Happy Birthdays and Miscellaneous

A lot to cover this time around. Let’s break it down:

Amanda and Abe’s Birthday(s)

Of course we’ve gotta start with the obvious today—10/10/10: Amanda’s 31st birthday and Abe’s 5th birthday. They both got to open their presents this morning, though Abe’s birthday party will be tomorrow, when Amanda’s mom is here (she’s going to be visiting for a week).

Amanda got a new clock for her clock collection, a hand-held quilting frame (man, in the 21st century, EVERYTHING has gone hand-held!), a box of Eggo’s cereal (her favorite), and the book “The Continuous Atonement” (thanks for the suggestion, Libby!).

Abe got a Spider-man costume, an Iron Man costume, and some Iron Man accessories (sense a theme here?) He then announced that he wanted to be War Machine for Halloween, and we quickly pointed out that he had to choose from his EXISTING costumes and we weren’t buying any others.

Here he is in his outfits:




Tonight we’re having roast and potatoes and Ding-Dong Cake. Here’s a picture of that cake (photo from Oct. 2008) in case you forgot the deliciousness:



And Abe chose crepes for dinner tomorrow, followed by a Blue’s Clues cake (which he now wants to change to a Spider-man cake)…(I’m gonna want a burger to counteract all that sugar tomorrow).

The Couch

As you already know, we had to leave our couch up in Utah, so we bought a few cheap chairs from Goodwill down here. Well, a couple weeks ago, there was a yard sale/moving sale just up the street and Amanda bought a couch for $50 bucks—it is in great shape (it was an old couple who kept it in good condition). Here’s a picture:



The morning we picked it up, we were walking to their house to get the couch and my foot slipped off the edge of the sidewalk—but instead of falling flat on my face, I did an AWESOME side-roll, curling into the direction of my fall and recovering perfectly—like I was in Olympic Tumbling or something (is there such a thing?)

Bread

Arizona grocery stores have an awesome assortment of tortillas, but their sliced bread is severely lacking. In Utah, we loved Grandma Sycamore’s Home-Maid Bread. It was moist and delicious. Here in AZ, we’re stuck with Sara Lee or other national brands. It’s very distressing. Almost makes us want to move back to—no, now that’s just SILLY.

Church Calling

A couple weeks ago I got a phone call from a counselor in the Bishopric, wanting to meet with me. And thus began stress. I don’t like to say no to a calling, so I was worried he was going to call me to scouts, since I WOULD have to say NO. Luckily, I was called to be 1st Counselor in the Sunday School Presidency, which, so far, has meant that I do absolutely NOTHING. Apparently the ward has been without a Sunday School Presidency for a while. We’ll see how it goes!

Abe’s Art

Abe’s been doing a lot of artwork lately. Here’s his picture of a guy paying tithing:



And a chalk drawing of Spider-man and Green Goblin:



Elliott’s Walker



Amanda was very sad to leave the toy shopping cart in Utah, so she was really excited to find this toy walker at Goodwill, which Elliott LOVES:



Knit-wits

So (sew?), Amanda is knitting a sweater for Madison, and the directions told her to increase the rows by 1 stitch every 4 rows, which led to confusion as far as what they meant by “every 4 rows”—was that “every fourth row” or “on the 5th row” and it turned out that Amanda and I were totally agreed as to what they meant, but because of our individual thought processes, we thought the other was thinking things wrong. There was a whole discussion of changing it on the 1st row, 4th row, 5th row, etc. There was also some back or front thing thrown into the equation.

My brain grouped common stitch amounts into sections, so you would do 4 rows, then increase on the 5th row(also 1st of a new set of 4), like this:

…47__48, 48, 48, 48__ 49, 49, 49, 49 __ 50, 50, 50, 50__51, 51…

Amanda’s brain saw it increasing on the 4th stitch, like this:

…47, 48__48, 48, 48, 49 __ 49, 49, 49, 50 __ 50, 50, 50, 51 __ 51...

OK, my brain hurts. I need a vacation…next blog post will be about Disneyland, I’m sure.