Slow News Week

We had really fun plans for the first two weeks of December. And then we got sick. First, Miles got a cold. He then graciously gave that cold to Gerrit. They both gave me that cold, which got combined with me somehow getting roseola. For the record, roseola is typically only a disease that children under the age of 2 get. It is also considered "very uncommon" for a healthy adult to get it seriously. I am apparently one of those lucky few. When I looked it up, I found out that children can get very mild cases with hardly any symptoms, so I'm guessing I got this from Miles.

I got sidelined for four days with a fever, total exhaustion, no appetite, and a "fun" sinus infection to boot. When the fever finally broke, it got replaced with an extra-attractive chest rash (which, actually, I'm kind of grateful for because it helped me figure out what was wrong.)

So, there went all of our fun plans. No possibility of heading to St. George for my friend's wedding. No playing in the snow. No girl's night at the local ice cream parlor. No Christmas tree lighting at the museum. No working on Christmas presents for my in-laws. No changing out of my pajamas for days on end. No leaving the house to make sure that we didn't expose anyone else.

Here's what we got to do instead:
-Set up a whole bunch of toys for Miles around the house.
-Lie on the couch, only getting up when absolutely necessary.
-Read books to Miles. Typically the same book about 10 times in a row.
-Try to convince Miles that exhausted, feverish Mommy is not a jungle gym.
-Have Gerrit take over the chores, and just let the clutter grow.
-Let Miles watch extra cartoons in the hope of some peace and quiet.
-Sleep whenever Miles was sleeping.

Yeah, that's about it. I also watched much more TV than I typically would because even reading made me tired.

Sounds fun, huh? I'm so glad that we're feeling better now! Nothing like being sick to make you appreciate your good health.

Choo Choo!

Miles loves this train table at Barnes & Noble. He can spend forever just running the trains around the track and saying "choo choo" as he takes them around. Of course, when Gerrit tried to take a video, he immediately stopped playing so nicely and instead decided to bang the trains on the rails, give the train he was playing with to another kid's dad that was sitting nearby, and play with the sound books behind the table, but what can you do? Here's some pictures of Miles and one of his favorite things.

So Many Hats to Wear

Does anyone else like to think of what other kinds of jobs would be fun to have? These aren't necessarily jobs that I would be any good at, just things that sound fun or interesting. When I asked Gerrit, his only answer was "professional racquetball player."

Here's some jobs that I think would be fun:

Education researcher: This is what I spent most of my time doing in grad school. I don't always love the publishing side, but I actually really enjoy doing the research.

Statistician: Don't laugh. I really enjoy statistics. I took several classes and used statistics for work pretty often.

Census analyst: This is another of the "things I used to do that I would want do again" jobs. There's a lot of fascinating information in the US Census! You can check it out at the American FactFinder.

Geography/world cultures/sociology/history teacher: I got my undergraduate degree in social studies teaching and these were my favorite subjects of my multi-subject license. I could do high school or community college, but probably not much younger.

Textbook/curriculum developer: Have you ever seen a teacher's copy of a textbook? I got to work with a lot of them in the BYU library. They're full of extra learning activities to the side and some come with separate books full of really interesting assignments. Coming up with assignments and activities was one of my favorite parts of teaching, and I figure someone has to come up with the ones in the book...

Librarian: I love to read and I think it would be so much fun to be around books all day.

Name consultant: This actually came up as a joke with some of my friends in graduate school when we found out how much a name consultant can make, but I actually think it would pretty fun. I love names!

Children's museum curator/owner: To be honest, this comes largely from my wish that Idaho Falls had a children's museum so I could take Miles somewhere fun when it's cold outside. I adore museums, but I wouldn't really know how to run one.

Itinerary planner: I don't think I would want the whole "travel agent" job, but I think it would be awesome to just come up with itineraries of where people could visit, eat, stay, etc. for a travel company.

Party planner: I used to check out party planning books from the library all the time as a teenager. We don't actually have that many parties, but I like planning them.

Restaurant owner/cook: Sometimes Gerrit and I talk about having a specialty pancake shop (mostly when I'm making pancakes). Sometimes we talk about having a cookie business (mostly when I'm making cookies).

Recipe developer: I like to play around with recipes and come up with new things. The last one I tried was a pumpkin-cream cheese swirl cake with brown butter glaze. The cream cheese didn't really swirl as much as I would have liked it to, but it still tasted good. I'm so envious of people who work in a test kitchen and get to come up with new recipes all the time.

The best thing about all of these jobs? As a mom, I'm lucky enough to get to do a little bit of all of them.

Give Thanks

My parents and my sister came to visit us for Thanksgiving and we had a great three days! Sadly, my Californian parents picked the coldest two days of the year (think high of 6) and had to deal with some pretty treacherous roads. I felt so bad! Too bad they couldn't just bring the San Jose weather with them! The best part of their visit was having lots of time to spend with my family. It was really great to see them and talk with them and Miles loved playing with them. He even learned to say Gramma and Emmy!

Here's some highlights of our holiday week:

Wednesday
Since we will be with Gerrit's family for Christmas, we had a Stuart family Christmas celebration a month early. I had a lot of fun making presents for my mom and sister, but I won't put any pictures just yet because I'm making the same thing for my mother-in-law and sister-in-laws and I don't want to ruin the surprise. Miles got lots of presents from his very kind and generous auntie and grandparents.
Finger puppets that my mom made for Miles



The Rushforths gave Miles this Cookie Monster and he loves it!
My mom made this soft book with pictures of his family and it's helping him learn everyone's name really well.

Gerrit got the Christmas present of his dreams: an iPod Touch. He has wanted one of these for almost three years now and I can't even tell you how excited he was. Or still is.

We hit a few stores to do some more Christmas shopping, and then we took my family to two of our favorite Idaho Falls places: The Snakebite for dinner and Reed's Dairy for ice cream.
When Emily ordered an Italian soda, we were not expecting anything this big!

Thursday

Happy Thanksgiving! We went to my aunt and uncle's house in Rexburg and we had a BIG Stuart family gathering. Four of my grandma's five kids and their families came for a grand total of 24 people. We enjoyed a big dinner and lots of fun conversation, games, and Christmas decorating. Miles may have enjoyed himself a little too much, as he refused to take a nap and stayed awake for 12 hours straight! Here's some of our many relatives!






Friday
I wanted to make a special breakfast for my family, so we had a tasty breakfast of pumpkin scones, cranberry orange scones, maple sausage, and apple juice.
After breakfast, we went to just a few stores for Black Friday before eating lunch and taking Miles home for a much-needed nap. We also went to see Tangled, which I really recommend. We brought Miles with us and he actually did pretty well. He usually won't sit still, but he did okay with the help of lots of different laps to sit on and a big bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.
We loved having visitors and playing with everyone and we miss everyone already!

Eternity's View

The local art museum had another free family day this past weekend. The weather was really terrible, but I was excited about it, so we went anyway.


See? Horrible weather!

This time, the featured exhibit was called Eternity's View, by Rexburg artist Gerald Griffin. It was a set of prints of early Mormon imagery that look like this:





It was an interesting exhibit, sort of a cross between church history and art. The corresponding art project was to make your own prints. I had thought we could maybe have at least do the drawing/etching part of the print, but he was not interested at all. Miles and Gerrit headed to the children's room and had a blast doing things like this:



That left me free to work on my print in peace. The museum had lots of pages of symbols out for you to look at, and I decided to do a print of Celtic symbols. First, you draw your design on a piece of paper. You then trace that design onto a piece of styrofoam. The etching needs to be really, really deep, so you have to go over it a few times.


Next up, you load up a brayer with plenty of ink and roll it all over your piece of styrofoam. You put a piece of plain paper on it, peel it off, and voila!



My finished print.

Holiday Pictures

We took Miles to JCPenney to get his pictures taken for Christmas as presents for the Miles Larsen fan club (i.e. his doting grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles). He was not particularly cooperative. Who wants to sit still and look at the camera when there is an entire studio to explore? Regardless, I think we got a pretty good picture. It captures my goofy little boy with the crazy blonde hair just about perfectly.

Snow Day

We had to cancel our trip to story time because it was snowing pretty hard and I prefer to avoid driving in the snow. Luckily, Miles considered playing in the snow to be just as much of a fun adventure. He had a blast trying to eat it and catch it in his hands.

As Heard on the Radio

I was listening to the radio today when I heard something that speaks volumes about the winter weather in Idaho Falls.

Radio Announcer: It's going to be a nice day today.
Me: Yes! Maybe it will stop snowing and be somewhere in the 50's!
Radio Announcer: The high for the day is 34 and there will be light snow flurries, but we can handle it.

Oh, Idaho Falls. If the best that you can say for your daily weather is that "we can handle it," it just may not be nice weather. Of course, this is also coming from a girl who grew up in a place where a day with the above weather would be some of the worst possible weather imaginable. Sigh...

Nursery Rhymes

Miles is old enough to go to nursery now and he's gone the past two weeks all by himself. He loves it! He particularly enjoys coloring, playing with the matchbox car garage, and snack time. In fact, he loves nursery so much that he sobs when we make him put the crayons away and go home. It's a little weird to not be chasing him around the church anymore, but I'm glad he loves nursery!

Peanut Butter for Dinner

We had a lot of peanut butter for dinner last week. Just not any sandwiches...


Gerrit loved this peanut chicken stir-fry. Clearly, that is not my picture. I don't really do fancy presentations unless we have company, and even then, probably not this fancy. Even if ours wasn't particuarly pretty, it was tasty. The peanut butter in the sauce is delicious and works really well with the chicken and broccoli. Miles would probably have eaten it better had I been smart enough to hide the white rice until he finished his chicken and broccoli. That kid loves rice.

We also had this sweet and spicy peanut soup:

Gerrit and I loved this soup. It's packed full of vegetables (carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, and sweet potato) and has really good flavor. A word of warning, though...it is pretty spicy. It was too spicy for Miles. You might want to take out the cayenne pepper if you don't like spicy food.

Go Play Inside

It starts to get cold really early in Idaho Falls, which can be unfortunate when you have an 18-month-old who loves to run around outside. Luckily for us, the city of Idaho Falls has an indoor toddler/preschool gym twice a week. It costs a dollar, and they have bouncy horses, a slide, tunnels, balls of all sizes, hula hoops, and other toys for the kids to play with. It wasn't too busy, so Miles got to play with all the toys he wanted for two hours. He was in energetic toddler heaven!

This is what the play area looks like:


He loved these bouncy horses!



A ball as big as he is.
He kept trying to climb up that slide the whole time. He finally figured it out and he was so excited!
For some unknown reason, this kid loves pressing his face into mesh.

The other little boy came up and asked Miles so politely if he wanted to ride on the toy with him. I think he was a little disappointed that Miles couldn't have a conversation with him in return.