Crafts with my kiddos – Other mediums

11 November 2015, 3:48 pm by Giggles
Categories: Quilting/Sewing/Knitting/Crafting

Last week I shared all the hand and foot print art I’ve done with our kids. This week I wanted to share the other types of art that I’ve done with them so far.

Markers – 4 months old. I taped Color Wonder markers to her feet, sat her up in the bouncy chair, and then held the paper to her feet on a clip board while she kicked.

2013-10-08

Finger Paint – 6 months old. She was more interested in eating the paper than the paint. The paint was edible, the paper was not. After she was finished I scanned her paintings into the computer and used them as background images for Christmas presents. It was pretty cool. We called them LED Designs.

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Crayons – 14 months old and on. I gave her crayons for the first time at 14 months. I would put a piece of paper on a clipboard and use painters tape to tape down the other side. She’s had a lot of fun with her crayons, sometimes using one in each hand at the same time. Her crayons are always available to her now and I try to keep little coloring books out for her too. To make a coloring book I stack five pieces of paper together and cut them in half. I then fold each half in half and do a basting stitch down the fold with my sewing machine. I can make two 10-page books for her that way. Then she tells me what to draw on each page and she colors them.

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Painting (with a fork) – 2 years. Just what it sounds like. The Pinterest idea had the kids doing the fork prints in a circle to look like a firework. I think random 2-year-old whackings with a fork look like fireworks too.

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Torn paper – 2 years & 4 months. Turns out she doesn’t like tearing paper. But after I helped her get it torn she did alright gluing it down.

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Painting (on a pumpkin) – 2 years & 4 months. This pumpkin has a yellow face and a black face. If I would’ve let her she would’ve done a face in every other color of tempera paint we have as well.

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Sidewalk Chalk – 22 months and on. She can’t go in the backyard anymore without wanting her colors. Our backyard is always very well decorated both with her own drawings and the ones she’s convinced us to do for her. Monsoon season did a good job of regularly clearing her canvas for her as well.

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2015-07-29 2015-08-17 2015-09-01
2015-09-26 2015-10-08 2015-11-11

2 Shared thoughts

Babies & Brains & Baby Brains

10 November 2015, 10:43 pm by Giggles
Categories: News, Science & Tech

I made Brett promise me that after we had kids I’d still be able to have conversations about topics other than baby poop. So here are some things I’ve learned about babies and brains and baby brains. Baby brains are one of my favorite topics. For a great book check out my review of The Philosophical Baby. Buy it on Amazon too – The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik

Babies

Our babies do not sleep in our room (I’m a wife in our room, not a mom). But we have had a twin bed in the babies’ rooms that I spent at least part of each night in the first month or so after they were born. And it was not good sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night to crying and be unsure which room I was in. I comforted Brett’s arm multiple times to try to get it to stop crying. And at least once I held onto his arm while he tried to get out of bed because I didn’t want his arm, which I thought was a baby, to roll off the bed and die. We all sleep so much better when we sleep all night in our own rooms.

Since reading that babies’ main motivation in their interaction with adults is to get the adult to smile at them while adults are aiming for the simultaneous smile, I’ve started smiling at our babies more without being overly concerned if they smile back at me.

Brains

In a comic explaining how our brains respond to humor, I think my favorite part is where they indicate that humor changes with age. Because yes.

An article about our growing dependence on digital memory really makes you stop and think, or at least it hopefully does. It’s not a good trend. Losing the ability to create long-term memories could be devastating to human culture and society.

Cognitive dissonance, that uneasy feeling in your brain, is actually a good thing. The main thing I found fascinating with a study about what parts of your brain are at work when you feel that way is that they used wallpaper choices to create the dissonance. Wallpaper? Really?

I really found it fascinating to read about how brains map time in the same way they map location. Perhaps that is why I can remember what I was thinking if I can remember when I was thinking it and how closely that is tied with where I was doing the thinking. Our brain cells really have the space-time continuum figured out.

Baby Brains

It seems that kids, especially under the age of 2, benefit more from dad reading to them than mom. They definitely benefit from mom reading to them. But just like everything else, moms and dads read to their kids differently and kids need both. Go Brett for reading to our kids at bedtime.

Babies have a critical period to learn how to say all the sounds in the language(s) they will speak as adults, and it’s between 8 and 10 months old. Anyone know where I can get native speakers from multiple languages who want to come talk to our kids a few times a week for the next 4 months?

Another interesting tidbit about babies and language is that they appear to need to be able to move their own tongue in order to differentiate between sounds. They aren’t actively making the sounds so it’s interesting that they need to have the capacity to do so.

2 Shared thoughts

I’m an orangutan

9 November 2015, 2:16 pm by Giggles
Categories: Family, Learn Something

I'm a momma monkey.

I’m a momma monkey.

We’ve been checking out PBS specials from the library and watching them at home when we want to watch something on TV and the kids are still up. The latest one we just finished was called “Becoming Human,” or as Iddo called it “Chimps.” I learned that modern orangutan mothers are in constant physical contact with their children for the first 4-5 months of their lives. Constant. The two are never apart. Always touching. And I think I might be part orangutan.

I hate being apart from my babies, for any reason, and for any length of time. And it’s more than just that they are nursing and I’m the only one who can do that. I need to be with them. And if it’s not me I need it to be Brett. I don’t constantly hold them. I do put them down so they can play or I can do other things, like sleep, but I am never far from them. I appreciate the offers of others to hold them, but no thank you. It needs to be me.

I want to say part of it is because of everything we went through to get them here, but it’s more than that and I imagine I would be the same way about it if our kids had come easily. It’s just who I am – an orangutan. Because before we know it they are off swinging through the trees all on their own.

2 Shared thoughts

Reverently

8 November 2015, 11:32 pm by Giggles
Categories: Gospel

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be reverent over the years. I’ve sat in many lessons in my life about how to be reverent. And I’ve spent a lot of time the past couple of years trying to figure out how to teach my children to be reverent because I definitely want them to understand it is more than just being quiet. Sitting perfectly silent in church while giving your brother a death stare does not a reverent person make.

Iddo likes to bring me the Primary Songbook and open it to any page she feels like and have me sing her that song. She can actually open it to several songs and sing the song that’s written on the page now because she recognizes the pictures that go with them. One day she brought me the song “Reverently, Quietly” and I actually paid attention to the words. I noticed all the -ly words and thought that maybe that wasn’t a coincidence – reverently, quietly, lovingly, softly, humbly.

That’s it. Right there. That’s what being reverent is. It’s not silent, but soft. It encompasses love and humility. I can teach my kids that. I can teach them to be reverent at church because they love Jesus and Heavenly Father. I can teach them to be reverent by being humble and teachable, ready to learn what the Spirit wants to softly whisper to them.

I’m positive that there will be at least one Sunday where they spend the entire meeting giving a silent death stare at one of their siblings. But hopefully they’ll at least understand that just because they were quiet doesn’t mean they were reverent.

2 Shared thoughts

Bagpipes

7 November 2015, 10:54 pm by Giggles
Categories: Random

Let it be noted, if anyone plays “Amazing Grace” at my funeral, it must be played on bagpipes. That’s the only way to play that song.

And then there’s this too, which is awesome: BBC | Astronaut plays bagpipes on International Space Station

4 Shared thoughts

Adventure is out there?

6 November 2015, 9:33 am by Giggles
Categories: Life

Adventure is out there! But I think we miss a lot of the adventure that is in here by always looking out there.

Back in April I reconnected with a friend of mine from high school, one of the few people from high school I was actually excited to find on social media. We haven’t seen each other in about 20 years and she asked what I’d been up to. This is how I replied (5 days before Shimri and Shimei were born):

The highlights – Got an elementary education degree at BYU, student taught in Mexico. Served a mission for the LDS church in Brasil for 18 months. Taught computers at an elementary school in Utah for 5.5 years and got a masters degree in education while doing that. And learned to belly dance. Met a Mr. Dennis on-line at the beginning of 2006. He lived in Arizona. Decided to get a PhD in education in Arizona much to his dismay. Moved to Tucson in 2008. In 2009 he decided me moving here was a good idea and we got married in November 2009. Discovered I am infertile and did that whole crazy thing. Got pregnant (and stayed pregnant) on our 6th round of IVF in 2012. Finished my dissertation and graduated very pregnant in 2013. Had our daughter in the summer of 2013. Got pregnant again last year and will have twins (a daughter and a son) sometime in the next week or so.

Day-to-day my life would probably be pretty boring. Right now it’s a never ending cycle of diaper changes. But take the bigger picture, step back a bit, and I’ve led a pretty adventurous life! And I’ve still got a lot of life left to live too. Given the right screen writer it might even make a decent movie.

The more of life I live the more convinced I am that everyone has an incredibly interesting life, the trick is knowing how to tell the story. Have you seen Humans of New York? Every person he talks to has a super fascinating story.

What are the highlights of your life in the last 20 years? What kind of adventures are you living each day?

5 Shared thoughts

Shimei

5 November 2015, 2:05 pm by Giggles
Categories: Family, Happy Things

Shimei is our little man. He has a smile that’s bigger than his face. We have yet to figure out how that works but it’s true. He’s an amazingly chill child and will fall asleep anywhere, although if he’s strapped down where he happens to be he’ll complain about it first, but not too loudly. He laughs. He laughs like the whole world is here for his amusement and he finds it highly amusing. We had him laughing so hard the other night his whole head turned red. It was hilarious. He loves to eat toes, his or his sisters’ it makes no difference to him (although they frequently have something to say about the matter).

I am eternally grateful for the science and technology that helped us get him to our family at both ends of his pregnancy – IVF to get him started and emergency c-section to get him here when he decided to give us the only real drama we’ve had with him and almost die right before birth.

My little man

4 Shared thoughts