A mom in our homeschool group planned a police station tour in Vienna, VA and invited other families to tag along. We of course jumped at the opportunity. We toured fire stations several times while living in Kansas, but never a police station. Buddy was thrilled.
It's a smaller police station but we got a full tour including the basement firearms practice room, and holding cell for bad guys when there is a wait for a spot at the county jail, and the room where all the officers get prepped on a situation (I think my only experience with this sort of room is from the TV show CHiPs). We also got to see the police cars outside (in the freezing cold) and the motorcycles (in their shed because it was too icy of a day for the officers to be out on them).
Fun facts we learned: To be a motorcycle officer, you have to be able to lift your bike. The back license plate on the motorcycles say, "Smile, I could be behind you." The baton officers carry nowadays open like a toy lightsaber. Bicycle officers have to be able to ride their bikes up and down stairs.
1/13/11 These were taken after I'd helped completely clean the boys' room twice already that day. Little Guy decided to go through a dumping out every box phase for several days in a row. Argh.
Here are three more Princess Sparkley's creations.
First is "Let It Snow, Or Maybe Not." In the first panel, the girl is observing that there is "no snow." In the second panel, she issues the command, "Snow go!" In the third panel, no snow falls. In the fourth panel, in disappointment she says, "Aw." In the fifth panel, she commands more emphatically, "Snow GO!!!" In the sixth panel, she is dismayed that there "still" is no snow. In the seventh panel she again commands, "Let it snow," but in the eighth panel she tries politely asking, "please." In the ninth panel, snow gently begins to fall. In the tenth panel, the girl tries to up the snowfall by again commanding, "Let it snow." In the eleventh panel, a giant snowball falls on the girl. In the twelfth panel, just her hat is sticking out, next to a mountain of snow. In the thirteenth panel, she says, "Or maybe not," and then in the fourteenth panel, she calls, "Help!"
Up next is "Pizza." First, a "guy with stand-up hair" (which I assume is something very different from "a stand-up guy") is laughing and putting something on the pizza. In the second panel, the guy zips from the room as the mom calls, "Pizza for dinner." The guy warns ominously, "Don't bake pizza." The mom asks, "Why?" In the fifth panel, the mom calls, "Here is pizza." In the sixth panel, despite his knowledge of the doctored pizza, the guy with stand-up hair nibbles a piece. Finally, he gets X-eyes. (In explaining this comic to me tonight, Princess Sparkley backed away from her obvious original intention of having the guy with stand-up hair die, as indicated by the word "Die" next to his corpse. Perhaps she felt the moral of the cautionary tale was too heavy-handed, or perhaps she has doctored my food and is trying to ease her conscience by lessening the imagined repercussions. We'll never know.)
Lastly we have a more-recent effort, "Super Twins." This comic can get by with less explanation. In the fourth panel the girl in bed is one of the Super Twins (Ruby, specifically), hearing someone else cry for help. In the eighth panel, the bad guy is saying, "Ha ha!" while a girl cries out, "I am shrinking!" In the tenth panel, Ruby is walking the shrunken girl to the grower, which does its work over the next two panels. Finally, the girl asks the unanswered question, "How can I ever thank you?" How indeed, rebigulated girl. How indeed.
Sometimes my church comics are single-panel affairs, like Family Circus, only funny.
My son Buddy decided to make Mittens holed up in a cave, and Sparks sitting on top, roasting a marshmallow over an open fire, using his tail to hold his skewer.
A Clarice Bean inspired effort. (Proof of its humor is found in Princess Sparkley's annotation, "He he!"
Okay, so maybe I was wrong to call out Family Circus. But I think we can all agree that my comics are funnier than those in the New Yorker.
About a year ago, I drew a comic for our kids during sacrament meeting. It told the story of a dinosaur attacking a church, and two children who were eaten because they couldn't sit still. I've looked all over the house this week, but I can't find it. It's like Fermat's Last Theorem: you'll just have to believe me that it was awesome.
This started a comic-drawing trend in our family. At first, they were church-themed, as shown in this comic drawn by my daughter Princess Sparkley.
In the first panel, a girl is excited to be baptized. In the second panel, the baptism is occurring. (No one filled PS in on the whole "don't depict a baptism" controversy.) In the third panel, the girl is drying off. In the fourth panel, she's bearing testimony of how she felt after her baptism. In the fifth panel, she's enjoying the refreshments. In the sixth panel, she's receiving a new journal, and in the seventh panel, she's recording her feelings. In the eighth panel she's in bed asleep (under a bed canopy), smiling as she remembers her baptism in her dream.
A few weeks later, Princess Sparkley drew the squares, labeled the paper "A Good Comic By Dad" (which is why all my subsequent efforts bear that subtitle), and passed it to me. And this is what we got.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't poking fun at PS for not singing the hymns. I wasn't. See, a total lie.
Next, she came out with this effort, which was so hard to understand, that I created a panel-by-panel translation for her.
As you can see, our subject matter quickly went downhill. From baptisms to dogs eating stinky diapers. I'm not going to say I wasn't proud.
Little Guy told me this morning that he needed me to cuddle him because he was sick. He's never on his own come up with being sick so I questioned him to find out that his mouth hurt. We cuddled for a bit and that was the last that I heard of it all day. But, remembering this, and needing him out of Princess Sparkley's room so she could clean it without him throwing books all over (which he was apparently doing) I put on a dvd for him and he requested the Pittsburgh Penguins blanket (it's a Steelers blanket) and when I came back a little later I found him like this. Of course, when he saw I had a camera he tried to cover his eyes, or just close them.
Little Guy had some potty success about 6 months or more ago and since then has had little interest in the potty at all. Every once in awhile I can get him to sit on the potty. Some times he pees. Sometimes he demands that he doesn't want to sit, he'll only stand... so far that hasn't worked for him. We got him the book Pirate Potty for Christmas. It comes with a pirate hat that can only be worn while on the potty. And the book comes with stickers to put on the hat. He did pretty well yesterday and today with it.
Little Guy got a gift card for Christmas and decided to spend part of it on puzzles today at Target. (He also requested some chips telling me in a half crying voice, "but I want chips for my birthday gift card.") He's currently and expert and big fan of 24 piece puzzles. He told me at the store he wanted to get one Princess Sparkley would like, one Buddy would like and one he would like. Nice brother. We just picked out two because we don't really have a need for a 24 piece Barbie puzzle.
Buddy got a TON of Legos for Christmas. He and B built all the sets and over the past weeks they've started to slowly fall apart from all the playing. So Buddy and B decided to rebuild ALL the Lego sets we have and somehow I got dragged into it too.
Here are some of Buddy's solo creations we photographed before we started knowing that we'd probably have to disassemble them for their parts. The "garden" is mainly Princess Sparkley's creation with some help from me and Buddy.
The rebuilding all started last night and was taking place in Little Guy/Buddy's room so everyone went to bed a bit late due to the Lego craziness.
Today we finished everything up, carried it all down to the table and photographed everything (proof that at one point we still had all the right pieces to build all the sets we have ... they'll get played with a lot and start to fall apart again in a few weeks).
As we were taking down the Christmas decorations I decided I should document which ornaments were gifts which years. For the most part, I've written it on the ornament box or on the ornament itself, but as you can see, there's still one question mark year for me and some of the others were educated guesses.
Little Guy was my helper, you can see his hand in some pictures. The ornaments work their way from left to right, youngest to oldest.
I need to do this with the books we exchange with each family at Christmas on B's side. Now that it's become a pretty regular thing, I'm worried that I'm going to give the same book twice.
There were a few years where we exchanged ornaments as gifts with B's family. Here's 2006:
And last year, we went to The Nutcracker in Richmond with the P family and Grandma and Grandpa M. The Ms bought Buddy and Princess Sparkley each an ornament. I think we figured Little Guy was too little to care.
Since Princess Sparkley was busily earning her Nutcracker badge, I had to come up with a similar, first grade type assignment for Buddy. We read a book about Santa and then Buddy had to draw me four different Santas that all looked very different from each other.
Top left: Mrs. Claus Top right: Santa Bottom left: Policeman Santa Bottom right: another Policeman Santa
To secretly help Princess Sparkley earn a Nutcracker Girl Scout badge (that she got for Christmas), I had to give her assignments that she thought were school related and specific to 3rd grade since Buddy only had to draw one picture while she had to create a dance, draw several pictures, read the story, etc. Here are their Nutcracker pictures.
by Buddy The different faces across the top are Buddy's interpretations of the first few songs on the soundtrack and how they make him feel.
As part of a homeschool art/language arts lesson, we read the Christmas story and looked at different artists interpretations of the nativity scene. Then the kids drew their own.
B got a puzzle for Christmas from Little Guy and another for his birthday. He builds them in record time (in my opinion). So puzzles are all the rage at our house right now. Buddy has some 100 piece ones. And Little Guy has become an expert at the 24 piece puzzles we have. But I couldn't find any of our girlie 100 piece puzzles for Princess Sparkley. So she made her own.
It's a Rapunzel puzzle. Grandma and Grandpa L sent us movie tickets and we went and saw Disney's Tangled on Dec. 28.
When I was a little girl, one of my favorite things about going to my family's cabin in southern Utah was getting lollies. A Smarties-like, ball shaped (sort of) lollipop that we could always find in the little country stores. On our drive to Ohio for Thanksgiving we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to use the bathroom (and to buy an assortment of fun candy- B's new favorite= coconut patties). While browsing their candy selection I saw giant Lollies and bought some for the kids' stockings. Here they are enjoying them.
For New Year's weekend, we headed down to Richmond to spend time with the P family. They are always super fun and plan lots of cool stuff for us to do while we're visiting. On New Year's Eve we let the kids stay up until midnight and then run down the cul-de-sac banging pots and pans. On New Year's Day they took us to an ice skating/laser tag/arcade place. The kids were thrilled with all of it, but especially the ice skating. On the way in Little Guy informed me we were going to have to buy some ice skates. I explained that we just rent or borrow them. He told me he was going to get two, one for each foot.
I can't believe they have ice skates for kids this little. I couldn't get over how cute they were. Little Guy was very proud of himself when he figured out how to stand up with ice skates on.
Buddy was especially excited to learn to ice skate because he realizes this is a skill he needs to be able to play hockey. He told me beforehand he hoped he was good at it. Because of this, I think he was a little disappointed by how hard it was, but by the end he was a lot better and a lot more pleased with himself.
We signed the kids up for laser tag at a specific time then rented skates and went to the rink... just in time to watch the Zamboni for 10 minutes. The kids of course all loved watching the Zamboni, but we were on a schedule now! When we got on the ice, Buddy and Princess Sparkley stuck to the wall with me slowly making their way around the rink. B took Little Guy ahead of us just holding Little Guy's hands up above him and having him skate between B's legs. B told Little Guy not to worry about moving, just to keep his feet under him and B would move them. LG's left foot started to slide out in front of him and he said, "but that foot's going crazy."
Then the big kids, the cousins, the aunt, the uncle and B went to laser tag (we only made it one lap) and stowed their skates and coats in a bench around the rink. Little Guy was not happy about ice skating now that he realized how much it hurt his feet and arms. I convinced him to come out with me again and we went one more lap. Then we stowed our skates and coats and walked around the arcade some until everyone was done at laser tag. B took Buddy and PS around again and they got much braver, letting go of the wall. I hung out with Little Guy on a bench until I left him with his aunt and uncle and I joined the kids on the ice. Then B and I skated around together holding hands all romantic-like. :)
And here's the video I got... as you can see, they aren't so much "ice skating" as they are "walking on ice without help." But this is much improved from the first lap around the rink where they were clinging to the wall for dear life and still couldn't keep their feet from sliding away.
{more pictures to come, H got some with her camera when I was busy ice skating and helping the kids}
So... B had two birthday celebrations with two different cakes this year. One on Sunday the 26th because we were trying to have a few friends over but one canceled because a huge snow storm was expected (we got about 1/2 an inch of snow) and the other family couldn't make it because the husband was working that night. That's the giant peanut butter brownie. Then on his birthday, the 27th, I made him a pecan pie.
Driving to the library the other I noticed a strange sound as the car tire turned. It sounded like I was driving over a sheet of paper with each rotation of the tire. Turns out it was a nail/screw. So when I got home, B but the spare on, and the next day we headed to Sam's Club (where we buy our tires) to see what they could do. It worked out well that they could patch it (since the tires are only about a year old) but it took them forever to look at the car, and then patch it. When the kids weren't watching Toy Story 3 in the pathetic waiting area, we were exploring Sam's Club. Sorry for the poor quality cell phone pics.
