Ellie is Eight

Ellie just turned 8!  Here is her school picture for this year, 2nd grade.  I don't know why, but I keep thinking she is in 3rd grade.  She has great teachers this year, ones that can give her extra assignments when she speeds through her work so that she doesn't get bored.  In her school, the second grade classes each have two teachers- one teaches math and science and the other teaches social studies and reading.  Her teachers also say that she is super helpful in class, almost too helpful- jumping up whenever someone needs something to go and help them or reteach them what to do.  I told them that she likes to pretend to be a mom, and that her biggest aspiration in life is to be a mom and they agreed that the best way to describe her is as "mothering" to the other kids in her class. 

 

 A few weeks ago, in anticipation of her upcoming baptism, we went and I took pictures of her.  They turned out really good (thank you photography class).

 

 She spent so much time running around with her friend that came with us, that by the end she was all hot and sweaty.

 For her birthday, we had a part with some of her friends.  Since we don't allow sleepovers, we did a lateover.  The girls wore their pj's and we watched a movie and painted nails and did up-does for their hair.  Since I am not capable of doing 11 little girls hair, I hired two of my young women and they helped with the nail painting and the hair doing. It was great because after the movie ended, the girls were all going wild and I didn't have anything planned, and the young women lead the girls in dance moves. They all seemed to have a great time.  Unfortunately, right before the party, Ellie said she had a headache.  I had her take a small nap, but then later during the party, she still complained of a headache.  I relented and gave her ibuprofen. A little later, she said her stomach didn't feel well, so I sent her to lay on my bed.  The next thing I know, one of the girls came to tell me that Ellie threw up on my bed.   AHHH!!  I think it was because of the medicine, because after that she felt better, but still had a headache, but no more stomachache.

 The next day, on her actual birthday, we opened presents.  She was very happy, she got an American girl doll.  She is really into them now. 

 

 Ellie is really a joy for our family.   She is always doing gymnastic tricks in the living room-  her newest trick is a front walk-over-it's like a slow front handspring. She loves to play with friends, to be entertained, to play dolls and pretend to be a mommy.  She mostly gets along with her brothers, she now has her own room, and at night we hear her yelling across the hall to be involved in their conversation.  She likes to be wherever I am, and preferably doing whatever I am doing.  If I can keep that up, that will be quite useful when she is a teenager.
She is finally starting to enjoy reading.  I think it is related to the fact that we have finally found some books that are interesting for her to read.  Too bad she doesn't necessarily like the books her brother reads.
Well, we are lucky to have her!

Cheer Camp

Being that she is the only girl, Ellie doesn't often get to do girly things.  Because of this, I try to give her chances to do fun things when they come up.  Just last weekend, she got to go to cheer camp and the local high school.  They spent a few hours interacting with the high school cheerleaders and learning a cheer.  Here she is with the high school mascot.

 

Ellie, with her friend Karys.

Crown and Arch Molding or is it Moulding

Shortly after we moved into our house and we were writing lists of things that we would like to do to our new house, Joe mentioned that he would really like crown molding in the living room area.  It has been somewhere on the to-do list since then, roughly 5 years.  I am not complaining, in the same time he has completely gutted and remodeled our lake house, and done several projects for this house.  He decided that while I was out of town this summer, he would get it done.  About last January, I decided that it would be nice to have molding on my archways.  When we had the house built, someone mentioned that we could get arches put in, and so we had them put in in two different entryways in our house.  Now that I have had them for a while, I have decided I don't actually care for arches, but in January, I saw a few pictures online of arches with molding.  I fell in love and decided that I had to do that myself. Putting molding on arches is quite challenging, however, because the molding has to be flexible so that it can curve around the arch.  I found a website online that sold flexible molding and decided I could just do it myself, so that it wouldn't be a burden to Joe and it would get done on my time frame.  The website molding was very expensive, but it came quickly, but what they sent was not what I ordered.  Luckily I only ordered for one of the two archways, so when I called them back, they sent more molding of the correct kind, but didn't make me return the first order.  Since the molding is super expensive, I used the incorrect stuff on the back of the arches (i.e. coming in from the back way) and saved myself a ton of money.  I quickly started painting the molding and then realized I was in over my head.  It didn't help that Joe was pointing out how awful my painting job was and how he didn't think I could do it.  Finally I enlisted his help, but it had to be on his time schedule.

 

Fast forward to this summer.  (His time schedule wasn't interested in doing it before then). While I was out of town, he was able to put up the crown molding, but I had to do the caulking.  It looked so good.  I had to request that for my birthday and anniversary combined he finish it.  (I pretty much didn't ask for anything else- I know how these things work).  Many grumpy nights later it is finally, FINALLY done. 

 

I don't have a before of the crown molding, I didn't think to get one.  Here is the arch before:

 And the other arch, they are both in the same great room area, so they had to match.

 And after.  One of the tricks was to find something that was flexible that could go on the inside of the arch since the corners of the wall are rounded, we needed to have something solid to meet the edge of the molding.  We finally found some plastic bead board that was flexible enough, but when we first nailed it in, it shattered the bead board, we had to redo it and use glue to glue the beadboard up.  The other wall is about 1/3 as thick as this one (obviously not a load bearing wall), so we used a different plastic substance on it. 

Here is a close up of the molding detail at the "corners" of the arch.

On the crown molding, since the corners at our house are rounded, Joe had to do special corners like this:  I can't even begin to understand the angles that he had to cut to get those right, but somehow he figured it out.

It looks SOOOO good, I am so glad it is done.  I do have two things I learned from this project- my husband is superman, (well I already knew that), and don't ever try this yourself at home, just pay a little extra and hire it done.

Photography Class

I just finished taking a beginning photography class at the local community college.  That had been on my to-do list for after the kids all went to school, and a few days before the class started, my friend told me she had signed up and encouraged me to do the same.  I quickly signed up. 

The class was perfect, it was designed to teach us how to use the manual settings on our digital SLR cameras.  It started with how to use f-stops, shutter speed and ISO.  I have tried before to figure those out, and gotten it for a few hours, but it was nice to have it written out for me, then to have specific assignments and then critique on the assignments.  We would spend some portion of the classes outside, taking pictures and checking our settings.  I still have a long way to go, but I feel like I really have learned a lot.  After the beginning, we then learned some about how to compose pictures to get a good photo.  I still have a lot to learn about that, but that is something you can get with time and practice.  At the end of the class, we went over editing, and used an online website to edit that worked pretty well.  Here are some of the pictures I was able to take from the class:

 

The theme for YW this year is Stand in Holy Places.  We wanted a good picture of the temple to print and hand out to the girls at Young Women in Excellence.  These were the ones I was able to come up with.

 We learned that if you use a tripod and slow your shutter speed, you can get pictures that have the water that looks blurry and pretty.  There aren't a lot of waterfalls here in the flat part of Texas, but I often see them when I travel, so it will be nice to be able to do that.

We also learned to do stop motion:

 I especially want to get better at taking pictures of my kids.  Since I have a good enough camera, why pay someone else to take pictures of them?  I took a bunch of Ellie for her baptism, and some of them are shown here, when we get a little closer to her baptism, I will post all of the good ones.

 This next one is just silly.

 Lastly, I made our family immortal for Halloween.  The photo editing website she showed us is picmonkey.com, and you can easily morph your family into vampires, zombies or witches on there.  It was pretty fun.  If you want to do more editing, it has a lot of options, and most of them are free.