Paint Off

Yesterday Ethan and I had fun painting on the kitchen table. Ethan especially enjoyed mixing the colors into one bowl. Had I known that I could have saved time and not mixed up seperate bowls of red, green and purple paint. I used powdered milk, water and food coloring to make the paint. Q tips and the ends of a carrot and celery were brushes. I was cooking dinner at the same time, waste not want not you know. Ethan pronounces paint as hate. This morning when Ethan woke up I heard happy humming noises coming from his room-almost always a sign of trouble. I opened his door to find that he had pushed his bed over to the window and had his head under the window blinds-I thought he was looking at the freshly fallen snow. Then I heard, "hate off" and realized he was busily chipping the paint(lead-filled I'm sure) from the window sill. Time to cut those little finger(nail)s off.

What I hate the most in my house...

Hate. Detest. Loathe. Do you get the idea? This afternoon I'm trying to finish sewing squares of fleece into strips to make a baby blanket. Two strips get sewn with no problems...then the third it starts to make loud clunk noises...turns out the bobbin thread is in a huge knot. I fixed it twice, the third time it happened I was so close to the end of a square I just kept going. SNAP! Off flies the clear plastic bobbin cover and the bobbin flies out and breaks. Has that ever happened to you? Just thought of two more adjectives: Abhor and Despise.

Things my son has taught me...

You can put a VHS tape all the way into a VCR length wise. It will fit. It just won't play.

Hurray for tops that have been sealed for your safety.

Ethan found a box of baby soaps and lotions that haven't been opened yet. I guess he can unscrew lids now. He's so proud of himself.

Pool Fun

So I was NOT the slowest person in my age group at the big swim meet-but lets just say I need to swim 5 seconds paster per 25 meters to be really fast. I am a bit bummed about mutual moving to Tuesday nights as I will miss the masters practice with Molly-we usually swim a good workout then spend a few minutes at the end working on something, the other week it was diving off the blocks to get ready for the meet(did you know that once they say take your marks you CAN"T move after that or you'll be DQed, neither did I, good thing to find out before the meet)anyways last night was working on the butterfly which is the hardest stroke. Turns out I do the kicking/wavelike body motion pretty well-Molly has the others watch me as I did it. Adding the arms to the equation was hard trying to figure out timing, breathing, ect. Oh well its good to have something to be working on. At least I can still make the 6:15 practices with Jack Wednesday and Friday mornings-but we hardly ever get to work on neat things-most everyone at those practices are experienced swimmers and we do workouts focusing on stamina, spped and strength, not techniques. Perhaps I can figure out a way to make it on Tuesday nights sometimes.

The Littlest Ward Clerk

Here is Ethan after church helping Daddy in the clerk's office-actually it looks like he's the one doing all the work there doesn't it? Watch out Nate-I don't think the Bishop shares your views on child labor.

My first swim meet!

So I've been swimming with the master's swim team at the YMCA since September, and I decided to try a swim meet! I did the women's 50 meter freestyle at the New England short course meters championships. There were over 600 swimmers, most from New England but some lady from San Diego flew in and set a world record in the Butterfly right before my event. I think there were a couple of world records set, they'd announce whenever that happened. The pool was huge-this is a shot of warm-up before the meet began-that's the competition pool with 10 lanes! In the upper right hand corner is the warm-up/cool down pool. There were 136 woman in my event, so we went in 14 heats. I was heat 3, lane 8. I think I swam it in 42 seconds-I couldn't wear my contacts because my eyes were all red when I woke up-that was a bummer. I'll update this with the real time and results for my age group when its posted online. Unless I came in last in my age group-which could happen-I'm new at this, remember-in which case I'll just "forget" that update.