The Monday before Christmas, DH took the day off of work to try and get some things done around the house. My parents were able to come over in the afternoon and they watched the kids for us while DH and I went to see Tron at the movie theater (awesome special effects, ending was a little disappointing). They also came over on Tuesday so I could get some things done and my mom helped sew MJ's Christmas stocking.
On Christmas eve, my parents came over for dinner and then we decorated Christmas cookies. After that the kids took turns performing Christmas songs - M&M, Luke, and Blondie on the piano; Kitty and Kay sang; Luke on the recorder. Then we sang some Christmas songs and read and talked about the Christmas story from the scriptures. Afterwards the kids opened up new pajamas to wear to bed.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Christmas Week
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Snowball effect
Cleaning out the toy room because of the mice led to one thing after another. We had been talking for some time about rearranging the bedroom assignments since MJ was born. After thinking through some different configurations we finally decided to move Luke down to the toy room. Since the room was now mostly gutted and scrubbed clean, DH took the opportunity to move Luke's bed down to the room and he started sleeping there Sunday night (the 19th). We gradually moved his dresser and bookcase over the next couple of days and he moved down his toys and clothes.
The next step we had to do was to move the bunk beds from M&M and Blondie's room up to Luke's old room. That has now become the room for Blondie and Kitty. M&M now has her own room in the basement (which we had to buy a new twin bed for) and Kay and MJ will be in a room together once we get some more furniture to complete all the moving. Right now we are in the market for a nice, sturdy chest of drawers for Blondie and Kitty's room. Blondie's clothes are currently sitting in boxes in her closet and her winter clothes are still in the dresser in M&M's room. Kitty has some of her clothes in Kay's room and the rest are in boxes as well. We have moved Kay to the toddler bed, but right now the crib is full of stuff that I haven't made a place for yet so MJ is still sleeping in our bedroom.
One of the biggest problem that we are dealing with right now is where to put all of the toys that used to be in the toy room. We have tried to disburse them between the bedrooms, but there are still some things that haven't found a home yet. Another problem we are dealing with is what to do with all of my sewing and craft supplies that were also in what is now Luke's room. I still have most of my things in the storage cabinet in his room and the plan right now is to move some of it down to M&M's room once we have finished moving Blondie's things out. The other thing we would like to do is to take the storage cabinet out of Luke's room and replace it with an actual closet.
So, in addition to all of the busyness that surrounds Christmastime anyways, we have complicated our lives even more than usual right now. All of the bedrooms in our house are currently in a state of change, but once we get them finalized a little more I will try to post some pictures of them. This has been one of the reasons that I have gotten so far behind in my blogging. Hopefully I can get caught back up here in the next couple of weeks (in addition to compiling and printing a new family calendar for my family). :)
Christmas Cookies
Friday, December 24, 2010
I actually had some time to make and decorate Christmas cookies with the kids this year. We made them on Christmas eve and my parents helped decorate them that evening when they came over. Kay had a lot of fun cutting out the cookies! It's nice that the kids are getting a little older so they can help out more with the actual baking part too.
Some of M&M's creations:
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Christmas card photo
If I had found some time to send out Christmas cards this year, this would have been the photo I would have used:
Oh, well. Maybe I'll have better luck next year... (At least it's a good picture.)
M&M vs the cheese grater
December 18th, 2010
As if we weren't already having enough fun on the Saturday before Christmas (yes, the same day the mouse was spotted), M&M decided to add a trip to urgent care to our list of things to do. After helping to organize the mess in the family room now, I headed up to the kitchen to get some dinner made. I asked M&M if she could come help me and I set her to the task of grating some cheese. So she was standing at the counter grating the cheese when her hand slipped and she immediately yelled out and grabbed at her hand. She had been pressing so hard on the grater that when her hand slipped, her finger got sliced by the grater - two deep cuts right on the knuckle of her right hand index finger. I took her upstairs to the bathroom and had her hold a wet washcloth on it while DH and I decided what to do with her. I think that if the cut had been anywhere else on her hand then we would have just bandaged her up at home, but since it was on the knuckle of the index finger of her dominate hand and the cuts looked pretty deep we decided to have DH take her in to the urgent care clinic.
M&M ended up getting 4 stitches in her finger and then they wrapped it up in a splint to prevent her from bending the finger and reopening the wound. They called it a double flap laceration and said that there was a chance that the skin between the two cuts would die and fall off - luckily that didn't happen. She had to keep the stitches in for a week. This was M&M's first experience with stitches and DH said she did really well while they were giving them to her. The cuts were apparently bleeding so much while they were trying to put the stitches in that they had to put a temporary tourniquet on her finger to stop the bleeding so they could see what they were doing. After she got home they wanted her to re-bandage the finger after waiting an hour so I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures. She was standing up in the bathroom while I was taking the pictures and she started to feel light-headed so I made her sit down right away. I've seen more people faint lately than I have in a long time!
In some ways it turned out to be perfect timing for this injury because her band concert had already taken place the week before and she only had three days of school left before Christmas break. It's amazing how much we take for granted using a finger though. M&M couldn't play the flute or piano (at least not very easily) and she had a hard time doing simple things like writing and fixing her hair! Even more fun was the story that she got to tell to everyone that saw her - "I cut my finger on a cheese grater"!! Several people made the comment to her, "Wow! That must have been one sharp cheese grater!"
M&M's finger has healed up nicely. This picture was taken on Saturday, January 8th, 2011 - 3 weeks after the accident.
And we bought a new grater for Christmas - one that is M&M-proof:
More car fun!
The Tuesday before the mouse sighting, I was driving around town running some errands in the morning when all of a sudden the van started making horrible grinding noises whenever I would step on the brakes. So much so that I ended up calling and canceling M&M's piano lesson and Luke and I walked to my den leader partner's house for cub scouts that afternoon. I called DH at work when I first heard the noise and he was able to arrange things at work so he could stay home the next day to work on the car. Apparently the brake pads were wearing very unevenly and the side that had the piece that makes the brakes squeal when they are getting worn was hardly worn at all. DH ended up having to get the rotors resurfaced again (this happened to us the last time as well) and then he was able to change the brake pads too. It's nice having a husband who can do work like this on the cars to help save us some money!
Family of 8 times 2
**CAUTION: This post may be disturbing to some readers. Proceed with caution!
December 18th, 2010
The Saturday before Christmas I told the kids that they really needed to clean up the sewing/toy room or Santa was not going to be bringing any presents this year. It had been a long time since the room had really been cleaned so it was a disaster. While the kids were cleaning, I was taking the kids out one at a time to shop for their secret sibling gift. I started with taking Blondie before lunch because she had been extra helpful that morning and had even shoveled the driveway without being asked.
After we returned from some stores, we ate lunch and then I took M&M to the store. As we were leaving the store to come home I got a call on my cell phone from home (which I of course didn't hear ring). So I quickly called back home when I noticed I had missed the call and Luke told me that while they were cleaning the toy room he and Blondie saw a mouse run across the floor along the wall! They quickly went to tell their dad and he found some mouse droppings along the floor over there as well as along the window sill in that room. He tried to find the mouse but the kids didn't stick around to watch it after they saw it so he didn't know where it had run to. When I got home a few minutes later DH had the kids removing everything from the room and piling it up in the family room while he searched for more mouse signs and possibly where it came from. He ended up finding some signs in the bathroom off the laundry room and then he found some in the utility/storage room downstairs. I bought some traps later that night and as of last week we have managed to get rid of eight mice!! (So apparently we have been housing twice as many in our home than we thought.) :P We think they have been living under the stairs off of the storage room. All of the mice that we caught were caught in the storage room near those stairs. It has been almost a week now since we caught the last one so we are hopeful that that is it.
Now we just wish we knew how they got into the house so we can prevent it from happening again! Apparently there are mice in homes all throughout the neighborhood so we are definitely not alone. A couple of years after we moved in some people in the neighborhood were talking about mice in their homes and asked me if we had any - which we didn't (or at least didn't know about). Our neighborhood is surrounded by open fields and a gully so the field mice are definitely all around us. I have seen them before in our vegetable garden, but it is a totally different thing to have them in your house!! The first night after the kids saw the mouse in the toy room I got up to feed MJ in the middle of the night and I kept hearing little noises throughout the house, wondering if it was a mouse I heard scurrying around! Luckily we have seen no signs anywhere else in the house and since we cleaned up the toy room that first day, we haven't seen any more signs of them in that room either.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Sounds of the Season - 2nd night performance
The concert on the first night went pretty smoothly without any big issues, but the second night was a different story. It started out with one of the cello players (high school age) dropping her cello in the parking lot and it broke. I'm not sure the extent of the damage but I know it was unplayable. Luckily the custodians were able to find a school cello from the orchestra room that she used for the concert.
I'm not sure if it was warmer than normal up on the stage where the choir was, but we had one lady almost pass out at the end of the first group of choir numbers. Luckily she sat down when she started feeling faint and some of the choir members helped her off the stage. Then during the second group of songs, right in the middle of the song, one of the bass singers passed out. He was a big guy standing about halfway up the risers and he just fell straight forward, hit his head on a chair in the front row of the choir and landed flat on his face on the floor. I was sitting just in front of where he landed and I was just playing along during the song when I all of a sudden heard a loud crash. I quickly turned and saw what had happened. Some of the men around him quickly got down to him and turned him over onto his back. He was out cold and his nose and lip were bleeding. He finally came to but he stayed there on the ground with his legs up on the risers until the choir was done with the second group of songs. During this time the bassoon player went over to take a look at him (he is an ear, nose and throat doctor). The guy ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital and he had a broken nose and needed stitches in his lip where his teeth cut into it. The whole time I kept wishing that there was something that I could do to help, but there were plenty of people around him who were in a better position and more able to help him than I was. And like it or not, the performance went on despite what happened.
Apparently the man had made some comment to some other choir members that evening that he wasn't feeling 100%, but he was a soloist in one of the first songs and he had a lot of family members there that night to hear him perform. According to my mom who sings with a women's group led by the same choral director, the man told the director that he is planning on returning next year to sing again! It was definitely a performance that I will not forget. (I asked my mom later if anyone ever passed out while singing with the Mormon Choir of Washington that she sang with for more than 20 years out in the D.C. area and she said no. And their concerts were much longer with no sitting breaks in between.) We also had a lady pass on out the night of the dress rehearsal, but luckily it was when the choir was stepping down off the risers and the people around her managed to catch her before she fell - she kind of slumped down where she was standing.
Sounds of the Season 2010 - Concert week
December 6-11, 2010
The week of the concerts for Sounds of the Season is always crazy - but even more so when there is a baby involved. The week of the concert we had a 4-hour dress rehearsal on Thursday and then concerts on Friday and Saturday. At first we had talked about having M&M and Luke come to the first concert and then DH would come the second night with Blondie and Kitty, leaving M&M and Luke to babysit MJ and Kay. Well, we ended up not doing that because MJ had been such a pill during the dress rehearsal and the first concert that DH wasn't sure if M&M would be able to handle her alright. M&M expressed an interest in attending the concert again the second night so I brought her with Blondie and Kitty (who also sat with my sister and her family).
This year the oboe player had been asked to play a couple of solo numbers in-between some of the choral numbers, but she didn't feel comfortable doing solos so she asked me if I would be willing to play in a quintet with her and her husband (who plays bassoon). We ended up just making it a trio since we couldn't find a clarinet or french horn player. The oboe player had some choral music that she thought she could arrange for our trio group so I went to her house one evening to run through a couple of numbers. We ended up picking two songs: What Child is This? and We Need a Little Christmas. This was several weeks before the concert so I thought I would be getting the music shortly after that and we would get together at least once or twice to run through everything. Well, I ended up getting my part of the music Wednesday afternoon. The first time we were able to run through it was during the dress rehearsal and we were even making changes to it the night of the first performance. Talk about crazy! Luckily the music was fairly easy and we are all pretty competent players. I think it turned out rather well. I just received a DVD recording of the concert so when DH has a moment I will try and put up a video for those that are interested. We also did a number this year that was just for the orchestra members. That made it a little nicer for those of us involved.
