decide who got what, the leader read this story aloud:

Every time she said the word "right" or "Wright," we passed the gift in our hands to the right.  Every time she said "left," we had to pass our gift to the left.   And at the end of the story, the gift that was in your hands was yours to open. It's really a funny process.

So I decided to have us do this game to demonstrate the importance of listening.  I arranged my students in a circle, then had them pick out a button from my button stash:

Then they passed buttons to the right and left while I read the story.  They had a good time, and it drove home the importance of listening.

Yes, some of them asked if they could keep their button.  No, they're not six-year-olds.  They're teenagers.  They crack me up. :)

Buttons make everything cuter.

Alright.  So a little over a month ago, I designed this card:

Those button-looking things there at the bottom left of the card - those are actually images stamped onto cardstock, with liquid glass poured on them and hardened.  I usually loooove liquid glass - it really adds dimension to a card.  But I wanted to make 30 of these cards, and the thought of applying liquid glass to 90 of these stamped images, waiting for the liquid glass to dry, and cutting all of them out by hand made me think twice.

I was talking to my mom about this conundrum, and she made a fantastic suggestion - why not use green buttons instead?  She told me that, at a local craft/framing store called Porter's, there is this enormous metal bucket choc full of buttons.  Buttons of all shapes and sizes.  And you can fill up a little ziplock bag with these buttons for only $1.25. 

If you sew (and I don't, but I hang out with people who do), you know that buttons are extremely expensive.  Like, you can buy three buttons for $2.  Yikes.  And I wanted 90 buttons.  You do the math.  So I thought I'd pop on over to Porter's with kids in tow and check out the button bucket.

I didn't want to spend a million years matching each button to the exact color of green that I needed, so I just picked all of the green buttons I could find.  I kept Sadie and Micah happy by letting them fill up their own ziplock bag with buttons of their choice.  They wanted to choose really huge buttons and buttons that weren't normal circles.  That was their goal.  They had a blast picking through them and actually just digging their hands all around in there, honestly.  (When I was a kid, I used to love playing in the pinto beans bin at the grocery store.  I liked the feel of them spilling through my fingers.  I'm surprised my mom let me do that - it's not very sanitary!  Haha!)

I'd say I probably was able to stuff 150 buttons into my little ziplock bag.   Here is a smattering of samples that I brought home:

So then I picked out 90 that best matched the color of green on my card.  And it didn't matter to me that they were of varying sizes.  In my opinion, that's what makes them so cute.

After I attached the buttons to one card, I put it side-by-side to the sample card to compare and make sure I was making the right decision:

 Yeah.  I liked the buttons better.  So they stayed:

Ugh.  Now for the non-fun part - I reeeeally need to get my etsy up and running.  I get so overwhelmed by stuff like that.  And honestly, I wonder if there is even a market out there for homemade cards.  I kind of feel like the sending of cards is a bygone practice.  Only a few people still do it (and I am one of them).  Yet it would be fun to do something I like and make a teeny bit of money in the process, right?

Elder Sighting

My kids and I were in the car today when we saw two LDS missionaries waiting to cross the street.

Sadie smiled, waved to them, and yelled, "Hey, it's the dictionaries!!"

My New Chinese Dresses....ahhhh...Shirts.

Chinese fashion is really interesting.  The girls wear very uncomfortable three-inch heels everywhere.  Even on, like, walking tours.  Or to the grocery store.  Carrie Bradshaw has nothing on Chinese girls.

There are no bare midriffs.  No bikinis.  They don't like to show their stomachs at all.  Which I loved.  It was so refreshing not having that shoved in my face every second.  And they aren't really into showing cleavage.  (Um, a lot of them don't have cleavage.  Very flat-chested ladies over there.  I fit in quite well...)  Nothing is low-cut.

One thing they are comfortable in showing, though, is their legs.  Oh my.  Mini, mini, miniskirts.  Everywhere you look.

Ben went to the Silk Market in Beijing before he came home last month and got some clothes for me.  So sweet of him.  He bought me a couple of pairs of pants that say "XL" on them.  Um, they may have been extra large to the ladies over there, but to me, no.  I couldn't even get them up over my thighs.  I'm going to pretend that it's because my quads are so buff.

And Ben felt badly, but he really shouldn't.  I should be the one who feels badly, right?  I'm the one who has a little bit of a "weight problem," as Chris Farley would say.

Anywho, he bought me some shirts that actually did fit:

Aren't they fun?  So bright and vibrant.  I love me some bright prints.  They're extremely comfortable and cool.  They cover everything up top, so I don't have to wear a shirt underneath. (I HATE doing that. Especially in the heat of the summer.  Like I want to wear two fitted shirts layered one on top of the other...)  They're made of some kind of lycra.  They're flowey and wonderful.

Something funny about these shirts, though, is...they're not shirts.  Oh no.  They're dresses.  Dude, these hit me, like, right below the crotch.  At the longest.  I cannot figure out how a lady can wear this as a dress and not show everyone her underwear. 

And you may think, "Well, Chinese people are shorter, so the dresses are longer on them."  Not necessarily, my friends.  That really surprised me over there.  They're a myriad of heights, same as Americans.  Short, medium, tall.  There are a few chubby girls you see every now and then, but most of them are skinny.  And most of them have small feet.  I struggled to find shoes to fit my feet.  And, um, clothes to fit my body.

Two of these shirts came with ties that hit right beneath the chest, so that the dresses are kind of baby-dollish in style.  But I noticed that, when I wore the ties, I just looked pregnant.  For reals.  They looked like maternity shirts on me.  And I just couldn't handle looking pregnant when I'm really, really so not pregnant (and don't plan on getting pregnant ever again).  So I cut the little tie holders off the sides, threw away the ties, and now I just wear them more as tunics.  And I'm good with that.

She Did It!

Well, my Sadie Girl has officially figured out how to ride her bike.  She's immensely proud.  As she should be.  It was hard getting her to put the bike away and come to bed tonight.  She has big plans for tomorrow.

Two Very Important Announcements

1.  Tonight, Dylan got his blue stripe in Taekwondo.  A fantastic accomplishment.

 2.  I ate possibly the best Philly Cheesesteak sandwich I have ever injested in my life, courtesy of a little place called The Works.  Oh my gosh, was it ever good.  Their cottage fries...bestill my little heart.  And they even have a sandwich called Cheri's Choice, spelled just like my mom spells her name.  I had to take a picture of it for her:

Two Workout-Related Observations

1.  My cat loooves to come and love on me while I'm stretching.  She puts her butt in my face while I'm doing Shaun T.'s never-ending hip flexor stretches.  (That man loves his hip flexor stretches.)  She rolls around and tries to get me to rub her tummy when I'm doing that yoga-type pose where I always feel like I'm going to fall down.  She's so funny.  Such a lover.

2.  I jogged today, instead of doing my usual Insanity workout:

Yes, this is actually one of the things we do.  And when I say "we," I mean Shaun T. and his buff robot people in the background. I can manage to touch my knees, but, um, I don't look like that.

Anyways, after my jog, I was like, Dude, compared to Insanity, that was a cakewalk. 

I NEVER thought I would refer to jogging as a cakewalk.  Perspective.

A Little Story Involving Poop and a Filing Cabinet

So my mom and dad take turns coming to my house every Sunday during sacrament meeting.  My ward's church block starts at 1 and ends at 4, and by the time Primary is over for the kids, my youngest two have HAD it.  There is no way they're going to sit through sacrament meeting.  So one of my parents comes over.  I have the two oldest find a spot in the chapel, I run the youngest two home (I literally live two houses away from the church building), and then I join the two oldest and actually get something out of sacrament meeting.

Yesterday was a little weird - Dylan is sick, so I couldn't take him.  But I couldn't leave him here for two hours until my mom was able to come over.  And I couldn't take the kids to church, but not be there in case there was an incident where they needed me.  So we played hookey, all of us.  And then I just went to sacrament meeting while my mom watched the kids for me.  At least I got some kind of church in.  And it was a great meeting.  I needed it.

So this is what happened while I was at church, feeling the Spirit.

Gage pooped in his diaper.  He removed his shorts, but his diaper remained.  Apparently the diaper was loose, because one of the poop berries inside (his poop has been hard lately because he refuses to eat fruits or veggies) rolled out of his diaper onto the floor.  Gage picked up the poop berry and put it into the top drawer of the filing cabinet, along with a flip flop and a sippy cup.  (The bottom drawer of the cabinet is full of actual files.  The top drawer functions as a catch-all for staplers, paper hole punchers, scotch tape, etc.)

For some reason, Micah decided to open the filing cabinet's top drawer and fish around in there.  He found the poop berry.  Luckily, he didn't put it in his mouth.  Knowing him, it might have looked like an M&M and he might have eaten the dang thing.  He realized (maybe he smelled it?) that it was poop and brought it to my mom.

My mom smelled it and yes, indeed, it was poop.

The end.

The Temper Tantrum Series

Like the Rouen Cathedral Series by Monet.  But with a toddler.  He was mad at me because I wouldn't let him tip my glass of water over.

He wasn't mad because he wanted to drink out of my cup.  I would have let him do that.  And as you can see from his red mouth, he had just drunk a sippy cup full of red kool-aid.  So, no, thirst was not his motivation for reaching for the glass of water. He just wanted to tip that flippin' thing over.  And I wouldn't let him.  And that made him maaaaaaaaaad.

 He tried banging his head on the floor for emphasis, and then got even more mad.

 He needed some loves at this point:

It's funny having a kid that throws a really demonstrative tantrum.  Each of my toddlers has done different things - Dylan would scream and run to his room.  Sadie would stomp her foot and fold her arms and stare at me witheringly.  Micah does a whole lot of screaming and running frantically from room to room.  This is my first kid who actually gets onto the ground and rolls and kicks and cries and hits the floor and, apparently, bangs his head on the floor.  I actually get a kick out of it, like, Wait, this really happens?  I've only seen this stuff on TV!  I'm sure in awhile it will cease being amusing.  But for now, I get a good belly laugh out of it.

Our Bedtime Charts - So Far, So Bad

Kay.  So something I've learned with Dylan - and I don't know if it's every kid with ADHD that works this way or if it's just him - is that punishments don't motivate him as much as rewards do.  So, for instance, if he's behaving badly in school, and I say, "You're grounded for a week," then it's a week of torture for both of us.  He cries and whines and cajoles for THE ENTIRE WEEK.  And the bad behavior at school doesn't stop. 

What I learned way back in preschool was that something that works really well for him is rewards charts.  He was really struggling with his behavior at that point, and I knew that he loved going to this Chuck E. Cheese-type place in town.  So I made him a chart - it was a pizza with slices of pepperoni on it.  I told him that, every day that I didn't hear bad things about how he was in class, we could color a slice of pepperoni.  When all of the pepperoni slices got colored in, he got to go to Chuck E. Cheese's. 

And that's what did it for him - he was great clear until he colored all of his slices, and then the behavior had become sort of a habit by then, so his good behavior continued beyond then.  I didn't even have to make another pizza chart.

This school year, Dylan and his teacher really struggled with each other.  Yes, he has ADHD, but I'm telling you, when he's on his pills, which is always during school hours, he is fabulous.  Cooperative.  Fun without hurting people or running into things.  Kind.  Talking at a normal speed.  But I would get e-mails from her at least three times a week, asking if I had forgotten to give him his pills (I never had), telling me how hard he was being.  It was reeeeally frustrating.  I think she wanted him to be perfect.  And I know she had, like, 9 other ADHD kids in that class with him.  I'm sure she was tearing her hair out.

Things were really reaching a breaking point about one month before the end of school.  So Ben and I came up with this chart for Dylan:

(I ran out of stickers and had to do boring old normal faces.  And Dylan took over with the drawing of the faces, with my permission, of course.)

So what we did was this - if he was good for all 34 remaining days, he would get a nice Lego toy - valued at $50 or so - at the end of the school year.  If I got an e-mail saying he was bad, he could still work toward getting a Lego toy, but its value lessened to $45.  Second infraction - down to $35.  Third infraction - down to $20.  And fourth, no more toy.  This way, he was still getting consequences if he was not behaving himself, but it wasn't like, first bad day, no toy at all.  Then he would have nothing left to motivate him for the remaining days, if that makes sense.

It worked great.  If you can see, he only had two bad days.  He worked really hard to be good.  And in the end, he got a pretty decent Lego toy still:

Oh jeez.  That hair.... Don't worry - we cut off, like, four inches last month.  It looks fifteen times better.

So one of our family's many issues right now is bedtime.  Dylan really struggles to settle down at night - his pediatrician actually told us to get him some melatonin for bedtime, which helps, but he still struggles to wind down.  I put them down at 9 p.m., and he's not usually asleep until 11. 

The kid always decides right at 9 that he's totally hungry and needs a whole other meal.  Or he needs to watch another episode of Phineas and Ferb.  Or he needs to play on the Wii.  Or he needs to play on the ipad.  On and on and on.  I don't let him do any of these things, but he continues to fight and beg and ask.  One of his famous phrases during these nighttime struggles is, "Pleeeeease!  I'll do anything!"  He just kills me; I'm ready to strangle him every night. 

Sadie will usually do the "I'm hungry now that it's bedtime" thing, and then about one hour after I put them all to bed, she'll come out and be like, "I'm scared. I'm so scared.  Can I lie on the couch?"  Which I don't get.  Her room has a makeshift curtain (made from an old fleece blanket) covering her window.  But our living room has all exposed windows.  To me, that's way creepier.  She started doing this right after Ben left for China.  I'll be like, "No, you're okay; you're going to be fine; be brave..."  But then, like at 3:30 in the morning, she'll come down to my room, crying, saying she had a nightmare, and can she sleep on the couch?  And at 3:30 in the morning, I'm like, "Go for it, dude.  Turn on the TV yourself."

But you know, it's getting old.  These bedtime issues are just getting really, really old.  I'd like to not get woken up every morning at 3:30.  I'd like my children to go to bed at a decent hour and not have it be this huge fight every night.  So I made them Bed Charts:

Micah, strangely, is really good about going to bed and staying there.  Weird.  It's the ONE thing - and I mean the ONE thing - that he doesn't fight me on.  But I made him a chart because he said he wanted one.

So I have 30 days on there - I should have just had 30 blank boxes, because I don't necessarily need them to have 30 consecutive days of good bed behavior.  I just want 30 good days.  I made the charts in, like, five seconds.  And it looks like I'm going to have to add boxes to it, because dude.  They've maybe gotten half smiley faces and half frowney faces.  This is proving a harder thing to kick than school behavior.  Sadie's gotten a ton better about waking me in the middle of the night and wanting to sleep on the couch.  That behavior has all but stopped, which is fantastic.  But we're still dealing with the coming out 20 times to ask me questions or make excuses for why they can't stay in their beds. 

But I haven't given up just yet.  Like I said, Micah does great with bedtime.  So he keeps getting smiley faces.  When the other kids see him, after 30 smiley faces, bring home a toy, I think that will motivate them to want to do better so they can get their own toy.  We'll see.

Swimming Lesson Report Cards

Well, swimming lessons are done for the summer.  At least for us.  One session for all three is nearly 100 bucks, so...I'm good until next year. :)

I saw Dylan really improve.  He went from doggie paddling to doing the front crawl in the deep end.  He still doesn't breathe right - he just kind of throws his head from side to side without immersing it.  But he's getting there.  After the first time they swam across the deep end, when I went to gather the kids up, Dylan clapped his hands together and rubbed them, saying, "Welp, that's it.  I know how to swim.  We won't have to do swimming lessons again!"

Sorry, bud.  Now we have to work on perfecting it.

Dylie haaates bobbing:

I notice that he'll bob, come up, and pause and wipe his eyes.  And then bob, come up, and pause and wipe his eyes.  So funny.  He says that, when he bobs, water gets up his nose.  I don't know how he didn't get the memo about blowing out your nose when you're underwater.  I taught him about that vital principle, and we practiced a few times in the car.

Micah also improved a lot.  He went from screaming, crying, and trying to run away from the teacher to staring at me in terror during the whole class to going quietly and willingly with his teacher at the beginning of class. So that's good. 

They'll play ring around the rosies, and when they're supposed to all fall down, they put their faces in the water and blow bubbles.  He won't do that part.  He just kind of blows on the surface of the water, like he's trying to cool a cup of hot chocolate.

He knew I was taking his picture - so funny:

 This picture of Sadie is funny:

The one-eyed demon girl.

Sadie's doing great.  They practice the front stroke a lot, using noodles that the teacher drags while walking backwards.  They bob and practice kicking.  She doesn't really have any fear of the water, which is fantastic.

So how did they do?  Um.....  None of them passed their level.  Hahaha!

All three report cards said that the kids had to be more comfortable in the water.  And that's alright.  I had to keep reassuring Dylan that it's really okay if they didn't pass.  They improved a ton and got used to the water a bit more.  And that's what matters to me.

I'm gearing up...

 ...to make some more cards.  I have some paper on hand that I'm dying to use.  It will be perfect for what I want to make - Thinking of You-type cards.  I've needed some of those in the past few months. 

I was practically falling asleep while doing dishes late this afternoon, so I decided to get out my idea books and flip through them for inspiration/close my eyes and snooze off and on.  The kids decided to help me:

Can I just stop here and point out how cute my kids' feet are??  You can see Gage's little pudgy feet, and then in the bottom pic, you can see Micah's cute little feet on the bottom right hand side of the picture.  I'm obsessed with my kids' feet.  I could squish them all day.  I often ask Micah if I can have his toes for dessert.  He always giggles and says yes. :)

After the boys lost interest in the idea books, Sadie took them to her bedroom.  She's flipping through them right now.  They really are fun to look at.

After I drank a Coke and sufficiently woke up, we took a trip to the craft store to buy a few supplies that I needed:

And then we headed over to Staples.  I like using metal-rimmed tags on my cards sometimes, and the only place in town that has them is Staples, in their Martha Stewart Home Office section.  I'm wanting to use square metal-rimmed tags for this project, but unfortunately, they only had round ones.  I'm going to try to use these and see if I can get it to work out okay:

They're square-ish metallic stickers  We'll see how it goes.  I'm really excited - I loooove making cards.  I'll show you the finished results when I get done with them.

My friend, Jason, is an actor living in Japan.  He has this fan blog and he does giveaways on it every now and then.  He wants to do a giveaway with some of my homemade cards, so these will be nice to add to the other types that I have on hand.

Bloom where you're planted. And no matter how roughly you're planted.

Dude, I was in my yard for zillions of hours today.  And you can tell that by looking at me (I still have grass particles stuck to my face) and by looking at my kitchen.  It didn't get much attention today, unfortunately.

Kay.  So I had these flowers called bachelor buttons in one of my front flower beds.  I was initially tickled with them - they were sooo hardy.  And they grew at an astronomical rate.  And they looked cool and were a cool color when they bloomed.  But then I got upset with them, because they grew too tall and covered everything behind them.  And then they started to choke out all the other plants.  They were driving me nuts.

So I took them out.  I had plans to put them into the back flower bed.  But then my elderly neighbor came and talked to me for like seventeen hours.  And the plants lay there on their sides, totally wilting in the hot son.

To add to the indignity, I planted them in very inhospitable soil.  Very clayish and hard.  Nothing much is able to grow back there.  I should have mixed some potting soil in with the clay.  I should have given them a little haircut, too.  But I was out of potting soil, and by the time my neighbor stopped talking to me, sunlight was fading fast and I had to just hurry and dig holes, stick them in, fill in the holes, and get my butt inside.  I also should have immediately watered them, but I didn't.  Too late.  Too busy.

"If they die, oh well," I thought.  And they look HORRIBLE.  I still need to trim them down quite a bit.  They have wilted and died.  They have, as my dandelion weed killer bottle says, "experienced plant death."  And I was okay with it.  I don't like plants that behave like weeds.  It makes me mad.

So today, as I was mowing, spreading lawn food, watering my back plants, and then throwing away the little plastic pots from some callies I just planted out front (I'll take some pics of them tomorrow.  GOR-geous!!!), I saw one of my little bachelor buttons.  One that I supposed had experienced plant death. 

And the dang thing hasn't died.  Well, most of it has died.  But it has a little bit of new growth and even a bloom:

Sorry; it's hard to see the plant with all the stupid ivy and weeds crawling all around back there.  But the point is, this plant has risen from the ashes.  When I thought it was done for.

When I saw this plant, I got all Glen Rawson-ey.  For those of you who don't know, there's this dude named Glen Rawson.  He is kind of a modern parable-writer, really.  He sees these situations in his life, and he goes, "This compares to the gospel..." and then explains the correlation.  And, um....well, I'm not a big fan of him.  Which is really bad of me.  I mean, here he is, talking about the gospel, which, obviously, I LOVE.  And making really great comparisons.  I guess it's his delivery that kind of gets to me.  It strikes me as being really cheesy.  I have a very, very low tolerance to cheesiness.  So it's hard for me to listen when his stuff comes on the local radio station's Sounds of Sunday program.  It's actually just hard for me to listen to Sounds of Sunday, period.  Because a lot of songs on there can be cheesy, too.  Just give me hymns, and I'm good.

Sorry; I'm irreverent.  It's an issue.  I'm working on it.

So back to my story.  I waxed Glen Rawson-ey for a moment.  And I thought about my situation.  I've had a helluva hard week.  One of those I-want-to-wilt-and-turn-grey-and-lie-down-and-experience-plant-death weeks.  But if this little guy can withstand all that I've put him through and still bloom, I can go through the things I'm going through and still bloom.  I can thrust my roots into this nasty clayish soil I'm in right now and just hang on and push through and emerge more spiritually beautiful.

I know, cheesy right?  I'd make Glen proud.  And Nicholas Sparks.  He's cheesy, too.  I'm just sayin'.

A Plumage Play-by-Play

So we were walking through the parking lot at the swimming place today.  Dylan saw a feather lying on the ground.

Nobody was reaching for it or even heading toward it, but Dylan is a bit overly concerned about certain things.  Bugs.  Toys Gage could choke on. [Even if the toy is a large block that Gage can't fit into his mouth, Dylan is worried about it.]  And germy things. 

So he springs toward the feather, carefully points at it with his toe, and says in his super speedy way (before his ADHD pills are in his system, he talks so fast that I can't even understand him sometimes), "Don'ttouchthisfeatheryouguys.  It'sgermy.  It'sagermyfeather."

Sadie, who HATES mornings and is extremely grumpy about having to take swimming lessons so early, muttered, "YOU'RE a germy feather..."

Dylan looked at her and said, "What does that even mean??"

It was super funny.