Category Archives: Family biz

Info about my family

Family biz, Geekiness

making pixel art with the kids.

1 Comment

The girls were given a craft kit from Ikea as a christmas present. It is made from the PYSSLA beads kit. You set all the beads on a little frame, put some wax paper on top a little pass with a iron, Viola!

Raw material

I immediately saw the ability to make little pictures pixel by pixel.

Laying out the beautiful masterpiece (McKelvey drew a flower on the grid paper for me)

And a flower for Arden & McKelvey

You can get even fancier by using something to help you layout your pixel art, like Photoshop. I used Pixelego.(link using the Archive.org ‘wayback machine’)

Up for the future:

Family biz

the tightrope between letting go and holding on

1 Comment

Lately I have begun to think about growing up. not myself mind you, that is a long way off, but my kids.

As a parent I want to savor every bit of cute childhood-ness that I see every day. But at the same time I’m supposed to be prepping the kids to grow up. Part of that is the urge to protect my kids from potential threats ,either physical or social. A dilemma that i have, is that I want to encourage their individuality. Each one is of them is this glorious, funny, smart person that could be anything. That is balanced with my worries about how the group can isolate away the unique. An example of this one of McKelvey’s christmas presents. She asked for a cloak, full length cloak. She asked for one because she doesn’t like big winter coats and loves olden times. Also as a lover of American Girl stories namely Felicity, she wanted a red cloak. Wanting to protect her from all the Little red riding hood jokes that would come her way we convinced her to approve a different color. I’ll find a pic of the cloak for you to see.

But she still gets a lot of comments, all positive, about the cloak. People look and stare, which is not something a kids usually wants, definitely my kids. So she has this great unique point of view and interests, but doesn’t want to stick out. How do you foster that and protect is at the same time?

So there is this tightrope between letting go and holding on, is that being a parent?

How many people out there want to be themselves but don’t want people to make a big deal about it?

Family biz

holidays and more

well we are back from our extreme holiday excursion. Extreme because it involved driving back and forth across the country in a minivan with 3 kids and 2 dogs. And overall the kids did great. not a lot of complaining pretty good cooperating and average amount of arguing with each other. Thank goodness for laptop computers and DVDs. To their credit they didn’t ask to watch a movie right away, and just looked out the window for the first hour or so. But that might be because we left at 5:30am and they were dazed.

We had a great visit with some friends in Cincinnati before getting to my parents house. We missed the snow storm. and had a great time with Jon & Tom at the American Girl Store.

All in all we had a great trip. Arden got an ear infection, but was OK and we got to see a lot of friends and family. Pix forthcoming.

In other news… McKelvey entered the PTA art contest called Reflections. Her dance won 1st place at the school, and we learned today in the district. Now I don’t know how big the district is, but it’s pretty great.

Bit of the ordinary, Family biz

Books and sleeping

McKelvey has been recently been reading the Harry Potter books. She has gotten thru the first two. As a result, she has developed a fear of basilisks she never had before. Which means for the first time in a long while she wants me to sit with her as she falls asleep. Usually, she can fall asleep by herself. But lately she can’t.

Also Arden has this phlemy cough that she can’t get rid of and wakes her up at night. So I can’t seem to get anything done at night. Between the long time put them to bed and Arden waking up repeatedly, there is no time to do the requisite late night email.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Bit of the ordinary, Family biz

Turkey time(and game time)

1 Comment

This year’s thanksgiving was great. Not only did Ann prepare a fabulous meal, but the kids were also great. We had the usual minor fights over cleaning up after themselves(I totally understand why my parents kept wanting me to not leave my shoes in the middle of the living room), but on the whole it was awesome. We taught the girls a few new games, Uno and a Harry Potter board game. Both McKelvey and Arden loved UNO, although Arden was on a team. McKelvey liked playing and holding the cards. Arden seemed to enjoy the silly banter the most. It was really great to play a game with the girls and not have them telling me what the barbie I’m holding is supposed to say. Not that I don’t like their make beleive games, it’s just that they don’t like you to break away from the script in their heads.

The Harry Potter game is basically like Clue but with a HP flair. McKelvey had a great handle of how to figure out the clues and ask the questions. She wasn’t to good on strategy yet. But hey she is seven.

I didn’t realize how much I missed playing cards or board games until we pulled them out. I just hope the interest from the girls will stay around. Or they just let have the doll say what I want it to.

Family biz

Dancing with my stars

Had fun this morning playing around with the girls. We went to the rehearsal hall at work to play around. I put on some music and we danced around and goofed around a bit as well. I must remember to do this while they are still kids and interested. Once they become surly teenagers, my moment will have passed I’m afraid.