On Top of Spaghetti . . .

Got that song stuck in your head now, do ya? You're welcome.

Yesterday, on December 31, 2010, Hi-Hat celebrated his 8th birthday!  Big day!  Around here, that means no more booster seat.  Wow.  It doesn't sound like a big deal, but after 8 years of dealing with infant seats, seat bases, rear facing, forward facing, seat belt buckles, latches, boosters and backless boosters, it's really weird to have a kid who doesn't need any sort of supplemental seat in the car!  How did we get such a big kid so fast?  But, we didn't spend the day reminiscing about car seats.  Because that would have been a rather dull way to spend New Year's Eve.  We had a pretty unusual and emotional start to our day, with our entire family having to say toodle-loo to our poodle-loo (sorry).  Oh, what a sad sad sad 24 hours we had, but I'll post on that next.  Suffice it to say that everyone is a-ok now and we have two adorable beta fish residing on our kitchen table who have performed very well at taking the sting out of a difficult situation.  OK, so now you're thinking, Laura - you celebrated Hi-Hat's big day by reminiscing on car seats and giving away his dog?  And you are not up for parent of the year?  I know, I know.

On to the festivities.  There really weren't any! :)  We had a very nice day with Grandma and Granddad H coming to visit once we had returned from delivering Alex to his new family.  We had a belated Christmas celebration with exchanging gifts and then lots of play time.  Play time that involved large quantities of mini marshmallows flying through the house!  Yes, my two men each got some form of marshmallow shooter, and the ladies found it quite entertaining to stand as targets with their mouths wide open!  I've been picking up little stale marshmallows all day, but it's all in good fun!  All in all, he had a fun day - play time with granddad, playtime with his next door playmate, quality time with Granddad's iPad, watching a goofy movie, dinner and birthday gifts.

For dinner we had spaghetti and meatballs, a family favorite.

Then for dessert we had spaghetti and meatballs!

I managed to keep the birthday cake hidden from Hi-Hat, and he was so surprised and tickled when Geof brought them into the dining room at cake time!

Took several tries to get all the noodle candles blown out, but he finally managed!  Then after we opened presents, the flying marshmallows were abandoned in favor of flying an indoor helicopter.  Head's up everyone!

Hi Hat has had a great year - moving from 1st to 2nd grade and proving to be an avid reader, lover of all things Calvin & Hobbes, Charlie Brown and Nerf, getting a new big boy room, continuing to be a friendly and loving big brother, overcoming his fears of roller coasters and fireworks, making new friends at a new school, participating in a school-wide spelling bee, moving with ease into a new drum school and continuing to find solace behind his giant drum set, loving all things Apple makes and tinkering with anything that has buttons and settings, starting to roll his eyes now and then at his parent's corny attempts at joking and wittiness, adventuring in Cub Scouts and the backyard woods, learning to swim on the summer swim team, publicly processing his faith in Jesus through baptism, and still continuing to come down to the living room late at night with his arms wide open, asking for just one more hug goodnight.  I couldn't dream up a better little boy and it's a daily joy to be his mom. 

The Eclipse

After Geof put Rella to bed last night, he gathered the other two kids around the kitchen table with a flashlight, a ping pong ball and a tennis ball.  I was wondering what he was up to - maybe some sort of creative devotion?  So I sat down and joined them for what he announced was to be a science lesson.  It was a little confusing, but I think he managed to drive home the main points of how the moon orbits the earth, how the earth rotates, and how the earth and moon together move around the sun.  And I THINK they sort of understood how the lunar eclipse works.  He then gave them both the option of getting up in the middle of the night to go out and see it.  I have no idea what time it was - 2ish or 3is am - but Hi-Hat got up, Fancy declined to get out of bed, and I decided last minute to get up.  I mean I had already put the zoom lens on the camera and all... Out we went.  I'm not sure what the moon should have looked like during the full eclipse - I guess a ball of burnt sienna or something.  It was more half burnt sienna when we saw it.  Hi-Hat was not terribly impressed and went back to bed after about 3 minutes (Geof reading over my shoulder said that in fact Hi-Hat was impressed but he was too cold and just wanted to be back in bed).  I had my camera, so you know I stayed out there for a while.  The hitch was that my lovely Sigma brand tripod broke like the second week I had it, so I didn't have the stabilization I needed to get a good picture (photo lesson - it was so dark that I needed a wide aperture and a very slow shutter speed to let in as much light as I could photographing a dark sky.  But I had to balance the slow shutter speed against just how steady I thought my hand could be to prevent motion blur from my cold shaky hands).  I made do by propping the camera on our giant county trash dumpster that was already out on the curb for pick up today.  There's not much better than sticking one's face right against a fully ripe trash dumpster while trying to find the moon and focus through one's view finder on a bitterly cold winter's night.  Well, maybe there is.

Then I propped the camera in a tree in our front yard.  Trying to find the moon and focus the camera while it was propped among a bunch of tiny, spindly prickly branches.  Yep.  That was fun.

All the pictures I took pretty much look the same, so I'll spare you anymore. :)  Maybe by 2014 I'll have replaced my tripod and will be able to try the photos again.  But all in all, I'm glad we got up to see it!

DIY Project

It's been a while since I've done any sort of interesting or meaningful post (imho).  So how about a DIY project to fill all that free time you must have as Christmas and New Year's are fast approaching!  You may remember that in the not so distant past, I started redecorating Hi-Hat's bedroom.  I got the walls painted, vinyl wall decal installed, and new bedding in place.  Then I kind of stalled out.  But this morning I picked up the project again and got another piece of wall art done: a CD jewel case wall mural using a photo of Hi-Hat on his drums.  The following project was not my own brain child, but rather was inspired by the fine folks over at photojojo, who come up with just the coolest DIY photo projects.  Maybe when I grow up I can work for them.  Not because I'm particularly creative in their sort of way, but so I can drink from their creative juices.  Anyway.  Back to the project.

First, I selected a photo with the right subject, colors and resolution to blow up and put on  Hi-Hat's bedroom wall.  Sigh.  The actual image resides on my other computer, so you'll just have to wait until the end of the post to see the image.  The next part was a tad bit tricky and requires use of a photo editing program, such as the ever handy-dandy Photoshop Elements.  I'll spare you all the nitty gritty details (because you can get them straight from photojoj by clicking right here).  Basically, I resized my image and then cropped it to pieces - to 20 individual 5 3/8" x 4 5/8" square-ishes.  Then I had all these individual pieces printed.  Here's what arrived from the printer:

While waiting for all these prints to arrive, I headed over to Big Box Office Supply Store and purchased a stack of old-school CD cases.  Not the sleek, jewel toned slim-line ones, but the thicker standard kind with the black plastic insert that hold the CD.   Then I took a kitchen knife and popped out all those black plastic inserts.

 Stacks of clear plastic jewel cases are so pretty.  Lets have another look at them.  

Then I had to trim some excess white border off of my 5x7 prints (because my printer is awesome, but 5 3/8" x 4 5/8" is not a standard print size.  Yet.).

Then I inserted each photo piece into a jewel case (after mounting each photo on a piece of corrugated cardboard cut to size so that the photo would fit snugly in the case and not shift or float around.  Cutting all those cardboard squares was a boring, tedious task that I did not photograph, but I include mention of it in case you need something to do with all those, say, Amazon boxes that have been appearing on your doorstep this time of year.  They work perfectly well).  OK. So now I basically have a stack of puzzle pieces in the form of jewel cases.  

And no, I was not smart enough to have given each photo piece a file name indicating its position in the mural when I first did all that cropping.  If I had done that, the top left image would have "1A" printed on the back, the piece below that would have "2A," and so on and so forth to the last image, "4E," in strict Battleship form.  No.  I did not do this.  Instead I had to enlist the help of Fancy the puzzle wiz to help me assemble the pieces.

Next, the good folks at photojojo suggest installing the pieces on the wall using adhesive Velcro squares.  I had to think twice about this, as I have experience with hanging light-weight decorative mirrors in kid spaces using Velcro squares and experience with catching said mirrors as they fall from the wall and narrowly miss 6-month-olds sitting directly beneath them.  No worries friends - this was YEARS ago when I just had one small child and was not yet a good mom.  har har har.  So, I was not interested in Velcro, even though a lightweight jewel case falling from the wall onto dear Hi-Hat's head would probably do minimal damage at this point.  Instead, I decided to go with this product:

They hold strong and supposedly can be removed without damaging the wall.  Did I test them first to see if indeed this was the case?  har har har.

OK, so I have a stack of cases (stacked in order now, thank you), mounting squares, pencil and handy dandy level to mark the wall with a nicely centered level line along which I would then place the bottom row of jewel cases.  

Once the first case was up, the other pieces were ridiculously easy to install.  I just had to line up horizontal and vertical edges and make sure everything stayed square.

As I was installing the cases, Hi-Hat would come and go to check on me.  During one of his visits I got the bright idea to have him autograph one of the squares.  And I just so happened to have a permanent paint pen the exact color of his freshly painted walls in my kitchen junk pen/pencil/scissor/Box Tops for Education/receipt/hairbow/guitar strings/Chuck E Cheese token/etc drawer.  What prepared mom doesn't?  

And after just a few minutes of peeling and sticking and positioning, Hi-Hat's cool wall mural project was done!

What's great about this mural is now that it is installed, if Hi-Hat's interests change down the road or if we decide to one day redecorate, all I have to do is open each jewel case, pop out the image, and replace it with a new one.  And you don't even have to crop apart one giant image - you could do a collage of lots of different little images or even pop favorite old CDs in them to display.  Great project photojojo!  And seriously, it took me longer to write this post than to do the actual project.

The Story!

I got an email today that a little Christmas interview I recorded at the WUNC studios in Chapel Hill the other week will air on Dick Gordon's The Story TODAY (all over the country)!  Last year I heard a cute little story on his program about another mom's greatest achievement as Santa and it reminded me of our own Santa story involving a Christmas wish, a traffic cone, a Sharpie marker and a little imagination.  Listen to how Geof and I played Santa for our sweet little boy here:

The iCone

Here's a link to my original Christmas blog post from 2007. 

Tentacles

more from the mouth of my littlest one:

Child: "Mom, can we go to McDonald's for dinner?"
Me: "No." 
Child: "Why not?" Me: "Because their food is not so good for your body." 
Child: "Oh, is it because they put tentacles in it?" 
Me: "What?" 
Child: "Dad said they spray tentacles on the meat." 

Do you get it?  She overheard Geof telling Hi-Hat about parts of Food Inc. that revealed the use of meat filler and what that actually is.  She meant to say "they spray chemicals on it."  Chemicals/tentacles - what's the difference?  Both seem gross to me! 

Setting Priorities . . .

. . . of the aperture and shutter speed variety, that is!  Hi-Hat is a Cub Scout this year, and this week he has started working toward earning belt loops - rewards for learning about different subjects.  He and Geof looked over the list this week, and it turns out he already had a number of belt loops under his belt (horseback riding, thanks to the horse birthday party last weekend), ping pong (thanks to the ping pong table that is parked in our garage), and computers.  He's also working on a reading/writing loop and tomorrow he'll earn a bowling loop.  Today I had already planned to go on a photo walk with some ladies from church, so it was the perfect opportunity for me to teach Hi-Hat some of the photography basics he needed.  Armed with our DSLR cameras, we hit the ground at NC State.  He learned all about aperture and shutter speed and how they work together.  We practiced taking photos with blurred motion, stopped motion, short depth of field and long depth of field.  We over exposed and under exposed.  We zoomed in and zoomed way out.  He loved it!  I loved it, too.  We never once set the camera on Auto, and he was pretty quick to start figuring out how to change the camera's aperture or shutter speed settings.  I think it will be fun to keep working with him, even after the belt loop has long since been earned.  And what I loved most was just investing the time together - talking, learning and having some fun.  I'm so glad I didn't sell my little DSLR!

he was so cute walking around campus among all the college students - as he's approaching his 8th birthday and seeming so big around here, he seemed quite small once again this evening. :)

Here Comes the Sun

Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

~ Lamentations 3:21-23