Mr. Piccasohead and this week

So I drew this on the Mr. Picassohead site.
It is fun to look through the gallery and see what others have come up with being limited to on a few shapes.


This weekend was pretty busy. Friday morning I had my playgroup over for a play and lunch. We made sugar cookies together which I think everyone enjoyed. Jolene stuck her wet hand into the bowl of sprinkles to see how many she could pick up and eat.
That night we went to Josh and Sarah's for tea and then headed off to our "Growing Kids God's Way" class. Have I mentioned this before? I can't remember. GKGW is a book/class on how to raise children. It seems to be aimed at kids from 3 up but it is still useful even if you have newborns to think about these things. I will write more about this some other time, B needs the comp so I need to finish up here.

Today we went to the fair that Covenant Christian School was putting on. CCS is where a lot of people from church teach/work at as well as several kids that go there. The fair had facepainting, slide, jumping castle, petting zoo, stalls, music, dancing, etc. I think Eleni and Jolene enjoyed the highland dancing and the face painting quite a bit.

Tonight we had the youth group over for pizza and a movie. I think everyone had a enjoyable time. I did learn that it is hard for young boys to sit still during a movie. We almost needed an intermission for them to go outside and wrestle around a bit. Having boys around the house is not something I am used to. My brothers were all really young when I got married.

Tomorrow we have our youth fellowship group. This includes a discussion and lunch.

Random note : while typing the last few paragraphs I sneezed eight times. I like sneezing but this was a bit too much. My throat is a bit sore from it all.


Oh I forgot to mention some other big news.

1. We bought a new (to us) car on Friday. It is a wagon, burgundy color. It has a roof rack and a tow bar which is awesome. We will be putting a back seat in and also putting it on gas. When I say gas I mean LPG. A lot cheaper than petrol although not as efficient.

2. I got a job. I will be web designing from home. I am excited about the prospect. It will be nice to use a few hours a day to work on something that I will actually get paid for and something that keeps my brain active in a way that child rearing doesn't. One job that I am signed up to do could last for awhile. What is nice is that my boss will send me emails every now and then asking for a few extra hours here and there to do small jobs as well. I have been wanting to gain more knowledge in this area because I thought at some point I could possibly start my own business or at least join up with an already existing one. What I needed though was the experience and now I am getting it. Exciting.

Conversations with a toddler pt. 2

Jolene talking to her friend Eleni...

Jolene: "Eleni, do you know, do you know that frogs go la dee da dee da?"

Eleni: "mmmhhhhm yeah they do"

Travel

I have decided that I would like to visit Iceland and preferably before I turn 50. I have been looking around on an Iceland site and am impressed with the scenery. So that is one reason, the beautiful scenery. I think another reason is because it sounds exotic and the last reason would be because they have a cool looking written language.

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Eleni sent me an invite to a place called Stumbleupon. It is a site that compiles cool websites. The cool factor is decided by other users and the sites are separated into different catagories. What I really like is the tool bar you can download for Firefox. When you have downloaded the toolbar a little button appears at the top of you browser that says "Stumble". If you press it a random site comes up for your exploration. You are able to list preferences as far as what type of sites you want to come up. For instance I have science, biology, art, design, shopping, kids, education, etc....coolness.

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Newsflash...parenting at times can be very difficult. Take for instance Sunday. Jolene had four major breakdowns. One of course had to be at church for all to see. Part of it was due to lack of sleep but most due to her sinful nature. I was very sad about all of it. It is very hard to discipline a child over and over and over during the course of one day. I just want to say "don't you get it? If you do this you get into trouble!!!!". Of course Jolene knows that certain actions have certain consequences but she just chooses to ignore. Thus leading us and other parents to pray for heart changes within our children. Sunday night I prayed a lot. I have to say Monday and today have been much better.

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Adele has four teeth now. She has realized that now she can explore the entire house due to her ability to move four appendages at the correct times to propel herself forwards and backwards. No real words yet but I'm sure we are not too far away.

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We are going to start looking for a new car. Our family car is dying. We drove it to McKinnon (1 1/2 hours) and the radiator consumed over 8 liters of liquid. For those of you who do not know cars this is not healthy. Also we drove to Josh and Sarah's one night and heard clanking sounds as we headed down the road. We pulled over and rolling right behind the car was part of a pulley system. Nice. Not only is our car a drunkard for water but it is also trying to lose weight by randomly throwing off metal pieces here and there.
So we are looking for a wagon, black-graphite-or red, lowered, with rims, must have duel fuel system, and a back seat. We have decided that the lowered part with rims although aesthetically pleasing should not be mandatory.


Random picture of the girls

Illustrations

A few weeks ago I went to the Melbourne Writers Festival with some friends. We were going to listen to Alexander McCall Smith speak. He is the author of the "Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency" books. These are good books to read when you hace a few moments and you don't want to rad anything too involved. They take place in Botswana and are a about a women who starts up a detective agency. McCall Smith also writes children's stories and I was able to get one of those and have him sign it for Jolene. McCall Smith has several other adult series as well. I think my favorite even above the Detective ones are The Von Igelfeld series. This series is about a German professor and his adventures in life. The characters in this book remind me of some of the people I used to work with in the lab. I chuckle when I think about sections of these books and who I used to work with.

While I was looking around the book table I also found a signed copy of "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. If you don't know of Mr. Tan then you should at least take a look at this book. "The Arrival" is a illustrations only book. It is about a man that leaves his family to migrate to a new country in hope of a better life. I won't spoil the ending, you will have to check it out form the library or something. Anyway, I really like his illustrations. I think the ones in this book are all charcoal. He has a cool website as well, check it out. I bought the signed copy of the book. I decided it was a good memory of our migration and if we have anyone over that can't speak English there will be at least one book in the house that they can still understand.

Victory, thy smell is sweet

The Cats won on Saturday! There was much rejoicing in this town of less than 200,000.
There was also much drunkness and disorderly conduct but I guess I am not surprised by this. None of this tops the riot I experienced at Purdue. Now those were the good old days.

Here are the scores from the game...really no contest as you can see
Geelong: 163
Port Adelaide: 44

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Ok so it is almost 1:30 in the morning and my eyes are burning from staring at the computer screen too long. I and a friend are working on a website for the Geelong Bible Conference. Check it out here...some of the links are not working yet. General Info and Schedule are. I am too tired to finish tonight.