The Quiver

We had a loverly dinner Sunday evening. My mother invited us over “just because” … which is maybe the best reason of all to invite someone over. Especially if you’re going to feed them large quantities of very tasty food.

Alas, I forgot the camera, and Smell-o-Vision™ is still in the pre-testing phase, so you’ll have to use your imagination to … erm, imagine what square ribs-an’-sauce over bow-tie noodles, fresh baked rolls, dilly beans (YUM!) and various other tasty morsels look (and smell) like. Oh and did I mention fresh strawberry shortcake for desert. She only made two quarts of whipped cream. No really, at least two quarts. I think she had more Schlagsahne than strawberries. We’re none of us sure why, but there it is. I think she was thinking there would be more takers on desert, but dinner was so tasty that I think the kids stuffed themselves nigh between and weren’t terribly interested—even in fresh strawberries and home-made shortcake.

After dinner it was time for the sit around the table, nibbling at what didn’t get eaten and saying “why am I still eating?!” chat. Quality time, that. What a blessing, to live in a country where we have not just enough to eat, but can have a really pleasant dinner with little more effort than it takes to prepare.

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for providing this bounteous world, and families to fill it with joy.

Thank you, Mom, for hosting and preparing the fine feast.

Thank you, Dad, for providing and helping prepare. (We know you do.)

T-Rex attack!

We went to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point (Lehi, UT) today. Cheezer/Butterfly had a birthday recently, and it has become a tradition that the one celebrating the birthday gets to choose a family activity. Occasionally they are encouraged to find something a little less pricey, or to find something that all the family can enjoy, but usually they come up with something fun and reasonably priced.

A couple of the things that were beyond the normal monitory pain threshold were museum-type exhibits. There is an aquarium up in Sandy, and the dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point that come to mind. (It ain’t cheap to get in to these kinds of places with seven kids, lemme tell yeh.) We decided that it was worth the education to buy year memberships and then milk ‘em for all they were worth!

Finding dinosaurs

Anyway, Cheezer picked the dinosaur museum right from the get-go and wouldn’t be enticed in any other direction. No great surprise, really; she’s had a fascination for dinosaurs since she was tiny. She used to take several of the large, hard, plastic dinos to bed with her. Some kids have soft, cuddly teddy bears; she had plastic dinosaurs. With spikes. And claws. We’d find her curled up on top of them nearly every night. I don’t know how she could sleep on those hard, pokey things, but she did. Her favorite movie when she was about four was Jurassic Park. She would watch it for hours on end—fascinated, never scared.

The kids were out of school today, so I took the day off and we all trooped through the dinosaur museum as Cheezer’s birthday family activity. Fun was had by all.

For some of the little ones, this was their first experience and we had fun as they rounded some of the corners.

Pre-historic Jaws

(Can you tell which were a little nervous posing for this picture.)

And finally, a gallery with a sampling of the 188 photos(!) I took on our outing today. Hope you enjoy, ’cause we sure did!

Kraut’s Aunt Claire started a tradition when he was a young child. She always gave her nieces and nephews pajamas for Christmas. It was something we would always need because we’d either out-grown our old ones, or worn ‘em out. Since my parents knew that we would be getting pajamas, we used that as our Christmas Eve gift.

Like many, we were allowed to open gift the night before Christmas, and since we knew we had new pajamas waiting for us, it wasn’t as much of a surprised what we were getting, …

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

… but we didn’t know what kind of pajamas we would be getting, and wearing brand new pajamas to bed, waiting for Santa, pretending to sleep so we could listen for sleigh-bells or hooves on the roof …

High excitement...

… well, you get the idea. New pajamas for Christmas was always fun and exciting because it meant Christmas was so close you could taste it.

Everyone in their new PJs

Well, it’s the New Year already, but we’ve had lots of folks ask to see our new hardwood floor, so I thought this would be a nice picture to use.

Getting ready for Christmas.

Everything is pretty much back to normal; we still have a few finishing touches to put on, but we have the piano, couch, and chairs back in, and pictures and cross-stitches back on the walls. The lights are on the tree and now it’s time for the kids to put on ornaments, as is our family tradition:  Mom hands out ornaments, kids cluster the ornaments on the tree, and Dad takes pictures.

This so sums up so much of the wonderfully crazy life of my brother and his wife and their family.  Well, that and “You have worms.” which was the welcoming note on their wedding guest book.

They live a life filled unique situations, many of which would confuse the more pedestrian of you out there in the world.  Your loss; sorry.

They also suffer from “excess of personality”–self diagnosed.  Gotta love ‘em!   Welcome aboard, sis-in-law.  Everyone else, enjoy!

We’re in the home stretch of remodeling our living room and putting in a new floor — and painting, apparently. For my birthday, I got a little air compressor and brad gun combo, great for reattaching those baseboards after the floor (and walls) are finished. My two year old came down and started babbling on about the Nu Nu, and saying something about his eyes.

The Nu Nu from Teletubbies

It took us a second or two but we realized he was talking about my new compressor, and the eyes were the pressure gauges on the top. Not bad for a two year old who hasn’t even seen Teletubbies for months.

My new air compressor. I will not be calling it a "nu nu."

I guess there are similarities. But I’m still not going to call it anything other than “my air compressor.”

The Great Thanksgiving Remodel

Right before Thanksgiving, we started remodeling the living room. The furniture got moved to various parts of the house; the carpet came up and the baseboards came off. Now it was time to put in that laminate flooring that we’ve had staring us in the face for months and months.

All that furniture has to go somewhere.

It has been a little crazy around here ever since. All the stuff that normally lives in the living room had to find “alternate lodging” for a while. For all the big or heavy furniture, that meant the kitchen. Have you ever tried living in a house without a kitchen? (Well, we still have one; we just don’t have all of one to use.)

Right as we’re getting to the home stretch, just a few small patches of floor to finish laying, someone decides that now would be a good time to paint the walls, too. So the floor ground to a halt while the walls got started.

Wha-?! What

The walls are mostly painted and the floor is in. I even managed to get some of the baseboards back on before I remembered I needed to cut holes for the heat vents. That was about all I had time for, so now we’re stalled again until after Sunday. (We try our best to keep the Sabbath day, and this wasn’t quite large enough of an ox for us to justify working on our little project. Nearly, but not quite. The insanity level is, however, reaching critical mass.)