New-ish Software

A while back friends and family would ask me what program I use for digital scrapbooking.  Several years ago (2007?) I got a new program, and although I tinkered with it a bit, life happened I never got around to using it.  Or my old program, for that matter.  No scrapbooking since January 2008.  *sigh*  Determined to catch up as much as I can before Baby Isaac appears, I sat down tonight to start the repentance process.

So I'm now using My Memories Suite by Polaroid.  And while the interface is a little different than I'm used to with my old program, I'm getting used to it and I like what I can do.  What's killing me is the program keeps crashing!  I wish it weren't so buggy.  I pretty much have to save my work after any change I make, or I'll have to start over.  And six pages and probably a dozen crashes later, I've started over plenty of times tonight.  Good thing it's New Year's Eve and I'm staying up late on purpose.

An hour later...
Golly gee whiz, it might help if I actually installed the latest version that I bought 6 months after I bought the program!  Installed it now and hoping that helps.

Now if only I could get the yellow ink nozzle on my photo printer unclogged so I could actually print these works of art...

Tick-tock

So often David lives up to his name's meaning, "Beloved."  He has such a tender heart.  The past couple of days he has shown particular interest in new baby Isaac's wellbeing.

Yesterday as everyone was bundling up to go play in the 7+ inches of snow we got (!!!) he said, "Mom should stay inside, because we don't want Isaac to get cold."  He's got a point there.  I'd better stay dry and cozy inside with a cup of hot cocoa... ;)  Seriously though, I was glad for his concern, because my midsection is rapidly making my warm outerwear gather dust on hangers.  I can get by for brief stints outdoors, but I'm not really equipped for snowball fights and snow angels.  Not that I could get down to actually make a snow angel...

But I digress...  Today David asked me at lunch time if I had eaten yet.  "Not yet," I replied.  "Mom, you need to eat because Isaac will get hungry.  He won't be thirsty now because you just had a drink."

Bedtime prayers: "...please bless Mommy and baby Isaac, and please bless Isaac when he comes out that he won't be cold, because it will be winter time..."

As I tucked him in and arranged his yellow blanket (his favorite since he was a baby), he said, "Mom, I'm getting too big for this blanket, so we can give it to Isaac."

What a precious boy!

Meanwhile the reality of the close proximity of Isaac's birth has started to sink in for Nathan and me.  I had David two weeks from this point in the pregnancy.  I've still got 5 weeks to go, but give me three more weeks to incubate this fella and then I'll be happy to push him out any time.  I'm tired of being pregnant!

So anyway, I've been thinking this past week that it's probably time pack the hospital bag (and by extension, dig out baby clothes and buy diapers), and type up the boys' schedules/routines for whomever lands them on the big day. Today Nathan was talking about how he's going to rearrange some exercise equipment in our room to make room for setting up the pack-n-play.  Which means that I also need to start thinking more seriously about how we're going to arrange all three kids' sleeping quarters once Isaac is ready for the real crib that is currently set up as Daniel's toddler bed.  I'm not sure I'm ready for David and Daniel to share a room (they'll keep each other up at night and will wake each other up pre-dawn, I guarantee it), but I'm not ready to give up my spare bedroom, either.  Okay, truthfully, I'm just not ready to give up that closet.  In the absence of much usable attic space, it's my favorite storage place in the house, and I don't want to mess with it.  But, something's gotta give, and the clock is ticking!

Christmas Panic

I woke up to Daniel hollering that he was ready to get up. I nudged Nathan and said, "Hey, the little guy is ready to come out. Shall we go down?" 
Him: "Really?!" 
Me: "Yeah, it's 7:00." 
Him: "Oh, Daniel! Be more specific next time!" (he thought I was in labor)

This 'n That

Long story short: My dad's ancestors were potters in England.  When he and my mom went to England on a family history trip in 2007, they learned that Dad has a fourth cousin, Mark Hewitt, with a kiln right here in North Carolina.  I got to thinking that it would be fun to get them a piece of Mark's pottery for Christmas.  His kiln is only open to the public three times a year, so when I saw he'd have an opening the first two weekends in December, I invited my folks to come up and check it out.  I enlisted my siblings to all pitch in and then contacted Mark about doing a custom piece for Mom and Dad to reflect our Hewitt Pottery heritage together.  We ended up having a private appointment to go see Mark the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so that we could really talk about family connections, etc, without the pressure of other customers around.  It was a lovely afternoon!  He has a delightful family and I'm so glad to have met them.  Here's the pot he made for Mom and Dad:

My paternal grandmother is a Hewitt.

NC SC on the reverse side "for balance" and to reflect our current geographic status, I guess

The sides have these pretty blue drips

JaNice, Dennis, Mark, Natalie

That weekend Mom and Dad also painted David's room for us, so the monster truck mural is all gone!  David's very excited.  We topped it off by rearranging the furniture in his room too, and he thinks it's pretty swell.  (Thanks so much Mom and Dad for your help!)

We set up our Christmas tree for Family Home Evening that Monday, and the boys were absolutely delighted that they got to put all the ornaments on.  After we got it up, Daniel declared, "It's so bootiful!"  He loves all the lights, and he asks me several times a day if it's time to open presents yet.  We have an advent calendar that my sister made where you move Mary and Joseph towards the stable, and on Christmas day you take out a baby Jesus to put in the manger.  Last week I overheard David explaining it to Daniel, telling him that at the end we'd get to open presents, and later that morning, after David was at school, Daniel called me over and showed me that he had moved Mary and Joseph to the end and pulled out baby Jesus.  "See Mommy?  It's time to open presents now!"  Bless his little heart.

David is excited too, but I love how he keeps reminding all of us that we need to remember that Christmas is about baby Jesus.  My brother sent us a replica of a tradition we had growing up, with a small manger and some straw.  Every time you do service for someone else, you put a piece of straw into the manger to make Jesus' bed softer.  I haven't had it out the past couple years, but David has been very enthusiastic about being a "Secret Service Agent" (kudos to whomever came up with that Primary lesson!  He's doing little acts of service all over the place), so I got it out and showed him.  He has embraced it wholeheartedly and is excited for opportunities to make the bed softer for Baby Jesus.

I took each of the boys individually to the Dollar Store to pick out a present for each other.  They both picked exactly the same thing.  How sweet is that?  I took David second and was actually rather relieved that he picked the same gift, because Daniel REALLY liked it and I had a hard time getting him to let go of it so I could wrap it up.  :)

Last weekend I took David to the Knightdale Christmas Parade.  He was very excited about seeing Santa in the parade and all the candy that would get distributed.  He was not disappointed!  He got loads of candy (good thing we brought a goody bag!), our town has a Miracle-on-34th-Street-quality Santa (real beard, real belly, beautiful costume), and it started snowing as the parade started.  I think winter is David's favorite season, because he loves the snow.  He did NOT get that from me.  By the time we were walking back to the car, there was about half an inch on the ground.  David was a real trooper, but a stones-throw away from the car he broke down bawling about how cold he was.  Poor fella.  Of course, by the time we got home all he wanted to do was go play in the snow in the back yard.

David waiting for the parade to start

This week we got official notice that Nathan's company will be transferring him to the San Jose, CA office.  We've been planning in this direction since August, but it's nice to know it will actually happen.  Now we're just waiting for the official "when."  After talking to the COO for an hour, Nathan said it sounds like we'll have a good deal of say in that matter, but there's going to be a big meeting in January with more details, so hopefully after that we'll know better what's going on.  If it's entirely up to us, I think we'll stick around here until July so David can finish out the school year.  Who'd want to be the new kid with only two months left of school?

I made a DVD of my visit to Hewitt Pottery to share with my siblings, so they could learn about this family connection too, and also to see Mom and Dad's faces when we surprised them with the pottery.  As I was working on it I thought, "I'd love to have a small piece of Hewitt family history, too," so I talked Nathan into coming out with me and the boys to the last weekend of Mark's kiln opening (today), since I don't know if we'll be around for the next one.  I made a batch of Great-Grandma Hewitt's Lemon Cheese (our family calls it "lemon cheese" but the rest of the British Empire calls it "lemon curd") and took some to share with Mark.  I thought he'd appreciate it.  :)  He was delighted and opened it right there in the yard and stuck his finger in for a taste.  Fortunately, it was the best batch I've made in years.  I even made it in Great-Grandma Hewitt's double boiler.

The pottery I selected is on the right.  Mark gave me the mug as a thank-you for the lemon cheese.

After I'd selected my pottery we went into his workshop to check out and also enjoy hot cider and cookies.  Mark's 26-ish-y/o daughter Emma came in and when she saw the boys, she immediately asked them, "Have you seen our swings?  Come with me, I'm your cousin!  Let's go play!"  "Okay!" they both chimed and as simple as that she wooed my thus-far bashful, hide-behind-parental-legs children immediately into following her out the door without even looking back at us.  (A little scary, actually, how easily they were convinced.  Pied piper comes to mind...)  They had so much fun with her, though, and asked me the rest of the afternoon where Emma had gone.  I pulled up the Hewitt DVD project on the computer and Daniel immediately said, "We went there!"

After we got home, Nathan pulled out a big box of his old toys that he's saved.  Out came the original MicroMachines and Transformers.  Grand Slam!  The boys sat upstairs and played with them all afternoon.  I told Nathan we should have wrapped them up and put them under the tree, but he just grinned and said "They're enjoying them now."

Pregnancy is going well, aside from feeling a lot more uncomfortable than I recall feeling with the first two.  We've decided to call the baby Isaac.  Still some discussion on the rest of his name. 

I decided it's probably time to start taking profile pics for posterity.  It's not a particularly flattering angle, or time of night for that matter, but here I am.  I must be quite a sight, though, because my burgeoning belly elicits comments every time I leave the house.  The public at large is convinced I'm due any day now, even though I'm only 32 weeks.  Last time I went to the grocery store, I had four employees eye me and ask how far along I was.  I think the best (and worst) reaction I've gotten so far was today as I was checking out at Michael's.  The cashier was a young man, probably mid-twenties.

Him: When are you due?
Me: Eight weeks.
Him: Are you having twins?
Me: Nope, just one.
Him: Man, you're SO BIG!

Quite the charmer, wasn't he?

Email Update

The IT department at BYU is cleaning house and discovered that I have an email alias (@byu.edu) they only want current employees using.  So, I have to change over to the alumni handle (@byu.net) which will be hard for me because I always type "ent" instead of "net."  Oh well!  So please,

Delete 211ta@byu.edu

Update to natals8@byu.net

While you're tidying things up, go ahead and delete pamperedbynatalie@gmail.com, too.  That chapter of my life has closed and I'm shedding the email address with it.  If you use my other gmail, you're fine to leave it.

My new byu.net email will (hopefully) be a permanent thing which I will always have set to forward mail to my primary email address (that was the plan with 211ta).  So when in doubt, send it to natals8@byu.net.  That should always find me even if I change other email addresses.

Thanks!

I Spy

Once upon a visit, Nathan's mom taught David how to play "I Spy" during a car ride.  On their most recent visit, Daniel decided he wanted to play, too.  He kind of gets it, but kind of not.  For example:

Me: I spy something... black.
Daniel: Is it outside the car?
Me: Yes.
Daniel: Okay, my turn!

At least it takes the pressure off having to spy something he can actually guess in a moving vehicle.  It gets even more interesting when it's Daniel's turn.  He usually spies something "black and yellow," but that's not a dependable description because it could really be anything at all, regardless of color.  One time he spied black and yellow and it was a tree--before the autumn colors had come to our neck of the woods.  And sometimes he spies things that are nowhere in sight.  This morning I spied something green (traffic light) and he insisted the answer was a school bus.  No school busses in sight.  Not even black and yellow ones.

A couple weeks ago I watched his little friend Tanner for the afternoon and they played I Spy on the way to pick David up from school.  I don't remember their dialogue, but imagine two little guys playing a la Daniel, and it's pretty comical.  I do recall that Tanner would say "I Spy something orange" and then proceed to name everything in sight that was orange.  It kept them entertained, though, so who am I to complain?

"You are Getting Sleepy"

I'm told that when it comes to sleep patterns, some kids are timers, some are alarm clocks.  Meaning regardless of when they go to sleep, "Team Timer" will always wake up X amount of time later, and "Team Alarm" will always wake up at the same time.  My kids are alarm clocks, and David's is set very early.  Ridiculously early.  As in, sometimes he's awake when Nathan's leaving for seminary at 5:45.  When he was in diapers, we just kept his bedroom door locked to make sure he wasn't getting into mischief until we woke up. After he needed the freedom to emerge and use the modern marvel of indoor plumbing, however, we took a different approach.

I bought him a bedside clock and we stressed emphatically that he could get up to use the bathroom, but otherwise he needed to stay in bed until 7:00.  If he woke up, go back to sleep.  Stay in bed.  But whatever he did, unless there was a dire emergency, he was not to come bounding into our room before 7:00 under pain of death.

Now, we happen to know that he's usually out of bed by 6:30, a fact merely confirmed when Nathan started teaching seminary last year.  He often just goes downstairs and reads.  We wake up briefly and notice a light on, or hear him playing, but we figure as long as he leaves us alone and doesn't wake up Daniel, there's not much we can (or care to) do about it.  However, when we notice he's up especially early and ask him what time he woke up, he, brainwashed with our ultimatum, always answers straight-faced that he got up at 7:00.

Today he was acting very tired while we were on an outing.  On the way home, as David looked on the verge of falling asleep in the car, Nathan asked him what time he got up.  "And don't say 7:00, because we know you were up earlier."  David hesitated a moment and then replied, "6:59..."

Giving Thanks

Daniel is still in the early stages of potty training, so I still get to enjoy all the thrills of diaper changes.  Thursday he did an incognito poo in his diaper either right before or at the very beginning of a 2.5-hour romp at the playground, which of course I didn't notice, so he started to get diaper rash.  Friday morning he greeted me with a not-so-incognito big load, walking like a saddle-sore cowboy.  Whenever I tried to clean him up, I had to deal with the usual sore-bum evasive maneuvers amid protests of pain.

This morning I walked in and saw that he had another big load (how does such a small body create so much waste?) and I carried on with what must be done.  I was very surprised, however, as I started cleanup on aisle 1, when he said, "Mommy?  Thank you for cleaning my bum."  There's a first!  He stayed remarkably still while I wiped him up.  That poor diaper rash even started bleeding a bit in one spot.  He calmly reminded me to put medicine (Desitin) on his bum, which I'm told stings, and after I finished, he gave me a big hug and said, "Mommy, thank you for feeling me better."

I'm so thankful to have such sweet boys!