Sewing

Here are a few of the projects that I have been working on for friends.


Pillows for the couch.

A fancy tablecloth.

With really heavy fabric, I might add.

A bench seat cushion.

Take a look at those corners. Whew!

The kids were invited to a birthday party with a slide & jumpy house. Of course the adults were invited too & we did our share of jumping around.

Look at that hair go flying!

His too!

Look! It's Spiderman!!

Well, actually it was Tony, but he had us all fooled for a minute.

Getting ready to go down the slide.

This is Isaiah. Derrek & Mariah's littlest one for those of you who know them. He's turning 2 soon & he can dribble a basketball, dribble a soccer ball(with his feet), play ping-pong and shoot a basketball. The boy has more athletic ability than I've ever seen. Amazing.


Mariah on the right.


As I said the parents got in on the action & a good time was had by all.

Chinese New Year

We as a family went to the Discovery Center to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We got to make crafts, go on a scavenger hunt, sample food & see a dragon!

Guess who? (See Tony in the background?)

Adrienne kept flapping the mouth open & closed & made it very difficult to get a shot of her smile. :)

Eli in the Dragon costume.

The real dragon dancers.

They came around & the kids got to feed the dragon. So thrilling to have a dragon so close!

And... Eli made it into the newspaper with his dragon creation.

Fancy Pink Fairy Cocoa

Adrienne helps me out in Eli's school library every week & the Librarian gave her this cookbook as a way of saying thank you for helping. She actually helps me alphabetize & shelve the books and also puts some books away according to their reading level. It's giving her good practice with her numbers & letters. She is so proud of having her very own cookbook. It's called Fairies Cookbook.

She wanted to make something out of the cookbook so we chose the Fancy Pink Fairy Cocoa.

We opted to not make the pink part but did make the "fancy" part.

She got corn starch all over the place & all over her face.

The proud chef!

Our cocoa creation.

Petting zoo at...Church?

What's a visit to church with stopping off at the petting zoo? As part of the New Year's series at church they brought in animals that might be found in Israel. They kindly even provided hand sanitizer. For the adults, there was also an iron forger, a weaver & a man creating clay pots on a potter's wheel. This last week we got to sample dates & figs. Yum!




Adrienne, of course, does not care where the animals are from or why they are there, but just wanted to pet them all.

Notice the little jumper Adrienne is wearing. She picked out the pink kitty fabric for me to sew her a dress & helped me lay out the fabric. It's reversible & has an "A" embroidered on it, but we made sure it wasn't scarlet.

A few random days in January

Here are a few other things we did in January.

Adrienne playing balloon games at Jill's birthday party. She won a prize for keeping the balloon up in the air the longest. Way to go girl!

Ahhh, yummy cafeteria food. Adrienne and I always have lunch with Eli on Mondays and this particular Monday Tony was able to come and meet us. Eli was thrilled.

We recently read the book Snowflake Bentley about a man who spent his life photographing snowflakes. The kids wanted to see if we could capture a snowflake on film so there you are. Here are some others if you want to see the professional version.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/photos3/photos3.htm

Believe it or not I actually had a few tokens left from our visit to CEC in California so I decided to take the kids one morning so Tony could get some sleep. Crazy fun.

Does anyone know what this is? I think it's an elephant or a vacuum cleaner but it has to be one of the strangest kids rides.

What's a visit to CEC without a hug from the main mouse himself?

Eli's Baskeball Game

Eli was on the honor roll for school & received a free ticket to a MTSU basketball game. The rest of the family was able to go too, at a discounted rate. Even though it was after church that night, we went & had a good time & saw several people we knew. As a bonus MTSU even won !

My smiley guy.

Eli decided to take some photos of the family enjoying the game.

Then of course Adrienne wanted to take pictures too.

Adrienne's photo of Eli.

The Discovery Center

My monkeys up in the tree.

Showing off their climbing ability!

The world of the tiny object is so fascinating. Adrienne could have stayed here the whole time.

A nod to Uncle Dusty. Just imagine it says Ford instead of Nissan. :P

She really had fun replacing the muffler, changing the oil, trading out the license plates & rotating the tires. We may have a future mechanic on our hands.

This was one of Eli's favorites of the day. Using levers the kids can make the bowling ball travel up & down the course. They would try & see how fast they could make it through. It required teamwork & it was neat to see them figure out how they could best work together to make it happen.

Transportation galore : cars, trucks & trains

Bringing coal from the mines to the train.