Moving

Well, I am about totally moved!!! Yeah! The cable guy came by today so I have internet finally! Yeah. I will take some pictures tomorrow and maybe a video if I can get my camera to work and upload them so you can see my new, much larger apartment.
Shauna, me new roommate, hasn't actually moved in yet and strangely, I miss her. I guess since I expected her to be here because that was part of the purpose of moving. She has been so busy but came by this evening. Hopefully, it will be soon.

Love you all!!

LaDale

Illustrations

Brett Helquist's illustrations for Blue Balliett's books. They are not picture books but chapter books with pictures. I listened to her first book on CD and didn't understand everything that he did. I read her second book aloud to my class last year and loved it. I just finished her third book this summer and actually went back over the illustrations to find the secret code hidden there. It took about 45 minutes with sticky notes, pen and paper and a lot of flipping pages back and forth. Brett Helquist hides clues in his picture that have to do with the story. IT'S FUN!

By the way, I've been thinking about recommending her books to the family at large. Each book tackles an art mystery with a ton of facts thrown in to the fiction suspense. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them and intend to read one aloud to my class again this coming year. The pictures above are the covers for Balliett's first and second book. Blogger wouldn't let me upload the third one.
Check them out- they're great!

Children's Books (Illustrators)

I know we've talked about our favorite children's books before, but have we ever discussed our favorite illustrators of children's books? I was reading Trina Schart Hyman's Little Red Riding Hood to Mercy last night and was reminded how much I love her illustrations. Look at the detail! Mercy loves the cats that appear in almost every picture (it seems). I also love (naturally) Don Wood's illustrations in Heckedy Peg and King Bidgood (couldn't find a good screen shot of those two).

On a different note, I love David Wiesner's Caldecotts--Tuesday, with the frogs!--and Flotsam. And although June 29, 1999 didn't win a Caldecott, I love that one, too, with the huge vegetables. (I'm actually thinking about getting a paperback copy of Flotsam (I have a hardback) and cutting it up and framing different parts of it for the kids' room. It would really go with the "theme" (as yet unrealized) of oceans and such).

So, if anyone is out there...who are your favorite children's books' illustrators? Maybe we'll discover some new ones...

New Harry Potter Trailer

New trailer for the Half-Blood Prince--although Harry is barely in it. It's one of Dumbledore's memories.

Hey, Hey, There

I am still alive and I have talked to almost everyone. I have now officially finished all of the big things for the young women and I am relieved. Camp was great. We only had a few problems. The usual "I don't want to be in THAT tent. I want to be in THIS tent!!" Never mind that it is a tent beg enough for 3 and you want 5-6-7 people in there. But once we got that straightened out the YCL's were wonderful. They all worked like there were supposed to. The biggest problem was that everything took longer than planned. Our schedule was blown out of the water before we even got started on it. I took my camera but never even got it out of the tent. I just forget to keep it with me. I guess I am not really motivated to get that many pictures. I am just glad that some of the others had cameras. I will be able get some of the pictures.

dogs

So, this morning I had a heart pounding experience! Jacob went to a friends house this morning. About 10 minutes later, Benjamin came into my room to tell me that Jacob had returned and "He brought home a lost dog with him." Of course this elicited the oh so very intellectual response of Huh from me. Apparently, while on his way home, Jacob had found a lost dog wandering around and had brought him home. The dog had a collar but no tags, and Benjamin didn't know what to do with him. Naturally, I jumped up and ran downstairs. There in my hallway was a reddish juvenile doberman. He was really behaving himself, wagging his tail and generally being very nice, but there was no way he was going to be allowed to stay in my house. Benjamin and I got him outside and locked up the doggie door and I called the Humane Society for them to come and get him.
Long story short, the dog is now gone and Jacob has been told never to bring home strays again!

Gideon's First "Steps"

Gideon got his first "gait trainer" on Monday, and today (Wednesday) he finally figured it out (sort of). He's walking!!!!! Yay!!!

Kip's first full theater experience

So last weekend, Saturday to be exact, Jen and Jeff invited our family to join them in their before school movie. They decided to watch Wall-E. As this movie had been out for a while, and it was the opening weekend for Dark Knight, Wall-E was moved to one of the smaller theaters. This had the bad side effect in that it sold out and Jen's family and my family were not able to watch it together. I don't think this is too bad as the movie was so great my boys didn't mind. This was the first theater movie that Kip allowed us to stay for the entire length of the movie. Sure we had to leave once to change his diaper, and Adam needed to use the bathroom once, and Kip lost his straw and needed another one. Other then that there was no interuptions. I really enjoyed the movie. I just thought I would share the exciting news that Kip allowed us to watch a movie in the theater. Love you all. SKT

25 greatest movie musicals.

You guys have to check out this website!

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20164491,00.html

Number eight makes me sick! But I have no problems with any of the others! I haven't even heard of four, but I will have to look them up.

Hey Samuel

And everyone else, for that matter, might enjoy this as well...it's a photomicrography gallery. Amazing pictures, of really small stuff. Mostly organic stuff (biology and all) but a few nano-tech pictures and even two geology ones. Pretty fascinating.

O Jerusalem

Keryn and I have a long term dream to live in the Holy Land for a year or two. As part of the "auditioning" process, we are planning a two-week trip. We're shooting for Fall, 2010. That gives us a good two years to plan, prepare, and save money.

We hope the trip will give us time to see the highlights and give us a feel for what it would be like to have our family there. We'd like to invite any of you that are interested to come with us on this two-week journey. I have invited my side of the family to participate also.

I haven't a clue how much it will cost and we don't have a set itinerary yet. We want to see places that are important for Old and New Testament History (Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee), as well as the history of civilization in general (Jericho, Caesarea and other Roman stuff, Dead Sea Scrolls Museum). We also want to see places that are important parts of the current political world over there (Holocaust Museum, Western Wall, Dome of the Rock). It will be a whirlwind trip.

We want to do a bunch of preparation before we go. We're going to read some important books on the ancient and current world. We're going to write up field trip guides for each site we plan to visit. We want to frame the whole trip as the filming of a documentary. We'll interview each other and take video of the various sites and then edit it all together when we get home. It will largely be for a family keepsake of the event, but it would be fun to post a version online as well.

I expect that most of you won't want to--or be able to--participate. However, if you'd like to do it, it would be fun to work together on the preparation for the trip. We could read the various books at the same time and we could divide up assignments for reports on different locations. We could share all of that online in a new blog if enough people are interested. (Separate blogs work like separate channels. Having a lot of them isn't a problem and it helps people filter out stuff they aren't interested in.)

If you can't make it for the trip in 2010, then perhaps you can come visit us someday if we can pull off living there.

Pandora

If you haven't yet, I strongly suggest that you check out pandora.com. It is absolutely amazing. For anyone who doesn't know about it, it's a type of online radio from the Music Genome Project. You create an account and then you type in whatever music artist or song you would like to listen to and it will play music from that artist along with other songs from the same type of genre. You can create more than one station with different genres and combine the ones that you'd like to hear together. If a song comes up that you don't like, you just tell it that you don't like it and it will never play it again. There are no commercials, ever, and it's absolutely free. This morning, I wanted to listen to some church music but I was a little tired of what I had, so I put in Kenneth Cope and it gave me beautiful, uplifting music from Kenneth Cope and similar artists to listen to. Granted, they weren't all LDS, but they were Christian and it was just nice. We played it all morning. Right now, I listening to piano music from Jon Schmidt and composers similar to him. It's just an amazing site. Check it out!

The Mercy Who Ate Salt Lake

My goodness, Mercy, you certainly have grown.

Definitely peasant stock...

Brigham Young's house (one of them, at least. Apparently he never even lived here, just built it for some of his wives...):

[side note: isn't she adorable?]

Where the Ence Family lived:

[He's awfully cute himself.]

Ross Family Reunion

I think Gideon thought I was going to sell him to the gypsies or something. He was NOT happy with the grandkids picture, when I sat him on a cousin's lap. And from then on he wouldn't let go of me--look at how defensive he is in that second picture. Yes, I will look at Aunt Nicole, but I won't smile and I won't release my death grip on your shirt, Mommy...

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Keryn and Brad and baby ... whatever. Just let me put in my two cents, I have always liked the name Ammon. I don't believe that it has ever been a "popular" name. At least not in the last several thousand years.
On a different note, does anyone other than me HATE their hair at this time of the year? It is monsoon season, a hundred plus, plus, plus temp wise, with a 40-50 percent humidity and I feel as if I suddenly have a ill groomed french poodle camped out on my head! This happens every year, and every year I start to think longingly of chopping all of my hair off, but every year, I let Jeff talk me out of it and am grateful he did come October! Oh well, I and my brillo pad have to go pick up Heather from Activity Day! Type you later!

And his name will NOT be Ralph...

But who knows what it will be? Baby Awesome is officially awesome, healthy, possessor of a cute round head, all the necessary parts to be a boy, and stubborn (or perhaps just lazy) personality (he was "resting" on the placenta and the doctor had a hard time getting a look at his face). The ultrasound went well, the due date unchanged (November 16) and the mama and papa relieved.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of Newton's first law of motion

An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

Object at rest= me
Unbalanced force= the thought of everything I still need to finish before school starts in a month!!!!

Have you ever had so much to do that it is hard to even get started? I feel that way, with the smell of procrastination in my nostrils and disaster in my apartment NOT helping!!!!

I am now officially "home" but in the process of looking for a new one (the not knowing adding another ton of bricks to the load), and packing the apartment (did you know things multiple inside dark cupboards), and completing school projects I foolishly waited until summer to look at (I think those multiplied also), and MY BOOK (which will probably need a million years before it's really good enough to publish).

So, what am I doing right now?

Sitting, at rest, typing on the blog.

Question? I need some upbeat music to dance to, or at least pack to. You know, music that can be the unbalanced force that gets me in motion. Any suggestions?

Love you all,
LaDale