Happy New Year!

1 January 2015, 12:00 am by Giggles
Categories: Happy Things

Something inside me tells me this next year is going to be big.
I can hardly wait for the adventures it has in store.

Happy 2015!!

3 Shared thoughts

A Nativity for a 1-year-old

24 December 2014, 12:02 pm by Giggles
Categories: Folks, Gospel, How To, Quilting/Sewing/Knitting/Crafting

When I was in college my mom made me a nativity out of scrap 2x4s she picked up at the home construction sites in our neighborhood. It’s a wonderful little set and I love pulling it out every year. There are 7 blocks total – the Holy family, a star, angels, shepherds, a donkey, wise men, and Samuel with a llama.

Random Giggles | A Nativity for a 1-year-old

It’s a pretty indestructible set so we put it out where Iddo could play with it. Turns out she loves stacking the blocks and has made some rather interesting nativity stacks with them. Because they are scraps though they aren’t exactly square cuts and so she’s a bit limited in her stacking possibilities. I thought we could make her a set of nativity blocks with squarer edges. We made this set for her.

Random Giggles | A Nativity for a 1-Year-Old
Random Giggles | A Nativity for a 1-Year-Old

This is how we did it.

Materials:

  • 2 sets of 2″ wooden blocks from Hobby Lobby (8 blocks total)
  • Multi-Media Paper. Or card stock. Or just regular paper.
  • Nativity Blocks PDF. The drawings we used were done specifically by my mom for Iddo. You will need to find your own clip arts, drawings, or stickers to use
  • Crayola Watercolors
  • Crayola Colored Pencils
  • Mod Podge

When designing the blocks we knew we wanted an image on one face and a label on another. We then decided to put a different scripture related to the image on the other four faces of the cubes. Since the blocks came in packs of four we had an eighth block to use and decided to put words related to Christ and the nativity on that block.

The scriptures we used are:

Baby Jesus

 Mary

 Joseph

 Star
Angels

 Shepherds

 Wise Men
  • Glory
  • Peace
  • Joy
  • Hope
  • Light
  • Love

How To:
I printed the PDF on to the craft paper and then used the colored pencils to color in the drawings.

I used the water colors to give an edge to each square before cutting them out. The colored edges gave a bit of design to all the squares. I thought about printing the squares for each block on different colors of scrap book paper, but the water colors were a lot easier.

Random Giggles | A Nativity for a 1-Year-Old

A little Mod Podge to glue the paper down and then seal it against toddler antics and Iddo has a nativity set she can stack to her heart’s content.

Random Giggles | A Nativity for a 1-Year-Old Random Giggles | A Nativity for a 1-Year-Old

6 Shared thoughts

We like technology

16 December 2014, 5:14 pm by Giggles
Categories: Science & Tech

Here’s the deal. Brett and I do love technology. We both have degrees in it (me just a minor, him a Bachelors and Masters). We spend a lot of time with our computers. We met on the internet. We put binary on our wedding invitations and plan to put it on our grave stone as well.

Which is why it’s kind of funny that we both, separately, thought that a series on Dilbert earlier this month was a little close to home.

Dilbert - 3 Dec 2014
Dilbert - 4 Dec 2014

We don’t even have basic cable (or Netflix of Hulu+ or any of those actually). And we don’t have texting as part of our phone plan either.

I started thinking about the technology we do have in our house now. We’ve been married for 5 years, which is a long time in the technology world. But the only technology items in our house that are newer than our marriage are Brett’s flip phone (bought the week after we got married), a set of computer speakers, the digital camera I got for Mother’s Day this year, and the new wireless router and adapter we bought a few months ago.

Both of our desk tops are older than our relationship (we’ll have known each other 9 years in January). I bought my netbook the month before we got engaged and my phone the year before (also a flip phone).

We are talking about doing something about our dinosaur-ness some time next year though. We’ll join this new modern age eventually.

7 Shared thoughts

Elves on Shelves

10 December 2014, 9:06 am by Giggles
Categories: Random

There are a couple of things I really don’t enjoy about this time of year. There are a few songs that really should not be played even though they generally pass as Christmas songs.

There is one “timeless” tradition (the book was originally published in 2005) that seems to have sprung up almost over night, because someone figured out how to really market it. Elf on the Shelf. You have to have the official elf sold by the official Elf on the Shelf people or it doesn’t count. And then you have to drive yourself absolutely bonkers moving the elf around every night and making it get into all kinds of mischief all over your house. And if you really want to get into it they even have outfits you can buy for the elf to wear and its pet reindeer to add to the merriment.

Now, I’m sure there are people who absolutely love this whole elf thing (see Pinterest). And that’s just fine. The tradition of hiding an elf does exist in many families. I know that my grandpa had some elves made out of yarn that sat in inconspicuous places during the Christmas season. They’d been around for a long time. And the story is told of my uncle on the other side of my family who found a similar elf that my grandma had put out and beat it up explaining that it wasn’t going to tell on him to Santa.

So putting out little elves is probably a tradition. But that tradition did not involve as much planning and mess as the people on Pinterest would have you believe. Maybe we could go back to just putting the darn thing on a shelf and leave it at that.

What’s your opinion on the elf? Creepy and excessive or cute and fun? (Clearly I’m biased, but it’s my blog so I can do that.)

7 Shared thoughts

Tell me the stories of Jesus

30 November 2014, 4:12 pm by Giggles
Categories: Family, Gospel

Brett and I started reading the scriptures together in March of 2008. Almost a year before we agreed we were dating exclusively. More than a year and a half before we got married. We’d trade off whose place we were at on Sunday evenings and read several pages.

In 2008 we read the New Testament. We had some pretty crazy tangential discussions during those evenings and started our ever increasing number of inside jokes related to the scriptures very early on (Matthew 25 actually).

In 2009 we read the Doctrine & Covenants on Sundays and after we got married we threw the Pearl of Great Price into the mix to fill out the rest of the days of the week.

In 2010 we set out to read the entire Old Testament. And we almost did. We took a little weekend trip in February and left our reading chart at home and some time that weekend we skipped a page but we were never quite sure which page. So that year we read the entire Old Testament minus one page in Leviticus. That was also when we started noticing all the “good” Biblical names in Chronicles that nobody ever thinks of for their babies when they say they want a good Biblical name. So we picked out a handful, like Iddo, to use for our future children pre-conception, in utero, and as screen names after birth.

It took us till 2011 to finally get around to reading The Book of Mormon. That year we read the New Testament on Sundays and the Book of Mormon the rest of the week. We read it again in 2012.

Last year we decided to tackle the Old Testament again, but this time we were going to spread it out over 2 years, doing it all in one year was a lot of Old Testament. We read the Doctrine and Covenants on Sundays last year and the Old Testament the rest of the week. We continued reading the Old Testament this year.

Friday we finished the Old Testament cover-to-cover, not missing any pages. We started reading it 5.5 months before Iddo was born and she’s just over 17 months old now. That Old Testament is a LONG book. We’re going to finish out the year with The Pearl of Great Price again.

Not counting that mysterious page in Leviticus, by the end of this year we will have read all of the standard works twice together. It’s made for some great discussions and a lot of laughs too.

5 Shared thoughts

I Knit

29 November 2014, 5:10 pm by Giggles
Categories: Quilting/Sewing/Knitting/Crafting

When Iddo says “I knit” it means she sees an elephant. When I say “I knit” it means I take two knitting needles (or four) and some yarn and make something. This year I’ve made a few things I can show off before Christmas. The rest have to wait till after Christmas.

Iddo had her first birthday earlier this year and we happened to be with my family that day. I got it in my mind that I needed to knit everyone a tiny turtle as a party favor for her birthday. We even sent some to Grandma and Grandpa Dennis who joined the party via Skype. The adults at the party got the normal turtle colored turtles. The kids got one of the “poison dart” turtles. Iddo keeps hers in the diaper bag and for a while loved sucking on the head. I keep mine in my purse as a little reminder of my little turtle. Dad’s is on his desk. About half way through I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew but then I figured out how to streamline attaching heads and legs and they actually went pretty fast.

Bale of Birthday Turtles Poison Dart Turtles

Way back in my sophomore year of college I started knitting my very first sweater. I’ve finished several hats, some baby booties, lots of wash cloths, many scarves, and a whole bunch of tiny knitted toys since then, but I had yet to finish a sweater. Saturday I finally finished a sweater. Except it wasn’t the one I cast on over 15 years ago. It was one I cast on less than a month earlier.

Last winter my dad knit Iddo a beautiful cardigan sweater to wear in our “cold” winter weather. She’s out grown it so I thought I’d see what I could do this year. I had to do a lot of lengthening of the different pieces to make it fit her so I’m glad I could measure it against her as I went. It isn’t as fancy as last year’s, and I need to work on a looser cast-on and my seams, but it’ll do for this year. She even likes wearing it when we go out, so that’s a definite plus. Brett picked out the color. We were trying to match her eyes and it’s a pretty close match.

Precious Sapphire Hoodie

Now, if she’d stop hugging my skeins and walking off with them while I’m trying to knit I might be able to get a few more projects done.

10 Shared thoughts

It was a good week for my news feed

28 November 2014, 11:47 am by Giggles
Categories: Health, Learn Something, News

I learned several interesting things this week as I skimmed through the headlines in my news feed and elsewhere.

With regards to gratitude:
Facebook analyzed what English speakers in the US were most likely to be thankful for by state. The results were kind of interesting. People are actually thankful for YouTube? People need to get a life. Arizona being thankful for rain isn’t that surprising.

Researchers have done studies and determined that we are more grateful when we feel the person doing the service was acting out of their own free will rather than having been forced in some way or another to do the service. Makes sense to me. Nobody wants to feel like a project. But everyone loves getting cookies out of the blue.

With regards to dinosaurs:
Paleontologists are rather annoyed with Hollywood for ignoring the last 30 years of dinosaur research in the making of the new Jurassic Park movie. The movie dinosaurs are too big and don’t have any feathers. I find it rather funny but I’m going to side with the paleontologists on this one. Real dinosaurs are much more fascinating and reality is often much scarier than fiction.

With regards to health:
Being fat is responsible for a large percentage of new cancer cases, especially in North America. Interestingly, they expect the trend to only increase as economic prosperity spreads. People get rich. They get fat. They get cancer. Given my family history of cancer I’m willing to do whatever it takes to reduce my odds. Maintaining a healthy weight is definitely one of the things I can control.

4 Shared thoughts