Strange Things My Children Do in Their Sleep

WARNING--This entry is CHOCK FULL of photos and might take a while to load. My apologies, and this caveat: It's worth the wait. What? My kids are cute. Of course you want to see pictures of them!

First, we have Miss Bubbly post-current-haircut. I believe she's attempting to channel her Aunt EC, and doing a mighty fine job of it as well. The new haircut is due to her tender scalp, fine hair, and screaming fits anytime I come near her with a hairbrush. So far, so good.


Here's a priceless, all too rare moment: The girls are reading happily together. I also recommend the Spot series of children's books, by Eric Hill. Easy reads, flaps to lift and surprise, and easily memorized by big sisters who want to "read" to their younger siblings.
And now to the point of this entry:
Below you see the product of years of thought and about a week's execution. The t-shirts are all ones that The Hub or I have worn to death, but loved for what was on them. So we cut them up and I decided to make a quilt.

Ha Ha Ha.

You see, I've only made one baby-sized quilt before, when I was a teenager, and helped tie a few large ones. But I discovered some flat batting, meant for sewn quilts instead of tied quilts, and thought that it would be so easy that I could do a king-sized one.

Ha Ha HA!

But I persevered with the easiest quilt design known to mankind, and here is the result. It's not the prettiest, it's far from perfect, but it's done and I like it well enough, so it stays. (The quilt is folded into quarters in the picture, so you'll have to use your imagination. I do too--we don't have anywhere in the apartment to spread it out to its full size.)


Anyway, quilts mean sleep, right? Right. So now we come to a collection of photos of my children in strange positions as they snooze. Our camera has a superb flash--bright enough to make it look like daylight in the darkest room, but quick enough not to wake sleeping children. Thus the reason we have so many pictures of dreamland-bound offspring.

First, The Eldest as a wee infant. It was the first time I caught her sleeping with her bottom in the air.

The Eldest again, not long after we moved her into her big-girl bed. She'd had a cold--thus the mist from the cold-mist humidifier. And there's a brown footstool next to her bed. She must have thought it was an extension of her bed in her sleep and traveled to this new position.

In the next two pictures, you might think I'm torturing my napping offspring, but really, she tended to fall asleep that way and THEN I took her picture. I call it her "no autographs, please" pose.


This is from just before The Eldest dropped naps entirely. She wouldn't just go to sleep, so I let her read in bed. As a result, books replaced stuffed animals as her comfort item of choice for a while.

Miss Bubbly has always been a very relaxed sleeper.

Remember the moving to the big-girl bed adjustment? Here's a reprise.

On the way home from Christmas at Omay's in 2006. Miss Bubbly hadn't napped that day--I think we ended up putting her to bed in the dress.
Here's our last picture, the one that inspired the rest of the entry. A few weeks ago, when we went in to check on the girls, we found The Eldest in this position. It still makes me laugh when I look at it. Who holds up a pillow while they're SLEEPING?

So there's your entertainment for the week. Totally worth the loading time, wasn't it?

I thought I would give an update on myself

By some miracle I got out of class early this morning, so I thought I would relieve The Momma of the responsibility of doing the latest post.

I'm sure most of you who care know that I am attending Arizona State University, working on a Master's degree in Counseling. Just yesterday I started what should be my final semester. Since August I have been fulfilling my internship requirement at a local hospital providing counseling and support services to cancer patients and their families. I really enjoy it.

Just so that you can all feel sympathy for The Momma, I'll tell you that I'll be taking five classes this semester, (three are in the evening) plus spending 18-20 hours at my internship. On top of that my internship coordinator has recruited me to play in a company softball tournament, and has us practicing every Saturday morning. Fortunately we have a bishop who has made it his business to be aware of all the demands on my time, and has provided callings for me that require a minimum amount of time outside of church.

In addition to that I will soon start preparing myself for two cumulative exams that I need to take before graduating. One is an exam the school gives, which I need to pass to graduate. The other is a national exam that I need to pass in order to be eligible for a counseling license.

I can't think of much else to tell you about. My life pretty much revolves around getting myself graduated in May.

-The Hub

Christmas and New Year's Day

I've been rather recalcitrant in my posting lately. I'd like to blame the busy-ness of the holidays, but the week before Christmas was actually the busiest, and you already know all about that.

On Christmas Eve, we went to Papa and Grandma's (The Momma's dad and stepmom) house for a little celebration and a fantastic dinner. The girls loved hunting for the younger pictures of their momma on the Christmas tree. They also like watching their Uncle D attempt to juggle--D and Miss Bubbly became fast friends pretty quickly. We're going to have to work out the confusion surrounding having two Uncle S---s in the family, however. And we love him and Aunt E------ enough not to call him "the other Uncle S."

Christmas itself was quite low-key. We didn't even wake up until 7:30 or 8, quite possibly because we've chosen not to play up the Santa Claus aspect of Christmas and as a result the girls were not as wound up as they could have been.

For breakfast we had cinnamon rolls and clementine oranges--it was perfect, especially since I used frozen bread dough that had all night to rise. The rolls were ready within an hour. Yum! While they were baking, we commenced with the present opening, as you can see below:

There are far too many pictures of me like this on Christmas morning. I should learn to comb my hair and apply a *little* makeup before emerging! The Hub has no mercy with the camera.

Among other things, I made the girls each a sweater for Christmas. If you know The Eldest at all, you know that the blue one is hers. Miss Bubbly was happy enough with her green one--I think it needs a little time to grow on her.
After opening presents and being reminded of family members near and far who take excellent care of us, we ate a simple lunch and went on a hike. Oh yes. The girls wanted to do SOMETHING, so we hiked up A Mountain. That's the hill called a mountain near ASU, just a couple minutes' drive north of us. The girls enjoyed the "walk" so much that they begged for a repeat performance on Thursday. We obliged. We also went to see the Christmas lights display at the Mesa Temple on Christmas. It was a great way to cap off such a relaxed day.

The entire week felt like a vacation, since The Hub wasn't going in to his internship. We've really enjoyed the time together, but I've gotten out of our usual routine and the house is in need of a good dusting and scrubbing. Please, no surprise visits until we're back to normal!

Here's a great picture of the girls from a couple of days ago:
I had to alter the dress The Eldest got for her birthday a little bit so that it wouldn't fall off of her and I may have gone a little bit overboard. Or I got too lazy to trim back the pieces when I finally figured out how much of the neckline they took up. Ah well. The princess is happy with the ensemble and her little sister looks forward to borrowing it when she's big enough.

New Year's was also quite understated. We went to Omay's house for dinner and a delayed Christmas, as she'd been out of town. The girls enjoyed their time there and seemed especially fond of Omay's signature cranberry-marshmallow salad. We got them home and in bed at the normal time, then stayed up to see in the New Year. I almost made it, but I definitely slept through a majority of the 11 o'clock hour. The Hub laughed at me, but he's the night owl in the family, so staying up until midnight was a piece of cake for him.

And there you go. We had our holidays just how we like them--full of family and friends and low-key celebrations.