Bobby's Sunday Summary

Most of this week was not too out of the ordinary. Our car started making some noises this week so we took it to the repair shop and got it fixed. We needed a brake pad and part of the brake itself to be replaced. It really wasn’t that bad at all especially because a friend loaned us a car to use while it was being fixed.

We also have had a little bit of stress with work. They have announced more layoffs. They say it will happen right after Thanksgiving. I am not sure exactly when but I am not too nervous about it. I think we will make it through without too many problems.

On a happier note Saturday was a very busy day, especially for Alice. Her cousin had his birthday party and it was a wild one. They had pizza making,

toys, and friends. We brought over our bounce house, which was fun for about 10 min, and then something even more fun took over.

Running around the park area behind the apartment, picking up leaves, throwing them down a drainage pipe, at each other, and at me. As this one is coming to do. Alice had a wonderful time. On the ride home we had to talk to her the whole way to keep her from falling asleep so we could change her diaper before a 2-hour nap.

The afternoon was busy. We had a lot of grocery shopping to do and we had to get ready for another party that night. This party was a Halloween party. At this party they had a doughnut eating contest.

[flv width="400" height="300"]http://evansfamily.powweb.com/movies/2008/Doughnut_eating.flv[/flv]

They had bobbing for apples,

pumpkin bowling (the ball is a medium sized pumpkin),

party games (I was a “bag of leaves” as the sign on my back stated and some how had to guess that with yes or no questions). Alice got to play all of the games. What’s more they had two babies there for Alice to “play” with, and candy. She was happy and wired until two hours past her bedtime, with no meltdown at all. Even when the babies lost it and needed to leave the room, she was calm and collected.

Susan's Addendum

My favorite parts of the day include, but are not limited to:

• Arriving 30 minutes early for a party because I failed to look at the time on the invitation. Oops.

• Little kids dancing

• Seeing the pure delight in those kids' faces as they threw wet leaves at each other.

• Preparing and delivering dinner with three good friends to 25 people.

• Watching Alice "help" her friend Spencer B (aka "Bonker") fingerwalk. It looked a bit like a ballroom dance lesson to me and Spencer wasn't very confident in his teacher.

• Winning the Ladies' Divisions of both the doughnut eating contest (thanks to Nathan J for the winning strategy there) and the Apple Bobbing contest (yes, it was hose water in a pool outside in the middle of October...bobbing rocks!). Rachel would be proud :)

Correction to "The Opera!" Post

Dude, it's been a while since I've seen a live opera...at LEAST seven years.

In my blog entry entitled "The Opera!" I fused two very different tragic romance stories into one story. Oops. The truth is, I love the music from "La Traviata," and I love the story of "Tosca". It is the tragic ending of Tosca that depicts "the subtle intrigue, the blossoming romance, and the bitter deception that culminates in the most striking finale I’ve ever witnessed on the stage."

Sorry to confuse you opera fans out there. It's clear my passion for the art outweighs my training in it :)

Bep, Nurn, Mump Mump

I was raking the leaves in our front yard this afternoon when Alice asked to "bep" me. I handed her the rake and she moved some leaves around. Soon she discovered it was more fun to crunch and jump in the pile than it was to wrangle the rake. I kept raking, though, and she came back to me every few minutes asking for her own "nurn" with the rake.

It came time to fill the leaf bags and she wanted to "bep" there too. She was too short to reach the top of the leaf bag, so I plopped her into one of the half-filled bags and told her to smash the leaves down. She proceeded to "mump mump" as if she were in the bounce house. Then we took a few more "nurns" with the rake until she wanted to "min." I grabbed her ankles and spun her around and around and around 'till we were both dizzy.

Then she asked for a ride in the "crowlr" so we took the bike trailer out for a spin. When we got back, she asked for a "nack" and I didn't understand her right away. It's not a word she uses often and there isn't a convenient sign for it. She kept saying it louder and closer to me until I finally asked her to show me. She took me inside, got up into a chair at the table, sat down, looked me straight in the eye, and said "nack." Still not completely comprehending her, I asked, "Nack?" She sighed, put her fingers to her mouth and said "ee."

Ah! I gotcha!

When Bobby got home from work today she couldn't get enough of him. They played and played and played. She did everything he asked her to do...even a "niss" full on the lips to wake me from my pretend sleep. After all her kissing practice with a certain Nehnehr (aka Spencer), and her baby doll Nehnehr, her lips-eye coordination is just about 100% accurate. She even times her smacky noise just right so it comes just as she's pulling away.

Oh my.

Cold Frame in situ

Here it is! My delightful cold frame in its natural habitat! It looked a lot better when Denise assembled it at her house, but it wouldn't fit in my car without some disassembly. My handiwork (and confidence with power tools, and experience with larger-frame construction) is lacking, but apparently sufficient. The lids are composed of 2x2's with a layer of sheet plastic affixed on top and bottom (thus "double-paned"). They are hinged to the back with door hinges and extra hinges have been constructed into the main frame for easy storage during the regular growing season. The back is 16 inches tall and the front is 12 inches tall. Alice approves.

First Haircut...sort of

I cut Alice's hair in the back so that it was all one length. Now it accentuates her round little noggin. I like it. A lot. Now when people mistake her for a boy, they won't mistake her for a SHAGGY boy :)

BEFORE:

AFTER:

The little handful of hair I cut off was so soft and fine that I actually hesitated throwing it away. That sudden attachment to something so seemingly insignificant caught me off guard. I wasn't sure what to do with it instead, but I was pretty sure NO ONE would, so I put it in the trash anyway. Now, every time I go into the bathroom I peek at the hair and remember how warm and soft it was when I first cut it off.

Sheesh. Being a mom sure makes you squishier and harder at the same time.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Susan already posted a quite a bit for this week on the blog.  For the most part she covered just about everything, except for one event.  On Monday we did pumpkin carving with Bill and Kristin.  The batteries for our camera were dead so Susan grabbed the camcorder, which also will do pictures.  She snapped a few pictures with it, but also recorded a couple of movies.  Unfortunately, we have not been able to download the movies off of it because of some computer issues.  But we do have the pictures.

It was a lot of fun to carve it.  The pumpkin weighed more than Alice did.  We kept it inside the first night, but by Tuesday it had already started to go moldy.  We put it outside and the squirrels got it.

At least the squirrels are not eating the moldy parts I don’t really want sick squirrels around my house.

Yesterday we drove to St. Louis to go to the temple.  Alice had a good time for most of it, but was getting bored about an hour from home.  We had the camera, and let her play a bit, she got a lot of really good pictures, but I have included only one of them.

This is one of the few you can actually tell what it is (our car from the back seat if you couldn’t guess).

Negangard Pumpkin Patch

Bug Hater?

I love bug paraphernalia. It's cool. I love bug prints on fabric, bug art, rubber bugs, bug stickers, movies about bugs, so on and so forth. The bugs themselves are cool (dragonflies, house flies, beetles, and praying mantises are especially cool) but the IMAGE of bugs is even more appealing to me.

Spiders are NOT cool. Ever.

I simply assumed that my love for all things buggy would rub off on the babe. Nope. She screams at flies and gnats and mosquitoes and ants and ladybugs. She tries to kill them all, or re-kill them. She used my shoe to put a sickly earwig out of his misery this morning.

I found Alice the other day shrieking in the garage, pointing and dancing at a smooshed cricket. Her signs and cries of "buh, buh" somehow made me think she was sad it was dead. Silly me, I quickly pointed out another cricket that was very much alive. Alice lost it! She ran away screaming and crying, then came back trying to STOMP on it. I told her not to kill an innocent bug and that I would take it outside.

I scooped the cricket into a cup and took it around the back of the house to let it go. When I got back, I found Alice with my rolling pin attempting to roll over the first cricket's carcass.

Oh, little girl, will I ever explain to you that your room is actually decorated in dragonflies, not "flowers" as you have so innocently assumed?

What a week!

Just a few pictures from our crazy-fun week.

Alice playing in her red "tuck" on a day when clothes just weren't on the agenda. This girl hates to get dressed, though she's quite practical when it comes to protecting her feet.

Close-up of the babe!

Her first skinned knee. She didn't cry a whit, but she's been trying to wipe the scab off ever since:

Friday evening we set up the bounce house. I stumbled upon one at a garage sale last week. It will be a perfect activity to break up the winter doldrums. It's small enough to fit in our living room or our garage, yet large enough to accommodate 3-4 toddlers and/or preschoolers at once. We had the Jarvies over for dinner to celebrate Marianne's birthday. Alice loved jumping around and Spencer loved smashing his face against the mesh.

Saturday morning, a friend from our church put on a tour of the Dairy Cattle Research Facility at the U of I. He's working on a PhD, but we were all interested in the cows. I was shocked to realize how big Holsteins really are (Alice is as tall as their heads are long) and that each cow has a name. I found Suzanne, but couldn't identify an Alice in time. The adults were a little shy. The calves were curious.

Alice's 3 favorite things about the dairy facility tour: 1) the crab apples on the ground out front, 2) the water buckets in the calves' pens, and 3) the fountain of urine she witnessed streaming from a cow's rear end.

And finally, a little movie clip from last weekend. Alice and her cousin Will play around after a Sunday brunch with family:

[flv width="400" height="300"]http://evansfamily.powweb.com/movies/2008/AliceWillCars.flv[/flv]

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was a somewhat busy week, but a good one. The week was spent finishing up one project and starting on another. I am quite happy with how the first project turned out. We have been working on a replacement for an application that crunches lots and lots of data. Before it took at least 4 hours to run. The guys who wanted the project done said it would really be great if we could cut it down to 40 min. We hit 30 min and I am sure with a bit more work we can get it down below 20. Luckily, we are just putting it on hold and will come back to it, so we can. OK enough about work.

The weekend was a busy one. Susan is writing about part of it on the blog so stay tuned for that. I will fill in what we negotiated that she is not going to cover, so I could. Saturday we went to a cider pressing party. A friend of ours has a lot of land with fruit trees. Another friend recently gave them a cider press so they threw a dessert party. We had apple cider doughnuts, pumpkin cake, a frozen fluffy strawberry dessert thingy, apples with caramelly dip, trail mix, and of course apple cider we pressed ourselves. It was a lot of fun.

Alice even enjoyed it a lot too. She got to eat lots of yummy things and even get in a game of foosball with a friend.

[flv width="400" height="300"]http://evansfamily.powweb.com/movies/2008/foosball.flv[/flv]

New Projects

A few new projects in the works this Fall. I sure love projects, especially food-related ones.

1. Cold Frame in the garden: this is a scaled down greenhouse-like box that sits over the ground. It moderates the winter temps a bit so you can grow some cold-hardy veggies through the winter. I'll be experimenting with spinach, kale, and leaf lettuce this year. Maybe I'll have grown a salad by Thanksgiving, eh? The chard in my regular garden bed is also an experiment this year...will it grow through the snow? Can't wait to see. My friend Denise has all the tools and construction know-how to build the frame itself (lucky me!) so I get to learn about lumber, hinges, plexiglass, and framing DURING the project, not before. That means I get the cold frame 2 years ahead of schedule ;)

2. Root Cellar: it turns out my garage maintains a pretty "moderate" temperature throughout the winter. I'll be storing a few root veggies in there this year to see if it's worth the hassle. Different root veggies have different storage needs (temp, humidity, grouping, etc.), but I'm hoping it's not as complex as the books make it out to be. Worst case scenario: rotten veggies. Best case scenario: eventually growing and storing my own root veggies to enjoy all winter! How cool is THAT?!

3. Remodeling our bathroom: pricer than the other two projects. More complex, too. I'm REALLY nervous about this one, but motivated. I think. Anyone ever replaced a tub before? Yikes. Maybe I can fly my parents out sometime to help me...

The Opera!

I am *this* close to making a spangly paper chain counting down the days to November 22nd!

My friend Julia invited me to see Madame Butterfly with her next month! I have been inwardly giddy with anticipation ever since! May I take a blog entry to express to you how MUCH I love a good, tragic opera? Ahhhhhh, so dramatic! My first live opera was La Boheme, thanks to my sister Heidi asking if her little sister could tag along with her high school class. When those trumpets sounded the tragic discovery of Mimi's death, my heart broke into a million pieces. I had NO IDEA music could pierce a person like that. I've been hooked ever since.

Heidi and I later purchased season passes to the opera series held at the Capitol Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah. What a treat! I soon learned that not all opera is equally good and that I REALLY like the romantic tragedies best. My ultimate favorites being La Traviata and Madame Butterfly.

I actually have a cassette tape of "Highlights from La Traviata" that I've blasted during late nights at the lab and while painting the nursery in anticipation of Alice's arrival. In utero, Alice heard me narrate the subtle intrigue, the blossoming romance, and the bitter deception that culminates in the most striking finale I've ever witnessed on the stage.

*sigh*

I should listen to that again today.

Julia introduced me to the Merry Widow, which is the only operatic comedy I've attached myself to so far. Thanks, Julia. I'm sure there are more out there I will come to appreciate in time :)

On a semi-related side note:

I remember my freshman honors English teacher in high school taking our class to an opera once. She told us quite solemnly that "It's important to appreciate the arts young, for YOU will grow up to be the people attending these events regularly." At the time, I thought she meant we "honor students" would grow up to be the affluent upper-crust of our society, mingling at tea parties and schmoozing with political and economic big wigs at these artsy functions. That's not what she meant at all, of course, but I didn't consciously realize that until...uh...well...this second. Hm.

Now what would a Madame Butterfly paper chain look like?!

Few Days with a Friend

It's actually embarrassing to see Bobby get two blog entries in a row. It means I've been a slacker. I COULD change the time stamp on this entry to throw it between his two, but then people wouldn't see it and that's no fun.

As Bobby mentioned in his most recent post, Alice and I spent a few days last week with my friend Denise and her family in Effingham. Unlike our farm-locked Chambana, Effingham has a few hills and wooded areas. I don't miss the Rocky Mountains for a moment, but those woods...well...I could have built a home right there. We biked out to the country one afternoon. Denise had her 3-year-old on the back of her bike, her 5-year-old and Alice in a trailer behind her (we estimated about 100 pounds of cargo there), and she was STILL able to keep up with her 2 older boys riding up ahead AND maintain a regular conversation with me the whole time. Wow. I still can't believe it. We didn't have a camera at the time or I would have recorded such a monumental feat.

Alice enjoyed the abundance of new toys to play with, including a fancy trampoline in the backyard. The static made her hair stand on end:

We visited a playground another day where Kelsey (5 years old) showed Alice how to do everything. Here are the two of them on the merry-go-round:

Kelsey was quite attentive to Alice the whole trip, carrying her around, playing games with her, helping her ride bikes, read books, and climb up to the table for food. Alice wasn't sure what to think about all the attention at first, but suddenly and sharply decided on Day 2 that she had had enough. She screamed whenever Kelsey spoke to her. It made Kelsey cry. I felt SO bad for Kelsey. I didn't really know what to do besides teach Alice not to scream, then apologize to Kelsey for Alice's sudden grumpy behavior. Human relationships are hard work at ANY age.

And here is a picture of Alice going down the twisty slide by herself:

This girl has yet to find a slide she can't handle. Fearless, even when she lands face first on the ground. The noise of the vacuum sends her into a panic, but a tumble in the dirt makes her laugh half the time.

Later, she was climbing a rung ladder when her foot slipped and she hit her face. Her teeth cut the inside of her bottom lip a bit, leading to bleeding and some eating issues over the next couple days. Any tips for getting blood out of kids' clothes?

We made some peach freezer jam, too:

Alice is a SERIOUS kitchen helper these days. If I so much as stand at the counter for longer than 2 seconds, she's pushing a chair up beside me. She's getting better at scooping and dumping ingredients, but she has this habit of eventually tasting everything she scoops. She was measuring the finished jam into containers really well until she licked her fingers. Then all she wanted to do was lick the scoop clean.

Cody (3 years old) showed Alice the joy of eating cereal straight from the box and head-banging to Crazy Frog:

[flv width="400" height="300"]http://evansfamily.powweb.com/movies/2008/MVI_6459.flv[/flv]

Denise and I stayed up late every night. We went through photo albums, played around on the computer, and talked about anything and everything until our tired brains turned to mush. It was the kind of stuff I did in college with my roommates, but I couldn't have appreciated it back then as much as I do now :)

Time off is soooooo sweet, even when you have to be the mom again starting at 6am the next day.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

Nothing too much happened to me this week.  About a month ago we all thought that I would be going to California for work this week.  But one of the people that we were going to go out to see had a conflict this week so it was canceled. However, Susan had already set up a play week with a friend in Effingham for the week.  So, I was by myself most of the time.  It wasn’t that bad, but it was a little lonely.  It has been nice having them back though.  Yesterday we ran some errands, including going to a new grocery store that just opened up a little ways from here.  The store has a kind of odd layout.  It is a super store with groceries and everything else, but the groceries are in a giant C shape, with other stuff in the middle.  We were walking up a frozen food aisle when at the end Alice suddenly stopped in her tacks.  Her mouth hung open and her hand shot up, then she ran over the wall of aquarium fishes for sale.  She would have spent all afternoon staring at them if we let her.  Other then that the week was rather uneventful for me.  Perhaps Susan will post some of the many pictures she has from her week.