Homecoming at Clemson

This was a fun weekend. It was Homecoming at Clemson, which is a bigger deal than I have ever seen anywhere else. I can't say I have a lot of college Homecoming experience, but this is certainly bigger than at BYU. Clemson has a free bus service that runs all over the city. It's fantastic. We live on the main line, so during the week it comes every half hour, but only on the hour on weekends. We decided to try our hand at riding it down to campus to see the festivities. The sororities and fraternities each year build these things they call floats, though they're stationary. I imagine there's a competition, but for us it was just cool to go look at them. They look something like this:

They're made entirely out of crepe paper, so it's amazing to see how detailed they get.

It was also football game day, so all the tailgaters were out. Oh my gosh, they know how to party it up here. They bring out their awnings and tables and BBQs and big screen TVs or two or three and what seems like truckloads of food and just party it up all over campus. Most of these people don't even go to the game. There's still 80,000 others that actually do that. Did I mention our town has like 14,000 residents? There are more hotels here than would seem possible to keep in business until you see the sheer number of people that arrive every game weekend. I'm sure that carries their business for the rest of the year.

We had a great time wandering around. We headed back to the bus stop not knowing what time it would actually come. Turns out we had just missed the last bus by maybe 10 minutes, so we had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. Good thing our kids were in fantastic moods. They did great. On a side note, apparently Spencer is terrified of busses. Who knew? He cried for several minutes the first one we went on. He was okay on the second, but he sure didn't love the ride.

I took a couple pictures of the kids this morning. Spencer loves to play with water colors, or really mix them into the water and turn it black. Cute kid.

Genevieve is just into everything. She loves to climb, do everything Spencer does, and generally be in the middle of everything.

I walked in the other day to find them wrestling and laughing hysterically. They are in such a fun stage now together.

Spencer loves to spin on this chair. He occasionally throws himself off he spins it so hard. I put Genevieve in with him and they loved it.

And this is just classic Genevieve. She loves to laugh. She finds everything funny. She really is my little ray of sunshine.

What a week!

It's been a crazy week. Spencer decided he wanted to potty train. In his words, "You want to sit on the big toilet with no diaper on." That was huge. So we tried Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, but he got overwhelmed about it, which is fine. We stopped and we'll try again when he shows interest. He asks to go every once in awhile. I'm excited to not have two kids in diapers, but I don't see a need to be the one always getting him to go to the bathroom. I want him to recognize the need. When he's ready, he'll get there, and that's just fine in my book.

In the midst of this Genevieve decided to get all her molars. At least one is in, but the others are all coming still. We had one cranky baby all week long. She's a lot happier this weekend though, which is great.

She's also our little daredevil. She's a crazy climber. She also thinks she's a big kid and can walk down stairs forwards instead of going down backward. We don't have stairs in our apartment, so she doesn't really practice going down them. So Tuesday she walked off the bottom step of the jungle gym at playgroup and came down on her cheek, scuffing it nicely. Thursday she did the same thing off the bottom stair at another park. Friday she climbed up on one of our kiddy chairs, then got distracted playing and tripped off backwards, clipping her cheek on the edge, leaving a huge purple bruise. I managed to grab her before she hit her head, but no such luck on the cheek. Her poor face. She takes it all in stride though. The fact that she can't get down from somewhere she climbs has absolutely no bearing on whether she climbs it. Spencer tends to stick close to my side when we're out and about, but Genevieve is off to the races the instant she gets set down. It's going to be exciting with this one!

Happenings this week

I finished painting my desk. I love it more than I should. The finish is silky smooth and I'm so pleased how well it turned out.

This not so little visit decided to make a massive web across the stairway by our front door. It's an orb weaver spider, also known as a garden spider or a writing spider or lots of other names. From what I've heard from friends and the internet, this isn't even that big, at about the size of a walnut. Some can get as big as your hand. They're pretty gnarly looking spiders. Our friendly maintenance guy was nice enough to find this sucker a new home.

Genevieve learned how to open our pantry and has been pulling out stuff ever since. She particularly likes the open box of pasta. She keeps chowing down on the stuff and drooling up a storm since she doesn't have enough teeth to really chew the stuff. A baby lock has since been installed on the door for my sanity's sake. Spencer already knows how to open it, but he has a bit more restraint. :)

Spencer decided to teach Genevieve the fine art of toothbrushing this weekend. It may backfire on him as he hoards our extra toothbrushes and she now thinks they're hers.

Genevevieve got to wear a new dress to church yesterday and the cuteness nearly killed me. This girl rocks the color orange. She had the cutest little shoes and an orange bow to go with it for church. It made her look like she was a miniature 15-year old.

Spencer's not much for pictures these days, but I snagged this one last night. Notice the lock on the pantry in the background? He can't be bothered to stop long enough for a cute shot, let alone open his eyes for the one I got. Hahaha! Stripes and print for his outfit? He's totally rocking it.

Genevieve LOVES to read these days. Her favorite books are Dear Zoo and Five Little Monkeys

This is how she signals she's ready for more food. It's hilarious. Usually she just feeds herself, but we were at Panera and Bill tried to keep up with feeding her as she inhaled their mac and cheese.

All those things my parents did

The older my kids get and the fuller our life gets, the more I am amazed by how regular my parents were with all the things they did with us each day to build our faith and testimony. We had morning family prayer and evening family prayer and we ate dinner together and we had daily scripture reading. They drove us to seminary every morning as all seven of us went through high school and the accompanying early morning seminary. We went to all the primary activities and then youth activities when we got older. They just managed to make it all happen. I'm so amazed as we try to do the simple things with our tiny kids. Family home evening? How the heck do you fit that in? We did it every week growing up. That's a work in progress around here.

Bill and I jointly made a little thing last night to help us out with at least one thing. A friend from church had a bunch of these she was passing out, so we grabbed one and it turned out pretty cute. I painted the stars and put names and ribbons on them, but Bill did the rest: painted the board, drilled holes for the pins, put the vinyl on, etc. Now hopefully it will help us actually do FHE every week.

Brasstown Falls

Saturday night, after staining and painting all day, we decided we had to get the kids out of the house, so we found a waterfall with a super short approach hike, and headed out. It was probably 45 minutes away, but once we got there it was super short to hike out. We had such a fun time. Spencer loved it. The decent from the trail to the waterfall was super steep, so I ended up carrying/lowering him down that little part, which he thought was great. Once down he threw rocks to his heart's content, we took some great picture, we ate some celebratory cookies for having left our house that day, and then we went back.

The one thing I could do without down here in the summertime is all the bugs. Everything seems to be super sized or there are just an over abundance of them around. The forests are beautiful beyond description, but not nearly as inviting as out west because you know when you walk in the bug life is going to try to eat you alive. That sounds way more negative than it actually is. It just takes more preparation to have bug spray and a little more vigilance to not step in some random poisonous plant or nest or huge bug of some kind.

This trail we went on was totally infested with the hugest daddy longlegs I have ever seen. Their bodies were probably the size of a pea or bigger and their legs were probably four inches across when you were looking down on them. Needless to say I wished I was wearing closed toed shoes. :) They didn't want to be near us, but they were so numerous it was kind of inevitable. It was also apparently milliped mating season. They were totally coating the roots and branches everywhere. So aside from the crazy quantity of bugs, this was a great hike.

The finished desk

 We spent a huge part of this weekend painting and staining our new desk. Saturday was a lazy day since the kids woke up at 5:30 and decided that was a great time to get up. Both Bill and I felt like we'd been hit by a truck by the time we got them to sleep again. He tried to sleep a bit more with little success and I just got up and started painting. I figured I better capitalize on the time at least one child wouldn't be standing right next to the wet paint.

I have a love/hate relationship with finishing the pieces I build. They look so amazing in the raw wood, but I've had a lot of problems getting the finished look I want. The projects I've painted turned out great, but the ones I've stained just haven't been anything special. I've been reading up on lots of different finishes and I came upon water-based polyurethane. I've seen it before but didn't know anything about it or why I should pick it.

I guess oil-based polyurethane is the standard finish for most people because it is so hard and durable. It has a yellowish cast, so it changes the color of the stain, though that's usually a good thing, not bad as it gives a richer glow to the finished product. Water-based polyurethane is also really hard, but not quite as hard as oil-based. The big difference is it dries completely clear. I was intrigued by that. I looked at some of the varnishes and shellacs too, but this desk is a pretty high traffic area and I just didn't think I'd get the durability I wanted with those. So I annied up the $23 for a quart can and crossed my fingers. I did some research on best brands and went with Varathane Satin finish water-based polyurethane. I read it had much better results than the Minwax you see at the big box stores.

So yesterday was the day. I can't tell you how nervous I was. I'm really pleased with this desk because I designed it myself from a basic plan I liked. I wanted the finish to look as good as the bare wood. We decided on a white base and dark top using a vinegar/steel wool blend. That was an experiment too. The desktop is oak, so when I stained it I got a super dark, rich, beautiful color. It has some kind of strange patterns in it, which bugged me, so I actually ended up going to the effort of taking it off and reapplying. That is not for the faint hearted and probably took me a couple extra hours to do. When I did it the second time and there were still some strange patterns, I decided it must just be the wood/stain combination and I let it be. It looks great, but I would have always questioned if it could look better if I hadn't done that so I don't regret the extra effort.

Once the stain was done I painted the bottom. That went really well and three coats later it was done. Now time to do the polyurethane. I started going on it and was so incredibly pleased with the water-based formula. It is SO much easier to apply than oil. It is thinner so it goes on smoother and more easily than oil-based. It only takes two hours in between coats to dry as opposed to more like four or five, and I ended up doing four coats on the desktop and three over the white. The finished product is amazing. It's a satin finish, so not super shiny, which is just what we wanted. I'm giving it a couple days to dry all the way through like is recommended, but I'm so, so, so excited to finally have a piece of furniture I made that I love the finish on as well as the build.

She's 1!

I can't even believe how fast this year has gone by. I just spent a while going through my iPhoto picking out pictures to go in Genevieve's awesome 1st year album from her Aunt Megan. It was fun to look at all the pictures we have from the past year or two since we found out I was expecting. So much has happened. Bill graduated from college. We moved across the country with a nearly two year-old and four month-old. He started his PhD program. We've been hiking and camping and exploring our new home. We flew back across the country and then drove home with a now 11 month-old and 2.5 year old. We've made friends and fallen in love with South Carolina and just really had a fantastic year.

Through all of that Genevieve has grown and grown and grown and now she's walking and eating like a big kid and starting to talk and is just the most delightful little girl I could imagine. She's such a joy in our little family. Spencer doesn't know what to do without her. He's always saying how he loves her and he gets bothered when she's asleep and he wants to play. She returns the love.

She bonks her head against yours to show she loves you. She says yes, boo, baby, mommy, daddy, dog or some version of those words. She loves food and gets very bothered when she can't get it in her mouth fast enough. She shunned her lunch the other day and chowed down on my taco salad instead. She only has four teeth, but it doesn't stop her in the slightest from eating anything she wants.

She plays peekaboo and is delighting in her newfound ability to walk. I had to go bring her back to our pew probably four times today in church. She's mostly gotten over her fear of strangers and charms everyone now with her cute little smiles and red hair.

She loves her water bottle. It's a Camelbak kids one and she and Spencer both have one. She chugs that thing all day long.

Her stuffed dog is her dearest of possessions. She has recently decided it needs to be at her side pretty much at all times. If anyone, and I really mean anyone, gets near it, she glares at them and starts hyperventilating and half crying until they give it back. That includes me, Bill, Spencer, and anyone else.

She recently discovered dolls. She has a few floating around and just decided they're pretty great. We have a mesh hanging thing of all the stuffed animals in the toy room and she will pick ones down from it to play with. She'll give them hugs and kisses. It's so crazy to me the difference in personality between her and Spencer. I have no idea what is different from boys and girls, but they definitely have different interests. They both love books though. It makes me happy to see her in the toy room reading her books.

She fancies herself an artist, particularly when it comes to kitchen bowls. She grabs crayons from Spencer's art supplies, heads for the kitchen and colors in my mixing bowls. I just thank my stars it's not the wall. She likes to color on paper too, though she's only just getting a good enough grip to really draw much. We picked up an easel with a white board a few weeks ago and both she and Spencer just love it. I don't trust her with a dry erase marker yet, but she'll love it once she gets one.

She has a halo of red hair. It's getting longer and longer and she has opposing cowlicks on the crown of her head, so it just sticks straight up in the back. It has just a hint of curl, but nothing major yet. Spencer's hair is already starting to darken up and I think he'll end up dark like me, but I'm guessing she'll stay light. Her skin tone is totally that of a redhead.

And that's my Genevieve. It never ceases to amaze me how much we can love our kids. It's cliche, but I really can't imagine life without our little lady.