Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, November flew by! We can hardly believe Thanksgiving came and went and that it's Christmas time already. We took a long 12 1/2 hour drive out to Virginia for 9 days and had a wonderful time with both our families. Ironically, we only have one picture to show for it because the batteries in our camera died and we didn't realize we had another set of fresh ones until the drive back. Oh, well.

We started the drive on a late Friday afternoon and drove through the night in hopes that Benjamin would just sleep the whole time, but he spent half the night wanting to look around and read his books. We got in early Saturday morning and spent the week at my parent's house. My brother Nathan and Paul's family flew in on Tuesday. Highlights included TWO Thanksgiving dinners, some projects around the house, playing in an enormous pile of leaves, going to the D.C. Zoo, cousin Will's Baby Blessing, and a rather uneventful BYU-Utah Football game. We got to see Brigham and Alexandra's apartment right across the street from the zoo, and Josh and Anne's in Lexington on our way back. We had a wonderful time!

My Other Life

Well, Paul just left this morning on a quick business trip to Williamsburg , Iowa. Back at the homestead, we're dealing with drainage problems in the kitchen sink, which has been going on since Sunday evening. Paul's been plunging it, "snaking" it, and dumping boiling, soapy water dawn, but nothing. Hence, we have piles of smelly, dirty dishes all over the place. So we finally had a plumber come out today. He at least reinstalled the poorly installed garbage disposal (which is missing the seal) that had fallen off when Paul was plunging, but couldn't do much more than that since the basement is finished, and the pipes he needed to get into were behind finished walls. We're going to have to go through the roof....Darn finished basements! We also have yards and yards of cable running through the middle of the room since the walls prevent any access to the electrical wires, but we won't go into that....

Anyways, now seems to be a good time to take a break from it all and blog. I decided to take this chance to show that I have other obsessions in life besides Benjamin and taking pictures of him.

I have a lot of creative energy that I have to burn somehow, so here are some of my latest projects. This is a tiny paper cut-out I did of "Goldbug," one of Benjamin's favorite fictional characters, for his room.

This one is a work in progress, but is also a paper cut-out. It's another favorite storybook character of Benjamin's, "Drummer Hoff." I plan on finishing it and framing this one for his room also.

This is a watercolor I did this past Spring for Paul during his business trip to Switzerland. It's an olive tree.

So I joined an FHE group since I've been out here with a bunch of other moms. We get together about once a month and prepare lessons to make copies of and swap. I made this one of The Fall out of paint swatches. We had about a zillion of them lying around the house, and I couldn't bear to just throw them away! Anyways, this is a color copy of that, laminated with velcro backs for kids to pull on and off to tell the story.

And last, this was the first FHE lesson I did of the Creation. It's also laminated with velcro backs. I feel like if I can at least make these now, then I can try to have FHE lessons every week when Benjamin is old enough to listen to me for more than two minutes.

I'm also of course scrap-booking all of Benjamin's zillions of pictures, plus the few that Paul and I have from pre-Ben days. Then I'm working on a square 2 1/2 foot acrylic/collage painting incorporating the alphabet and numbers, but it's just started, so I didn't include a picture of that. Anyways, now you know what I'm really up to during the few spare moments I feel blessed to have!

Silly Boy...

I just have to say how fun Benjamin is getting. Yeah, he can throw a royal temper tantrum, and he's still a baby in a lot of ways, but he's becoming such a fun little boy! He loves helping me cook in the kitchen, and smelling (putting his mouth on) all the spices. Here he is, tasting the pizza dough and all the other compontents to make sure they're ok before we put it all together.


So the other day, I was in the other room, when I heard Benjamin in the kitchen, gulping something down. Being the good parent that I am, I dashed in, only to find him chugging my soymilk. I couldn't stop laughing. He usually turns down any juice, normal milk, etc. that I give him, and only accepts water. But somehow he'd found his way into the fridge for this special little treat that even I won't drink by the glassful!


Benjamin loves his duck costume, and admiring himself in it in our gi-normous living room mirrors. He doesn't use words yet, but he's got the head shaking thing down pat for any decisions I present him with. On this particular day, all of my reasonable clothing options were rejected with a vigorous head shake, and the duck costume won. But he had a good time playing in the leaves and getting it nice and dirty! Hey, isn't it a good thing if the costume gets more than one night's use?