Game Time

Age of Empires III

Adam and I got kicked out of the house this evening, Drew, Tom and I went to Rocky Mountain WingShak for dinner. Mmm, wings.

We played Age of Empires at Drew's house, I brought 2 computers. Tom, Drew, and I played 3 computers to start, the computers didn't fare too well. Then we played a couple of Free for all games, I won the first, Drew won the second. We are headed into Xbox 360 land for a while at this point...

One more Christmas picture

I think what she is trying to say is: "Did someone really wrap up a package of socks and give it to me thinking I would be excited by them?" Classic picture, Tom.

Tom's Gifts

I tried to get a picture of Tom with his presents. (For Mom...)

Other pictures of the Christmas morning mayhem

OK, so the mayhem was pretty controlled for six kids...

New coats

The girls got new coats. Tom, our expert Christmas photographer, was on had to document.

Santa brought Emma a turnip for Christmas...

This year, Santa decided to include some stew ingredient for the kids stockings, in addition to the normal fruit, candy, Little Ceaser's gift certificates, and coloring books they normally get. Kate got celery, Mary got carrots, Emma got a turnip and some rolls, Ruth got potatoes, Lily got onions, and Adam got yellow squash.


I added some stew meat, garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, and oregano to the mix, and the stew turned out pretty nice. We called it "Santa stew", but it has a different context than the "Easter Bunny Roast" I hear my family did one year after I moved out...

Electric Guitar

Grandma Payne send Emma an electric guitar for Christmas. Emma Really enjoys it.

To Emma's shagrin, Lily also enjoys the guitar, and steals it when Emma is not looking...

Adam

The slobber is because he is teething. The surprised look has more to do with the fact that the vacuum is running than it does with my taking his picture...

Lily's birthday

Lily opened some presents tonight. She had been waiting all day to tear into them..

The highlight of the night was the big giant box with the baby doll accessories. Several fights have already broken out about them. (Ruth also likes Lily's presents.)

Hoodlum Reindeer

I think the sucker was a nice touch on Emma's part.

Gingerbread house festival

Mary and Emma both made Gingerbread houses at school this week. In this picture you have just missed the part where Mary had an entire side of the house in her mouth trying to get pieces off... (We were too slow with the camera.)

Requisite pose, but not before pieces were missing.

Emma's pose, she was able to hold off before pictures were taken...

Emma did a pretty good job with hers. They are both gone now, as happens to all good gingerbread houses...

2009 Christmas Cookie lineup - Week 3

AKA "Small plate week"

I made some chocolate stars, but forgot about them, they didn't get on the plates. Tara liked the stars so much she went out and got some different molds tonight for me to make more. I've got one fan at least...

This week's "cookie" lineup:

• Banana bread
• Chocolate chip cookies
• sugar cookies - now from a mix! - save an hour or so...
  
• coconut encrusted thumbprint cookies with either apricot, raspberry, or marionberry jam on top
• chocolate covered pretzel sticks
• candy cane

The deliverees:

• Bell
• Botts
• Bright
• Bullock
• Capps
• Carlisle
• Cole
• Gonzalez
• Heftel
• Howell
• Keele
• Kelley
• Mackay
• Marble
• Martinsen
• Niccoli
• Oakes
• Perazzo
• Reece
• Wilde
  

Book Review

In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan

This book is about the "western diet" and how much of it really is not food. The author takes quite a bit of time talking about how "Nutritionalism" as a science has been trying to break food down to it's individual nutrients, not necessarily with a lot of success. (He uses the ever changing products "margarine" and "baby formula" as examples. He figures that if they really could do it, baby formula by now would be the same as brest milk...)

Anyhow, he talks about how the macro- and micro- nutrients in foods appear to be more than the sum of their parts. His ideas are that our diet is what makes us sick as a people. (At least all kinds of sicknesses people get these days.)

The last section of the book go over 3 different sets of suggestions he has: Eat Food (as opposed to 'food like products'), Mostly Pants (He thinks eating more plants is good for us, eating less processed food is good for us, and is not necessarily just an 'organic' guy...), Eat Less (He would have us pay more for our food. We would get better food. Just eat less of it.)

It was an interesting book, I would recommend it to anyone, especially people that just eat junk all the time. One of his ideas is to have the family start sitting down for dinner together again, which we started doing before I read this book. I think the girls enjoy it, hopefully someday we can see some benefit from it... (It is still early in the process...)

By the way, I think this is the first time I have used the word "breast" on this blog. My hit count will likely go up now...

mp3 player

2 weeks ago, Tara was telling me she wanted to find a relatively inexpensive mp3 player for her niece, and wanted me to watch slickdeals to see if one came. 30 minutes later, a deal for an mp3 player popped up.

The mp3 player was $11 with free shipping. I didn't really read the description, I just saw that it was a refurbished 1GB mp3 player and ordered it.

The thing came today, and it ended up being a 1GB Sansa mp3 player, with FM tuner, kind of like Tara's 2GB mp3 player, but newer, with a color screen. We loaded some music on it for her, then I noticed the thing had a microSD slot. I pulled the microSD card out of my phone, and the mp3 player synced the music that was on it. I wonder what we will find in the next 12 days for Brianna for Christmas... (Just kidding.)

If I had been playing attention to what I was actually ordering, I might have ordered a few of these mp3 players. buy.com is not selling these anymore. I guess I will need to wait to see if they ever come up again...

The 2009 Christmas Cookie project - week 2

Last Monday, we continued our cookie delivery quest. We ended up taking the girls in the van, and let them make deliveries. (We need to figure out a way to get deliveries done before the girls get tired.) Last Monday was "Big plate night", we delivered to bigger families.

This week's cookie lineup:

• banana bread
• chocolate chip cookies
• andes peppermint cookies
• sugar cookies - all cut into trees and frosted
• oatmeal raisin cookies
• no flour monster cookies
• blueberry muffins
• candy canes

This week's delivery lineup:

• Anderson
• Berrett
• Brimhall
• Callaway
• Champagne
• Daniel
• Egbert
• Fromm
• Garrett
• Harper
• Johnson
• Kovacs
• Morales
• Pope
• Shields
• Werner
• Palmer
• Hales
• Christiansen

More to come in just a few days. We picked up some sugar cookie mix from Costco the other night, which will make it easier. It takes so long to make sugar cookies from scratch...

Ward Christmas party

We had our Ward Christmas party tonight. I think Tara was a little nervous about it for a while, but it turned out fine. Except for the large number of children running and yelling in the halls all evening, some of them ours.

I sliced the hams for the thing, I think I did a pretty good job, if I say so myself. There were about 175 people that showed up, which was pretty good, I thought. The Primary did a little Nativity, the girls were angels. (At least for a few minutes...)

Just about everyone seemed to have a good time, and get enough to eat. (There was plenty of ham.) I waited to long to go for potatoes, and didn't end up eating, at least until we got home. The party went for an hour and a half, the Bishop ended the thing, had a pray, and asked people to help clean up. I pushed around a garbage can collecting donations.

While cleaning up, one lady complained that we were cleaning up. She thought the party was going to go until 8:30, not 8pm. She was complaining that her kids didn't have a chance to eat. The thought in my head, which I didn't say, was "Your kids would have had plenty of time to eat if they hadn't been running through the halls all night." I didn't say that. 5 or 6 years ago, I might have. I think Tara is happy that I sometimes edit myself more often these days.

Writer's Clob Christmas Gala

Tara goes to a monthly writers club. It is a few of the ladies in the ward that just get together to write about a topic and share what they write. They had their first annual "Christmas" gala last night. Guests were invited, Tara decided to bring me.

The dress code was casual to classy, I wore jeans, a white shirt, tie, and suit coat.

While they were waiting for everyone to arrive (there ended up being 10 people there), the guys were in the kitchen, the suggestion was made that we head downstairs to watch a game. Had the ladies not decided to eat first, and read second, that was where we would have been.

After they had some light desserts, we all sat an talked. It was kind of funny listening to some of the stories. We heard a story that justifies never, ever buying a real Christmas tree. Ever. It was a nice little evening. Not exactly what I would call a gala, but a nice evening.

Kate's "Christmas" Concert

On Wednesday night, we went to Kate's school to listen to her sing in the 3rd grade choir. Kate has been practicing in the choir for a couple of months and really looked forward to the concert.

They did a few songs, usually when we go to the school for something, the gym is completely packed, and it is hard to get seats for us all together, but Wednesday night wasn't too bad, not crowded at all.

I tried to take pictures of Kate from our seats, but I guess the lighting wasn't good for how far away we were, and the pictures didn't turn out all that well. At one point while they were singing, I tried to get closer by going around to the side, but I guess I couldn't get all that close.

Anyway, the music teacher had them sing songs from all over the world. They included some Jewish songs just to make sure no one got offended. (The program for the night called it a "Holiday" concert. I guess the school is afraid of writing the word "Christmas", at least outside of kindergarten. Emma's class is learning about how Christmas is celebrated all over the world...)

Kate did a good job, and seemed to enjoy it. It was a fairly short event, which was an added bonus for a family of 6 small children.

Back down to a two car family

We sold our minivan today - to Drew. It took us quite a bit longer than we planned back in May, but that is ok. It is nice to not have that second car payment to thing about anymore.

Hopefully it will be a good van for them, it really has been for us.

New Computer

Our current home computer is very old by computer standards. It is somewhere around 8 years old, and is starting so show its age. I have tried nursing it along over the years, I have had to add disk space to it twice, and added memory to it once or twice in its day.

In the last week or two, it has started to have little hard drive failures. It will hang on Tara while she is trying to get something done on the computer, and she will be unable to get it to recognize the disk after a reboot. I have got it running again so far, but the signs of impending death are clearly there.

I looked at a couple of different machines from Dell, and looked at some HP machines. This past week, Dell was running some deals, I ended up getting a nice computer for the amount of one of the machines I had spec'ed out, but the one we got had many more upgrades in it.

The computer I got? A Dell Inspiron 530, 4GB of memory, 20inch flat panel monitor with integrated speaker, 320GB hard drive, DVD+/-RW drive, and a 4 year accidental care warranty. Not the best computer money can buy, but for what we will use it for here at home, not a bad deal at all.

They also gave me 2 business day shipping, my new machine was in Memphis this morning, and is only 40 miles away right now. It should arrive sometime tomorrow.

The first thing I will do? I will install Windows XP over the top of the Vista installation Dell provides. (Unless someone can give me a compelling reason not to in the next 21 hours...) I have the home directory for the old machine, including all music, photos, etc on an external hard drive for our existing machine, so it should be fairly easy to move everything over. It will be really nice to have the extra space on the desk by getting rid of the CRT monitor.

The second thing I will do? I will probably install name extraction software for Tara. The third thing? Wish I could find the Zoo Tycoon 2 disk (the one that I swear I loaned to Missy...) so I can install the game and both expasion packs I have so we can play the game for the girls on that machine. There are some silly little games the girls like to play that we can't install, we don't have the installation files. This might not be such a bad thing.

I hope we don't ever have to use the Accidental Care coverage, but you never know, especially around here, that is why I got it. I would save the thing for Christmas, and just wrap it up, but that seems a little silly since the machine on the desk right now is so slow and is having so many problems...

Restaurant Reviews

I have two restaurant reviews to do from the past few weeks:

Sam Hawk

I went to this Korean restaurant a few weeks ago with one of the Stake presidency. I forget what I had, I forgot the name of it about 3 minutes after I ordered it, but it was some sort of spicy chicken dish. Very spicy. Not that there is anything wrong with that. While we were waiting for our order, they brought out some little appetizers on little dishes for us. It was stuff like kimchi, little black beans, and some other stuff I didn't really know what it was, but it was tasty. I don't know how the place ranks in the world of Korean cuisine, but I liked it, and would go back again.

I have been having problems using my bipap lately, it is time for a new mask and tube, every time I use the thing, I end up sneezing all day the next day. The night before we went to Sam Hawk, I used my machine. After lunch, I was sneezing, but each sneeze left me with a good dose of "Spicy Korean food acid reflux". Good times. I'd still go back to the restaurant again...

International Buffet

A new restaurant recently opened in between Movies 8 and Shopko here in town. It bills itself as a "Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and American buffet." Ruth spent some time with me at my office one day last week, I took her to this restaurant to check it out. I liked it enough that on Monday, when Tara ended up picking me up from work, she looked like she needed more time than 10 minutes away from the girls, so I took her back to this place for dinner.

They have a mongolian barbque of sorts in it, a little sushi station, and lots of steamed shrimp. (Tara's favorite are those steamed then chilled shrimp.) What I think I like about this place is that they don't seem to care to dull down the taste of their dishes. Too many Chinese buffets make their dishes taste kind of bland, at least around here. (Is it the same in other places?) At this place, the foods actually have flavor. They at least taste like you would think they should. I liked the dim sum, which I guess was a number of the things sitting there. I couldn't figure out why they weere unlabeled until I went to Wikipedia and looked up dim sum. Turns out all those things were 'dim sum.' I don;t know if the sushi was good sushi, since I don't eat sushi all that often, but it doesn't matter, since any time I have sushi, I use generous portions of wasabi with it. (Cleans out the nasal passages in a hurry...)

When I was there with Ruth, they had fried mushrooms. Those things were good. Ruth and I both liked the fries they had. I liked the wontons, potstickers, and General Taos chicken, and a lot of the other stuff. It just had flavor.

Ruth's most favorite thing? Their dessert station had an ice cream section, they had about 6 different tubs of different flavors of ice cream. Nice touch, not just a soft serve ice cream machine most places have.

Anyhow, they look have way busy, at least the few times I have driven by there. Maybe they will stick around. Maybe it is about the flavor after all...

Woah! It's the 10th.

Somehow I took a 9 day vacation from the blog. Sorry about that everyone. I guess I was just out of energy half the time, and busy the other half.

One thing I have been playing with - gmail. I settled on the "shiny" theme, the "planets" theme was a little too dark, the contrast kind of bothered my eyes. (The terminal theme was way too much contrast. Funny how 10 years can change things. The old mainframe terminal wasn't so badback then, the internet was young. These days, there is a lot of white space on web pages, you get used to seeing it. I still miss 2 things about the mainframe days. I miss sleeping on top of the big Xerox printer during the night, waking up when the thing stopped because the paper filled the trays. It was nice and warm up there. The other thing I miss was the master console that used to beep whena message came up that needed attention. I could half sleep until I heard a beep. There seems to be a lot of sleeping involved at work those days. Now, I might not even wake to an explosion outside, much less a little beep...)

Anyhow, gmail also released something called 'tasks' in their labs. You can start multipe task lists, and link emails into the tasks to refer back to them. No longer will I need to use my inbox for a task list. It is kind of nice. It is new, I am sure it will get better, right now you can't add a priority to the tasks in your list, but you can at least link in emails, which I really like. I went from 50 emails stored in my inbox yesterday to one, that one will be archived tomorrow.

Tithing Settlement (aka "the girls overwhelm the Bishop in 10 minutes")

We had tithing settlement yesterday afternoon. The Bishop took a few minutes to ask the girls some questions about tithing and do some teaching. He kept asking Ruth questions, the answers Ruth kept giving had nothing remotely to do with tithing. (Bishop: "Ruth, do you know what tithing is used for?" Ruth: "I once smashed my fingers in the piano. It hurt.") Ruth certainly had a lot to say about him. Lily sent the entire time with her hand raised shouting "My turn! My turn! My turn!", then when he turned to her, she started mumbling something. Once he was done to her, she was back to "My turn! My turn! My turn!"

At one point, he asked who their Mommy was married to. Ruth insisted it was baby Adam. (Unfortunately, he said 'married', not 'chained', so this answer was wrong.)

He showed them a Widow's mite that he had in a box, circa the time of Christ, the girls didn't seem all that impressed. Kate let out a 'wow.', but it sounded like her trying to humor him.

At least he only has to endure it once a year. We let him know this was pretty much how every Family Home Evening goes... He wanted to make sure we made a blog entry about it, it impressed him that much.

Will it blend?

Have you seen any of the "will it blend" videos on YouTube? They have this industrial strength blender that they chew all kinds of things up in. Tara wanted me to make her a shake, so I decided to make my own video.

As you can see, a Butterfinger does indeed blend. You can also see that after all this time, I still can't seem to figure out that Tara keeps the blender unplugged so that the girls don't fool around with it.

Maybe the hammer was overkill...

The 2009 Christmas Cookie Project - Week 1

We have restarted the Christmas cookie project again this year. This evening, the girls were way too crazy to try to deal with driving them all over the place delivering cookies, so we let them get the neighbors and put them to bed. Then Tara and I went to deliver the rest.

This week's cookie lineup:

• Banana bread
• Andes candies cookies
• Mexican wedding cookies
• Sugar cookies - complete with green frosting and green sprinkles
• Candy canes
• Little round creme filled chocolates

This week's delivery lineup:

• Snow
• Faux
• Duffin
• Falater
• Blackham
• Lott
• Christensen
• Teresa
• Corless
• Crow/Havasi
• Sawyer
• Rose
• Rose #2
• Kinsie
• Krommenhoek
• MacDonald
• Ringer
• Weinheimer

Will you make the cut next week? Only time will tell. Speaking up will bump your priority on the list higher. Bribery will put you on top...

One tired baby

Conversation with a 6 month old

Adam: {unexpected burp}
Me: "What's your last name?"
Adam: {throws up all over Tara}


I won't be asking that question again...

Christmas Tree #2

We have only gotten one of our 2 trees set up so far. The trees take up much less space than the old one did. We may be using the other tree for a ward Christmas party, so it might go up later.

Christmas Tree #1

This is our old Christmas Tree. It was given to us 10 years ago, and it was old then. Last year, we picked up a couple of new trees from Sears, this old tree has been banished to the outdoors. It is kind of sad looking without thousands of lights and hundreds of ornaments on it. It's slightly tilted, and "needs fluffing", as Tara says. I would have our little reindeer out there next to the tree, but I spent so much time trying to figure out which light was bad on a string of lights (there were 3 lights bad...) on Friday that I got demotivated to try to figure out which light is out on the reindeer.

The person that invented Christmas lights was smart. The person that got Christmas lights to fail after a year of use is a genius. An evil genius.

Family picture

We had some pictures taken after church this morning. We were looking for a picture to be able to send out with Christmas cards. I think this was the winner. Lily is this years winner of "the kid that wouldn't smile" contest.

A Thanksgiving tradition

After dinner, I announced we would proceed with a "Payne family Thanksgiving tradition." No one knew what I was talking about, until I said "The playing of video games." We played Mario Kart.

Leftovers! (It's a 1970's B movie...)

We had a bunch of dinner confirmations yesterday afternoon for Thanksgiving dinner. Tara's parents came over, Drew, Tom, Missy, and Steve all came over.

I hear Adam didn't get mashed potatoes today. I made a little extra in his honor. We had apple pie, made easier by the apple slicer Grandma Oaks send a while back, I was the only one who had a piece, and I only had a small piece. There is plenty of it left, and it is very good. Come on over and have some.

Tom requested banana cream pie. I sent the rest home with him. He liked it, but was unwilling to commit to it being the best banana cream pie he has ever had. Mary and Emma readily committed to it.

There was tons of food, and we have tons of leftovers. Anyone and everyone can stop by for leftovers. Or Leftovers!

Fine Print

I think the fine print you find on products is sometimes really funny. It is amazing some of the things you find on labels when you look. I am sure it is a product of all the lawsuits that go around. I remember when McDonald's had that little problem because someone spilled coffee on themselves and got burnt. They sued McDonald's for not letting them know the coffee was hot...

Anyhow I have a potential new regular feature here. I call it "reading the fine print." (Like the "May contain nuts" label on a bag of peanuts...) We will see if it sticks or not.

Today's entry:

I bought a new measuring cup, one of those new angled measuring cups, so you can see the volume being poured while looking from the top. The front label had a "Dishwasher safe, Microwave Safe*" label on it. When you followed the asterisk down to the bottom label, you found "Do not microwave fat (oil, butter, etc.) for longer than 4 minutes."

I thought I did more damage than good on Friday at work...

On Friday I installed an upgraded version of one of my tools on a new server. (This tool lets me perform the same task on multiple machines at the same time. I have all our machines discovered on the old machine.) The newer version has got some new import/export functionality in it that would make it lots faster to migrate to the new one, so I upgraded the tool on the old server. After the upgrade the tool didn't start the way it was supposed to. It looked like it was brain dead. I figured that I just made things worse for me, because now I wouldn't have the old machine to refer to when creating the new stuff on the newer tool. Lots of work was lost.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I went to reinstall a different machine. I got paged that the machine was down. It was the old tool paging me. I went on to the old machine, and the tool was up and running. It looks like it is fully up and functional with the upgraded tool. I actually saved us a lot of time because we have the import/export features now. I actually did get something useful accomplished on Friday.

The fine print in the documentation said that the upgrade would trash the DB if using an Oracle DB. Turns out that this must have been something they forgot to update in the documentation. It looks to me like the tool didn't start right away on Friday because it was busy converting the Oracle DB to whatever it needs now. That's good for me.

Thankgiving shopping list

• Potatoes
• Pie shells
• bananas
• vanilla or banana cream pudding mix
  
• Apples
• berries
  
• ice cream
• whipping cream
• cranberries
• cottage cheese
  
• gravy mix (The good kind)
• Roades frozen dinner rolls
• Sweet potatoes or yams
• Potato chips
  

Don't shout at me. The turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie are all being provided by an outside consultant. We already have plenty of green beans and corn. If you think sweet potatoes and yams are the same thing, don't head for the South any time soon. The potato chips are for the cook to snack on while cooking this stuff. It is all about the mashed potatoes anyway...

Dinner

We ate dinner at the table tonight. The girls were well behaved, which is a good sign for the first effort. (At least we didn't get discouraged after the first meal.) Dinner was pot roast, potatoes, and carrots, if it makes a difference. We do have leftovers.

Dinner Benches

I think I just finished the benches for the dinner table. Or at least did as much as these ones will get. Like everything, I have already thought of several different ways I would change these if I started over again, but these will do for now.


Spray paint ended up being a very effective way to paint these things, the paint got all in the little corners and crevices. You can see where the paint soaked in a little, I guess those are the areas that I didn't really get the primer one very well, but I think it gives it character. You can tell it was handmade instead of purchased on the store. (Not sure if that is a good thing, but they are only the second and third benches I have ever made, so I will take it.)

I took a roast out of the freezer tonight so we can have a nice Sunday dinner together tomorrow. I just hope I actually can find some time to get dinner made somewhere in there. (We have the last Ward conference for the year tomorrow. Long day expected.)

Batman: the Brave and the Bold

Cartoon Network has started a new cartoon series Friday nights. Back in the day, there was a comic called "The Brave and The Bold", basically every issue was a teamup of a couple of characters in the DC universe. (A lot of the time it was Batman and someone else.)

It is only 2 episodes into it, but so far I like it. It is kind of fun, the tone of the show is not quite as dark as previous Batman cartoons. They seem to be taking characters that didn't get a lot of face time in previous cartoon series and running with it. It's not too intense for the girls, at least so far, least week they had little cell like guys being saved, this week they have plastic man as the teamup.

Now that I say this, it looks like it is not one next week, but picks up again on Dec 5th. If they keep it up along the lines they have so far, I say it is a keeper...

New gmail themes

Yesterday Gmail rolled out a new feature where you can select themes for your gmail page. I kind of like the change.


This one is called "Planets". I am not sure what planet this is being displayed, but I assume that if you leave the thing on the setting, it will change the background for you from time to time.

This one is called "Ninjas". The ninjas seem a little odd. They annoy me. I won't be using the Ninjas theme...

This one is "Marina" or something like that. It is the 'normal' theme I would pick.

And finally, the funniest of the bunch, a "terminal" theme. It takes me back to my days working the computer room as a student. It would be absolutely perfect if the browser would ring a little bell every time mail came in...

It is also good for stopping people from reading over your shoulder...

Bon Appetit

I have a one year gift subscription I can give for Bon Appetit magazine. Anyone want it?

The taping of the diaper

Lily has developed a habit of taking off all her clothes at night. I finally figured out why she has been doing this tonight. Quite often, we find ourselves chasing Ruth out of Lily's room after Lily has been put to bed. Ruth has differing reasons for being in there, tonight I realized the most popular reason. Ruth goes in there to change clothes. She gets the idea that she can go in and get some dress up stuff out, and strips down. Lily is just following suit.

The problem with this is that after Lily strips down, if her diaper is not a "clean canvas", she will take the diaper off, the diaper and contents end up on the floor. This is not a nice thing to wake up to. It's like "Monday morning at the monkey cages", not that I have ever worked at a zoo or spent any time with real monkeys.

One day last week, I changed her sheets twice, then got some packing tape and taped her diaper around her so she couldn't pull the tabs off. No tape on her skin, that would be mean, but just a row of tape around the diaper where the tabs are. Lily does not like this activity. Since I have been taping the diaper, we have found her stripped down several times, but the diaper remains.

Being the very polite 2 year old she is, this morning (or last night, they kind of blend together) I changed her diaper, and taped her up. She started crying about having to have the diaper taped up, once I got the onesie and pajamas back on her, she stopped crying and said "Thank you." I guess being taped up isn't that bad.

Pumpkin Carving Injury

This past week Emma said she still wanted to carve a pumpkin, I told her in the middle of the week that if she got her room clean by Saturday, I would help her carve a pumpkin. On Friday, Kate and Mary helped her clean her room, and on Saturday Emma made her bed. Pumpkin carving time.

I had bought a junky little carving set at the store before halloween, the little carving knife bent in two within the first minute of carving. I used a boning knife for the rest of the carving, which worked much better.

We used a little plastic template to make a girls face on the pumpkin. Emma seemed to enjoy it. At first she wanted to do the scarecrow template, but that one was rated "Expert", the girl was rated "Intermediate." For some reason, Emma wanted to take some of the insides with her to school, but I vetoed that decision and tossed all the innards in the trash.

I accidentally knocked one of the eyes out of the thing when I was trying to carve it, it still looks ok.

The injury? No blood. We had been keeping all the pumpkins on the front porch. When Emma went to get hers Lily was also out there, Lily took one of the little pumpkins and set it at the top of the steps. After dark, I left the house to go fill the van up with gas (Under $2 a gallon - Filled the tank for under $50...) but I didn't see the little pumpkin, stepped on it, and fell off the porch. My left hand still stung a little this morning, my right hand still hurts, my back is hurt, and my ankle hurts.