Salmon and Souvlaki

November Sewing: A Bag for A Dear Friend

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Laura

One of my friends from church is currently recovering from hip replacement surgery. A week or so before her surgery, she asked me if I could come up with something to hang on her walker so that she could move small items with her from room to room in her recovery time. I set out intending to just make a really simple bag but I love making bags so much and rarely have a chance to make them. I couldn’t help myself and ended up making a super cute one that now I want to make more of!

The strap needed to be split in the middle in order to be able to be strapped onto the walker. I used two pieces of Velcro, hoping that would be strong enough for her phone, water bottle, etc.

And, just for fun, I densely quilted the straps and the accent strip at the top.

I love that blue/green color combination. I used the blue fabric in my sister-in-law’s Christmas present two years ago and was glad to find the perfect project to use up the leftovers!

I hope this bright little bag makes the next few weeks just a little bit easier for my dear friend as she pushes herself through physical therapy and on towards an easier life with a new hip. Anyone else need a bag for a walker? I have fun making them. I could even take some commissions! 🙂

*I used the dimensions from the medium bag of the Oh Fransson “Little Shopping Bag” tutorial. I can’t find the blog post on her site now but the PDF still seems to exist. These were the bags (along with the Buttercup bag) that introduced me to the fun of sewing bags. Outside of the dimensions, the rest of the design is my own.

Posted in sewing | 2 Comments

A Fond Farewell to My Dearly Loved Oregon Mug (and my Montana one too, sniff, sniff)

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Laura

My favorite souvenir to buy while on a trip is a hand-thrown pottery mug. I have several and LOVE using them. My dad even brought me one back from Scotland last year. I love the feel of them in my hands, the different signatures on the bottom, the memories of trips taken and enjoyed as I’m sipping my tea. I had never broken one until last Friday morning.

The night before had been a rough one (Mark is sick and nursing a TON) and so I was staying in bed as long as possible while the kids were up with Nik. All of a sudden I heard a strange noise, followed by Ellie saying, “Mark! Mark! Be careful! Put on your shoes!” I called out for Ellie to come and tell me why Mark needed to wear shoes at 6:45 in the morning and heard the sad news. I’d enjoyed a cup of tea the night before and had neglected to move it to the kitchen before falling into bed.

The mug they knocked off the side table was one that I had found in Cannon Beach, Oregon* when Nik and I went there in 2009. I somehow managed to only blog a couple of silly pictures of that trip so here are a couple beautiful ones, only five years late!

pre-kids for both couples! 🙂 (two for us and three for my sister and brother-in-law)

Haystack Rock

When I realized that my beloved mug was broken (the favorite of all of them), I had two immediate reactions:

I’m going to replace it!
No one is ever going to touch my mugs again.

Upon a bit more reflection, and after, tragically, two days later, managing to drop my Montana 2013 mug in the sink and break that too, I came to my senses. Clearly, it’s not just other people who are going to break “my” mugs. What’s the point of having something if not to be used and loved? It’s fairly antithetical to what Nik and I believe to acquire stuff just to have it. When our kids do this (i.e. when they are accumulating toys just to hold them and to keep others from playing with them), we call it “being a dragon”.** We don’t want to be a dragon who finds joys in counting and exulting over our stuff. We want it to be useful or beautiful or both, and in any case, used.

And should I replace them? I don’t know. I loved, LOVED that red mug. I know this probably sounds weird but I really enjoyed my tea the most when drinking it from that mug. I just searched the web for the potter who made it (having taken a picture of the name on the bottom of the mug before throwing it out so I wouldn’t forget) and she has retired. I can’t replace it. More importantly, I think, I can’t relive that trip again. Do I really need to replace the souvenir? Probably not but I really do want to.

So alas, my red mug and my blue mug are both gone. I’m still drinking out of my other mugs though, hoping that I won’t break another one but still drinking tea. The kids and I have “milky tea” almost every afternoon these days. It helps make the long afternoons slightly more bearable! 🙂

sipping her “tea” (mostly milk) from her great-grandmother’s mug, because I know my Granny would have loved knowing that her great-granddaughter was using her tea cup and because, what’s the point of it just gathering dust?

*Please, all you East Coasters, repeat after me – “Or-eh-gun” (NOT “Or-e-gone”).
**I take no credit for the “dragon” idea. I read it in a parenting book, most of it not particularly useful but I did like that idea!

Posted in parenting, reflecting, travel | Leave a comment

Yet Another Weird Sleeping Position

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Laura

Mark just seems to find them all!

Posted in Mark | Leave a comment

How We Spent Our October 31st (and why we didn’t go trick-or-treating)

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Laura

As is true with other parts of my life, my thinking about Halloween has moderated in my adult years. When I was younger, I probably would have told you that I didn’t think there was any way to partake in Halloween festivities and still be a Christian. I don’t think that now, thanks in large part to many friends who have helped me see in shades of gray, rather than black and white. So please know that this post is not meant to indict you in any way for how you celebrated on October 31st. If you haven’t read my KIOS disclaimer in awhile, go read it because it definitely applies here.

That being said, Nik and I have decided to forgo celebrating Halloween with our family for several reasons.

1. I have very limited creative energy and sewing time. I am NOT about to squander it on coming up with costumes for my children that will only be worn for one day (or at best for a few times).

2. I know we could also just buy/borrow costumes for our kids, but we also have some serious ethical concerns with the the amount of money spent (wasted) on costumes by society at large. To us, it’s a waste of resources, both monetary and environmental.

3. Our kids don’t even really know what candy is. (Remember Ellie’s pencil candy?) We don’t see any reason to let them acquire the taste for it any time soon.

4. For a variety of reasons (no sidewalks on our street, our front door is difficult to locate, etc., etc.), we get little to no trick-or-treaters at our house. We see plenty of them in our neighborhood but they just don’t come to our house. Therefore, Halloween isn’t even a fun night for us at home anyway. We’d be sitting around with a bowl of candy with no one to give it to. What fun is that?

5. One of the true evils of Halloween? All that chocolate tainted by child slave labor. It’s hard to forget once you know.

6. Last but most important to me, I just can’t do scary stuff. If someone could promise me that Halloween would just be cute babies in bumble bees and little girls as princesses and boys as firemen, I might be OK with it. But I’m just not OK with dripping blood, glorifying evil, and celebrating death. I don’t see any way to separate the cute from the horror and so we’ve chosen to separate ourselves from it. We know our children will need to learn about the very real presence of evil in this world but it doesn’t need to happen when they’re young.

“geese!!”

You can’t just say, “NO!” right? Eespecially now that Ellie is old enough to understand that something is going on, that other kids are doing something fun and she’s not, we knew we needed to have a family tradition for October 31st. Last year, we went out to eat on a whim and this year, we decided to just do that every year. We super-rarely eat out as a family just by ourselves (maybe 2-3 times a year?), so it’s a big treat, especially FOR ME!!!, to get to eat in a restaurant (no cooking! no dishes!). We decided to combine it with a trip to Loch Raven Reservoir to see the geese, and there you have it! A fun family tradition!

One of these things is not like the other! Somewhere, a farmer is sad, missing her duck.

At this moment, Ellie would only consent to being in a picture if we were being silly.

my precious, growing-up-so-fast daughter

stomping to scare away the geese, who clearly have been fed too many times

I’m not sure what will happen once our kids get old enough to have their own opinions about trick-or-treating, costumes, and Halloween. When the time comes, I hope that our willingness to listen to their deep desires and concerns will inform our conversation about how to live ethically and responsibly in all areas of our lives. If that involves one child or the other wanting to celebrate Halloween, then we’ll just have to work together to figure out how to do that in a thoughtful, responsible way.

In the meantime, Ellie was thrilled to eat the biggest piece of pepperoni pizza she’d every seen and I don’t think she missed the candy at all!

How about you? How have you solved the Halloween issue? Maybe it’s never been an issue for you? If you do go trick-or-treating with your kids, what in the world do you do with all that candy? 🙂

Posted in Ellie, Mark, parenting, reflecting | 4 Comments

A REALLY Big Whale

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Laura

For our second year, my friend Emily and I are doing a homeschool-preschool co-op for our kids. (Somehow, I don’t think I’ve blogged about this at all but it’s been a great part of our week for the past year and a couple months!) Today, we were learning about blue whales and as part of that, we went outside to mark on the street how long a blue whale actually is. They can grow up to 100 feet. This turns out to be REALLY big! I couldn’t find any sidewalk chalk so we improvised with rocks and pink paper every 25 feet.

I’m at the tail, the girls are at the head.

Walking from head to tail, you will notice that all four children declined my request to say “hi”.

It also takes a long time to run the length of a blue whale.

We also made blue whales out of cups, complete with blow hole spray.

Although I avoid Pinterest almost all the time (too mind-messing, too time-sucking), it definitely came in handy for fun blue whale activities!

P.S. Lest you be concerned about the safety of all our children, rest assured that we were on a one-way street that has very little traffic, which comes from the tail direction. We were A-OK! 🙂

Posted in Ellie, friends, Mark, school | 3 Comments

He Sings! He Talks! He Runs! Oh The Cuteness!

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Laura

Mark is daily amazing us with his leaps and bounds forward in talking, moving, and generally just being super adorable. Here’s three videos to let you experience the cuteness too. Sadly, two of them are upside down. I’m still getting the hang of taking videos with my smart phone (because oh yeah, by the way, I have one now) and I just keep managing to hold my phone the wrong way. Annoying, it plays them correctly on my phone so I don’t figure it out until I download them. Anyway, if you’re a dedicated Mark-admirer, I suppose you’ll put up with the upside-down-ness of them because they are OH SO CUTE!!

First, he loves to sing and has a remarkable grasp of tune already. Here is he singing in the car. He usually chooses the “Twinkle Twinkle/ABC” tune for his chosen melody! 🙂

He is talking oh, so much. He’s starting to make three and four word sentences and comes out with new words all the time. Most of his words, he drops the first consonant sound, which makes understanding him a bit tricky. Duck and truck come out “uck” and plane and train come out “ain.” He also loves giving kisses as you’ll see if you watch to the end!

Finally, he also loves to run. We don’t even take the stroller with us on walks around the neighborhood any more because he doesn’t want to ride in it. He says, “Un! Un!” and just takes off. I’m so sad this one is upside down because I just love how he vigorously swings his elbows from side to side. I hope you can get a sense of it at least! Sometimes we do take our wagon with us so you’ll hear it rattling along in the background.

Also, don’t you love the classic “run but get totally distracted by something” behavior?

We’re so glad this precious boy is in our family! I don’t know what we’d do without him!

Posted in Mark | 1 Comment

A Weekend Getaway, Part 3: Waterfalls and Vultures, Oh My!

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Laura

Here’s part 1 and Part 2.

Sunday morning we decided to take a bit of a detour through Letchworth State Park on our way home. The main entrance to the park is only about 20 minutes from Houghton so during college, it was the place we went on an occasional Sunday afternoon for some exploring. It’s also where everyone seemed to take their graduation and/or engagement photos. This time, we went in a new entrance to us (the one closest to Lisa’s house). On the way there, we stumbled across the Castile Cider Mill. It had just opened for the day and they were selling piping hot cider fry cakes, which may just have been the best doughnuts we have ever eaten. Along with apple cider and delicious apples too, we were well supplied for our trip to the park!

The first overlook after we entered was the Archery Field overlook, complete with gorgeous views of the canyon and soaring vultures.

so cool to be looking down at the vultures!

At the Upper Falls, a train happened to be coming over the trestle, which TOTALLY made Mark a happy boy! “Ain!! AIN!!!!”

I love Nik’s eye for color in photography.

At the middle falls, we all enjoyed the roar of the falls and the beauty of the canyon.

A very kind stranger obliged us by taking a picture, “no charge!”, of our whole family at Inspiration Point (note both the Upper and Middle Falls behind us).

After lunch at the lower falls, Mark discovered a new best friend in the gift shop.saying “turtle”

And here are a few shots from our drive home, fall color, handsome driver, and all!

Lisa, we’ll definitely be back sooner rather than later to visit if you can promise me that we’ll have time to go to the cider mill and buy more fry cakes! 🙂

Posted in Ellie, friends, Mark, travel | 1 Comment

A Weekend Getaway, Part 2: A College Reunion, Sparsely Attended But Greatly Enjoyed

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Laura

Here’s part 1.

Saturday, October 4th was Homecoming at my college and also the ostensible reason for our trip up to western New York. So, in the morning after the kayak rides on the lake, we headed for Houghton. There’s been quite of bit of change on campus since we graduated 15 years ago, most recently ew soccer, baseball and softball fields along with a gigantic field house complete with a regulation-size indoor track and tennis courts. When we got to campus, I was so disoriented I hardly knew where I was (which is ridiculous because it’s a really small campus). Once we figured out where we were, we went to the kids’ carnival in the morning. All our kids had a great time, including Ellie jumping in a bouncy house, a new experience for her!

I had the fun of seeing three of my favorite professors – Dr. Young (psychology [my major] and my adviser), Prof. Roederer (Spanish and a kindred spirit – because their children live in AK), and Dr. Gaerte (communications [my minor], student government adviser [my on-campus love], and dear friend too [he and his wife even came to our wedding]).

Dr. Gaerte, who I know I’m allowed to call Doug but I just can’t make myself! 🙂

The new field house was dedicated that day so we attended the ceremony. This is a terrible picture but it does document the ribbon cutting and gives some scale for how massive the building really is.

A student played the bagpipes for the processional and recessional. Houghton’s mascot is the Highlander and this sound is so full of many memories for me. So I’m going to let you watch it even though I somehow managed to shoot it upside down. I must say, it’s pretty funny to watch the people walk by on the ceiling! 🙂

Only six people from our class made it to the reunion. Somehow, we didn’t manage to see one of our classmates (sorry Jessica!) and we forgot to take a picture with the other two (sorry Jill and Mike!). So here are Lisa, Liana, and I. Lisa and Liana were roommates our sophomore year and I was their suitemate. It was fun to be together again!

Nik and I took a little time in the afternoon to wander around campus. It really felt weird to be walking in places that I know and love so well, but to have my husband and children with me, a totally different person than I was 15 (19!) years ago.

on the Quad, too sunny for Ellie to smile

I love Houghton in the fall and I’m so glad we went to visit in October.

(coming soon – a visit to Letchworth State park – waterfalls and vultures, oh my!)

Posted in Ellie, friends, Mark, travel | 1 Comment

A Weekend Getaway, Part 1: The Friends Who Got Us To Drive 309 Miles With Two Children In The Back Seat

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Laura

My fifteen-year college reunion was the first weekend in October. As much as I love Houghton, I wouldn’t have made the drive all the way up there just to go to the half-day reunion. Luckily, my dear friend Lisa lives not too far from our college and it had been FAR too long since we’d driven north to see her and her family. I used to make the drive 2-3 times a year, after I’d moved to Baltimore and before Nik and I got married. Lisa’s family has always truly been my East Coast family (starting when I was a freshman and a VERY long ways from home) and I spent holidays with them. Lisa and her family came to visit us last year and so we were glad to finally make it to their house! This was both Ellie and Mark’s first trip there.

Lisa’s house is on a lake so we spent Friday and Saturday enjoying the lovely fall weather both in their fun backyard and near the lake.

throwing acorns – a game that could have gone on forever! 🙂

just missing Lisa’s older two kids (Poor things, they had to go to school.)

Here are a few lovely scenery shots for you from Lisa’s neighborhood (thanks to Nik!).

The wind had made the lake super choppy on Friday but thankfully, we woke up to a lovely calm lake on Saturday morning. Ellie and Mark went kayaking with Nik and C, Lisa’s oldest son. Well, in theory that’s what happened. In actuality, Mark screamed for all of his one-minute boat ride and then I took him out so we could take a walk and they could see the lake!

Saturday night, Nik even got to watch one of the resident beavers swim right by him.

The whole weekend, both girls enjoyed have a sister to play with! 🙂

We had such a lovely time with our friends. Here’s hoping we don’t let another 4.5 years go by before driving up to western New York again!

(Coming up soon: Part 2- Houghton and Part 3 – sightseeing in Letchworth State Park.)

Posted in Ellie, friends, Mark, travel | 4 Comments

Mark is a Star! (what happens when a boy has an older sister)

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Laura

A friend kindly gave Ellie a lot of fun clothes in her size. Last week we were putting them away and Mark fell in love with one particular shirt . He even insisted on wearing it! 🙂

I think he’s quite handsome in that color, actually!

Ellie is fond of saying, “When Mark is big like me, he can wear [my pink shoes, my fancy dress, etc.]” I haven’t had the heart to try to explain to her that he won’t be able to wear her fancy Easter dress when he’s four because, well, he’s a boy and that’s generally frowned upon win our society. So I usually just say, “That’s really kind of you to want to share your clothes, sweetie!” or something like that!