is that a threat, or a promise?

madeleine's latest response when i won't give her what she wants is, "fine, then i'm going back to bed."

i don't think it's produced the desired result.

picture and video dump

it's been a while since i've posted pictures of the kids. so, you're going to get a bunch at once, starting with this picture of all three kids (three? when did i get three kids). this was a few weeks ago and already jonathan seems way bigger to me. 

this next batch is from one of our sunday outings. we went over to woodinville and walked along the slough/sammamish river trail for a while.

 

 

these ones are from the girls playing in the backyard in their pool and on the slip 'n' slide (both of which we got for free on craigslist). the weather was really hot (for washington) a couple weeks ago and has become more intermittent again, but the girls still like to go out there for brief stints, regardless of the weather.

madeleine on her new bike. we got her another used bike that is slightly smaller because the other one was just a little too big and heavy (she's on the heavy one in the video below). as soon as she got on this one, she really took off. i love how easily she switched from her strider to this bike without training wheels.

diane still doesn't really show any interest in the strider yet, so while madeleine rides her bike, diane tends to push the stroller around the neighborhood. with her helmet on.

jonathan likes being on his changing table and i tried to get some pictures of him being really cute, but he's hit that stage where as soon as you pull out the camera, he gets really interested in the camera and stops being as cute. but i still snuck a few good ones in.

an attempt to get a picture with him snuggling me, but it didn't really work.

nobody's hair parties like diane's hair.

here are a few videos of the kids:

i've been reading

i've been reading a little bit lately, although i haven't done as much as i would like. i finished the last book in the maisie dobbs series, elegy for eddie, and enjoyed it. i enjoyed the whole series. winspear's books are great - well written, fun mysteries that can be fun, light reading if you feel like it, but also have some deeper themes if you want to put a little thought into them. i'm a little sad to be caught up with the series because they've been a steady part of my reading diet for the past few months.

about a month ago, i came across this list of parenting books.  the latest antics of our four year old have been giving me a little run for my money and i like this woman's book recommendations on her blog in general, so i thought i'd give some of them a go. as in, i put in hold requests for about eight of them at our library. the problem is, i'm used to a slower library system and a bunch of these came to me at once. i don't do well with a stack of books waiting for me on my nightstand and especially a nonfiction stack. i get anxious and start several at once. and if i'm trying to read nonfiction at the same time (maisie dobbs), the nonfiction almost always wins out. i know this about myself and you'd think i'd do something to fix it. but i don't.

anyway, i started the parents we mean to be first and got a couple of chapters into it before i quit on it. it's actually a fine book, but it's not really light reading and the main message seemed to be, "teach your children charity" (although he never used that word). since that is already my main goal in life and i feel like the gospel gives me a framework for that, i decided to stop reading instead of forcing my way through the book.

another book that i picked up at the same time was house thinking, by winifred gallagher. this didn't end up being what i thought it would be. i thought it was going to be a guide on how to improve various rooms in your house to fit their function and match it with aesthetics, but it was more of a history of how rooms came to be what they are and if you dig deep, you could get some ideas from it, but i wanted them handed to me and it wasn't happening. the book was a little too much of a chore for me to read and i only made it half way through.

in defense of the original list, i think i'm just mostly not in the mood for any kind of heavy reading right now. both books were well written, just too dense for my mood. also, i'm currently reading another one of the books on the list and it is a little lighter and i'm really enjoying it so far. i just picked up our mutual friend, by dickens, at the library today, as well as another parenting book that showed up from my list, so hopefully i don't fall into some of the same problems i was having with these books.

three months old

this one turned three months old yesterday. not much to say except that he's perfect. 

pin this

outfit number one: 

shirt - kohls

skirt - homemade

shorts - kohls

socks - fred meyer

shoes - lands end

helmet - gift from a neighbor

i think that the oversized helmet is what really makes this outfit.

outfit number two: 

shirt - costco

skirt - made by grammy

and that belt? actually a headband. making the accessories work for her. 

and a hair tutorial from madeleine:

supplies:
lots of clips
headband

step one: get out all of the clips you can quickly get your hands on.
step two: put them in your hair. refuse help from your mother and try to cluster them as close together as possible, preferably in the front of your hair.
step three: put on a headband, but don't actually let it touch your hair in the front.

born on the fourth of july

i woke up with "yankee doodle dandy" stuck in my head yesterday and it remains there. not my favorite song. what can you do?

i also woke up a little grumpy yesterday. it's always hard to be away from family on holidays. also the fourth of july has never really been the same for me after years of going to the lakehouse and having the best fireworks show without having to battle anyone for a view. needless to say, i wasn't optimistic about the day.

but the fourth of july pulled through for me. first of all, the fourth of july marks the beginning of summer weather for seattle and this year appears to be no exception. we were blessed with a beautiful day and the forecast looks good from here on out. second of all, madeleine is her grammy's granddaughter and loves holidays. so it's hard to be too much of a scrooge with her running around so excited about the day.

we started off the morning by playing in the neighborhood with everyone. all of the kids and most of the adults were out and we even walked to the park with a bunch of them, which was fun. i got to get to know a couple of the moms a little better (it seems like mostly the dads come out with the kids in our neighborhood) and the girls were in heaven.

around lunch, everyone seemed to go their separate ways. there are no personal fireworks allowed in kenmore city limits, so there wasn't potential for a neighborhood gathering at night to do fireworks and everyone else had made other plans. i'm okay with that. i hate little fireworks.

in the late afternoon, we all headed out and got some fries (for me) and shakes (for everyone else (some day i'll be able to eat dairy again)) at kidd valley and then drove around scouting out a place to watch the fireworks at night. kenmore has a big show at the north end of the lake and we knew that there would be plenty of fireworks around the lake in general. the problem is, there aren't many spots where you can actually see the lake unless you are actually on the shore (have i mentioned that there are lots of trees here?) and the spots on the shore are extremely crowded. not something we wanted to do with little kiddos.

randy and i were both a little worried about how the night would go. it doesn't get dark until late here and our girls don't do very well when they are tired. but, we decided that we can't always opt out of holiday celebrations because our kids are little and i really didn't want to be sitting at home moping at night, so we braved it anyway. we had found a street earlier in the day that had a great view and hoped that there would be space for us. we didn't want to leave so early that the kids would be dying before we were even close to the fireworks starting, but didn't want to leave so late that we wouldn't get a spot. we left at 9:00 and it ended up being perfect. we got a spot at the top of the hill and right after we got there, it started getting crowded.

 

you can't do this with a corolla. it was the perfect set up. jonathan fell asleep before the show and was in his carseat and we all snuggled in the back of the van with pillows, quilts, and trader joe's cat cookies.

this was our view. it was great, although we actually ended up getting our and watching the actual fireworks show from outside the van because that shrub on the left blocked us from having a full view. but before the kenmore show started, we could see tons of other fireworks from the comfort of the van.

burrito baby before being put in his carseat.

about half an hour after we got there, a family from our ward actually pulled up right across the street from us, so we got to talk to them for a while and hopped over to their spot to avoid the shrub when the actual show started. it was a win-win situation.

the girls actually didn't love the fireworks. they were kind of loud for them and they were really tired at that point. but i think they still really had fun and will have fun memories from the fourth of july. despite its grumpy beginnings, and even though it wasn't lake cavanaugh, i had a pretty great day too.

your cat is beautiful

(warning: after writing this post, i realized that it quickly became a rambling post that is of little interest to most people, but i know that my immediate family will enjoy it, so it goes on the blog).

i've become a little bit of a craigslist troll lately. i watch the free stuff pretty religiously, and i have alerts set up through an app on my phone for certain items that we're looking for. one of my alerts is for the term, "organ."

let me explain. a couple weeks ago, i was perusing the free ads and there was one for an organ. no picture, and very little description. i thought, i'll call just in case this person is giving away a nice organ for free. i called and an older woman answered. i asked her if she knew what kind of organ it was. she didn't. so, i gave the phone to randy and he started asking her questions. by the end of the conversation, randy had narrowed it down to a few models of a hammond organ. he went and got it and we now have a hammond M3 that is in great condition. for free. it's not anything fancy, but it's a fun little organ for randy to play some jazz on.

so that got us to thinking, what if other people are sitting on even better models of the hammond, not knowing what they have, and selling them (or giving them away!) on craigslist? thus, i have an alert on my phone for the term organ.

so last night, i checked an alert for a hammond C3 organ on my phone. the ad claimed that it was in working and had the listing price as $100. here is the picture from the ad (relevant later):

now, i know that i've been throwing around model numbers like people know what i'm talking about, and most don't, but let me assure you that this is a great organ. hammond organs have a bit of a cult following. they are famous as jazz organs and the B3 is the most famous. but the C3 is pretty much the exact same organ with a built in speaker in an enclosed cabinet. so a C3 for $100? ridiculous. they might as well have been giving it away.

back to the story. i told randy about the ad and quickly went to email the person to tell them that we would take the organ, but there was no email associated with the ad. upon inspecting the ad, i realized that there was actually no contact information in the ad at all. this was maddening. somewhere out there, someone was trying to sell a C3 for $100 and there was no way of contacting them. i considered walking the streets of capitol hill, yelling for the owner of the C3 to show himself. i tried to summon my inner sherlock to find any clues in the picture as to the exact location of the organ: a landmark in a background window, a unique architectural detail, anything. to no avail. so instead, we hit the button that has craiglist send the seller a note, indicating that there is no contact info. we kept refreshing the ad to see if the seller had added contact info, but nothing changed and we finally went to sleep, dreaming of the illusive C3.

this morning, i checked the ad first thing after i woke up. still no way to contact the seller. but as i continued to watch the ad and my organ alerts on my phone, a funny thing started happening on craigslist. ads started popping up, trying to reach out to this seller. you see, we were not the only ones in angst over the ad. i could just imagine hammond enthusiasts throughout the seattle area, sitting in front of their computers, trying to figure out how to one up the other seekers, without looking so desperate that it would drive the price up.

but the ads climaxed at 12:56pm, with this beauty. i'm going to include the text and picture here, because some day the ad will be taken down and i want to immortalize it:

Hammond C3 Owner - your cat is beautiful

To the seller of the Hammond C3 on Capitol Hill,

I just wanted to say that your Nebelung cat is gorgeous; they are one of my favorite breeds. Even more so as I have one myself. Like yours, mine also likes to sit atop musical instruments: http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/5531_141696500870_6216495_n.jpg

I wish it were your cat you were selling for such a wonderful price, but alas, I couldn't ask you to part with a Nebelung. As it turns out, though, I love Hammonds about as much as I love silver cats. And I would love to buy that C3 if you've still got it. I know I am not alone in trying to contact you in this indirect manner. But if you feel so inclined... shoot me an email, and we can figure something out.

I'll get there today if you need! And of course, I never turn down the chance to chat with another cat person.

this is fantastic on so many levels. i don't even know where to start. randy is working on a parody of the cat ad with a soda can (there is a soda can next to the organ in the original ad), appealing to the seller's love of soda and stating that randy, too, loves to drink soda. even if he can't have the organ, randy would love to talk to him about soda.

still no contact info on the ad. who knows, maybe the seller has already contacted one of the people who reached out in a separate ad. maybe due to the response he has realized that it is worth much more than $100 and will sell it somewhere else for more. maybe he just hasn't checked his email yet and will update the ad later (you know i'll be watching). maybe it's some old lady who doesn't know why no one has responded to the ad that her nephew put up for her last night and she will end up taking it to the salvation army.

or maybe it's someone who is messing with the hammond community.

i hope that the cat response ad was posted by his best friend, who is also in on the joke.