Who taught him that?

The kids will miss a lot of school this semester for our trips to Colorado and Utah to see their Aunt Carrie and their Uncle Clark when they return from Honduras and Calgary (they have both been serving as missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the last couple years). Because of that, we decided that we would make sure to use the second week of Christmas break as a time to create extra learning opportunities for them. Today Leslie had them read and do some math. When I got home from work we did some science experiments (we made an egg float in the middle of a glass full of water, and we measured our lung capacity by blowing air into an upside down pop bottle full of water). We like to get inspiration for some of our experiments from YouTube videos.

Anyway, one of the videos we happened to watch today was about how much sugar was in a can of pop (they boiled it down and weighed what was left). A 12-oz. can of pop has about 39 grams of sugar in it. At dinner time we had some Sunny-D (not a usual thing at our house) so we thought we would compare. The nutrition label said there were 14 grams of sugar in 8 oz. of Sunny-D.

Now here's the crazy part. To make a valid comparison, we asked how much sugar would be 12 oz. of Sunny-D. After a few moments of silence, I started prompting the thought process by asking what the difference was between 12 and 8. Before I finished my sentence, Morgan blurted out, "21 grams." Leslie and I were stunned! (That's the right answer, by the way, in case you were still trying to think it through.) Who teaches that kid? (By the way, I'm pretty sure it's not us.)

The Great Tile Project

We'd like to share with you one of the many things that have been keeping us from updating our blog recently. We call it The Great Tile Project - with the word "Great" indicating a sense of "long and arduous", rather than "impressive or of high quality".

It all started not too long after Emma broke her arm when Leslie called me at work to say that we needed to get a hold of our landlord because our bathroom was flooding (I won't go into the gory details). Half of said landlord team rushed home from work and tried to help the other half of said landlord team mop up the mess with towels (there were SOME good things about renting, we now realize).

After conducting perhaps ill-advised tests to determine the cause (involving running all the sinks and flushing all the toilets at once, and then mopping up the mess with towels again) and asking questions of more knowledgeable landlords, we paid a plumber $80 to come to our house for 20 minutes to remove the roots that had grown into our sewer pipe (along with a baby wipe or two; who flushed those down the toilet?).

The previous owners of the house had installed some self-stick vinyl tiles in the bathroom that we had never been really fond of and wanted to replace at some point. Seeing as several of them had now lost their self-stickiness, and we were worried about the water that had gotten underneath them, we decided that it was as good a time as any to redo the flooring. So, armed with a flat-head screwdriver and a hair dryer I pulled up all the vinyl tiles to reveal the originally white terrazzo tiles underneath. Because a significant amount of glue didn't want to come up with the vinyl tiles, we had to lay some of them back down to have some "stepping stones" to get around in the bathroom.


A day or two later I borrowed some tools from a friend and chipped out all of the terrazzo tile with an hammer and chisel (the stones in those can really fly!). I thought that would be the hard part until I realized that the real work was getting rid of all the leftover mortar underneath. Luckily I complained about it enough that someone at work offered to lend me their 5.5 hp compressor with air chisel and grinder. Here's a shot of the cleaning crew before the work:

And after (notice the decrease in size of the work crew):

It quickly became apparent that chiseling and grinding mortar was going to make a big mess, so we covered as much as we could with plastic sheeting, including the door to the bathroom. That meant that I got to crawl in and out of the bathroom window. Since the bathroom is right next to Talmage's room and no 5.5 hp gasoline motor is very quiet, another result of using the compressor was that forever after, when Talmage would see it in the garage he would emphatically say, "Daddy youd! Daddy youd!"

We had a bare cement floor in the bathroom for quite a long time while we looked at different tile at Lowes and the local tile store. Because it was such a good deal, we finally decided on some 16" travertine (a natural stone) tile. I used PowerPoint to create a half-scale model of the tile pattern we had come up with (the other engineers at work had to laugh at me for that).

We slowly came to realize that for our first experience with tile, we were sure making it difficult on ourselves - natural stone tile usually has thin grout lines (we used 1/16") that don't hide mistakes very well, and a diagonal pattern with a border means a lot of cutting (especially since everything had to come from the same 16" tiles; no border pieces premade) - but there was no turning back or settling for something less at that point. After planning and planning and planning until I was blue in the face, I finally got up the courage to start laying tile. Leslie was my beautiful backbuttering assistant. Here are the first four tiles on the main diagonal (we only got to put in two tiles in the entire bathroom that were not cut with a wet saw; the wood is filling the space that will be used for the border tiles):

And here are some more tiles put into place:

All the tiles finally laid - what a relief!

After laying the tiles we applied enhancing sealer and then grouted and then resealed the tiles along with the grout.




Then I borrowed a nailer for the air compressor and put the baseboards back in, then caulked all around and put the toilet back in. We finally moved back into the bathroom on Saturday.








I'm happy to say that everything turned out well in the end, and I'm rather proud of our tiling job, but I don't think I'll be doing it again any time soon.

POST EDIT : A big thank you goes to Nate's Dad who came in and took over as assistant. He did such a great job helping Nate during his Thanksgiving "vacation". Thanks Steve, we couldn't have done it with out your superior know-how and tireless efforts.

Spooks and Smiles

We had a great Halloween. We enjoyed Trunk-or-treat at the church on Thursday and went around to just a few neighbors houses on Saturday to say hello and get a little more candy.
We had the Princess (Emma) and the Pea (Peter), and the Princess and the Frog (Morgan), and Talmage was a smash hit as a Crash Test Dummy (or Genius!).
My favorite part of the weekend was sitting out on the porch to hand out candy with the whole family. The weather was nice and we read a Halloween book while the kids ate their candy and Morgan handed out treats to all the people who stopped by.
Hope you all had a good one.

Terrific Two

Talmage turned 2 last Tuesday. We had a pretty laid back birthday. We played at the park with friends, shared some mini cupcakes and took pictures with a dinosaur. He opened presents through-out the day. In the evening we ate corndogs for dinner (his favorite), rode bikes around and ate a donut & cupcake creature. It was a good day.
Since I just recently wrote a post about how much we love Talmage, I will just tell you two things he learned on his 2nd birthday. He learned to say "Awesome!" and he learned what a camel says, "Camel, pweit" (spitting). Morgan taught him that and he repeated it over and over to everyone, even to our neighbor who is 100 years (and a couple months) older than him. Bring on the "terrible twos", we think they're exciting.

A memorable weekend

The weather this past week was gorgeous in Oklahoma. So nice that we planned a camping trip to our local state park for Friday night. Wonderful. Except, it didn't happen. Instead, we ended up camping out in the hospital. Why you ask?
Because this cute, (but sometimes clumsy) little girl fell off the monkeybars at school.
I got a call Thursday morning that went something like this:
"Hi, Mrs. King?"
"Yes"
"This is Lori at the school. You need to come pick up Emma. She fell and it looks like she broke her arm."
"Oh, a, um, okay . . . We'll be there right away."
And then the adrenaline started pumping and I grabbed Talmage and we quickly left Walmart headed for the school.
Prayers were said, kind friends (and even strangers) helped out, Dad came to our rescue, x-rays were taken and by afternoon we had a diagnosis of a broken elbow and an appointment with the Orthopedic Surgeon.Emma was so, so brave. They say she never cried in the school office (until she saw me, but i told her that it is a kids duty to cry when they see their Mom after a trauma). The worst part was probably straightening her arm for the x-rays. Her face went white/green and she started sweating profusely, and i thought she might pass out from the pain, but even then she only whimpered.
Things kept growing. First it was an appointment with the surgeon to set it, then it would surely need surgery, probably just inserting pins with no incision, then the surgeon came in and informed us that it would be an open surgery, and then they told us that she would need to stay overnight in the hospital.But things went well. They surgery was almost two hours and the waiting to see her again was excruciating. We got to have a little girls night out at the hospital. Emma enjoyed ordering whatever she wanted to eat from the hospital menu. The nurses brought her princess coloring pages and her very own crayons. In the morning our boys brought her a pink rose and a pink balloon.
We feel so very blessed with how everything played out. Thank you to all the kind friends who helped us take care of our little boys, and gave blessings of healing and strength, and even brought us dinner. Hopefully everything will heal up just perfectly. We love our sweet little Emma.

Growing Up

Here is Morgan on his first day of Pre-K in August 2008.

Here is Morgan on his 31st day of First Grade today.

The lizard shirt lives on. This is still one of his favorite shirts (he would probably wear it 3 times a week if i let him). He also still has the same Elmo backpack. But now instead of pulling his socks way up, he rolls them way down. Oh, wow. Our boy is growing up.

In love

I've fallen in love with a wonderful boy,
and his name is Talmage!
I have fallen in love with this little son of mine. He is pretty wild,constantly covered in bruises, and sometimes a handful but i really like that kid.
I am so glad that he gets to be my at-home friend while the big kids are at school. He is almost two and is in such a cute stage. This summer he turned into a real talker. It is so fun to listen to him. It melts my heart when he gives me a hug and says "I love you, Mama". He is very polite. When we read Go Dog Go, and the bird says "Stop", Talmage insists on "stop, PLEASE!". I love when he says "Tank you, Mama".
He is pretty quick to say "Sorry, bebe" or "Sorry, bebe Emma". (He has lots of opportunity to practice those since he is in a hitting and throwing stage.)
Talmage is a comic. He is funny and he knows it. He often keeps us laughing through dinner and all day. On our recent camping trip he fell backwards off the picnic bench. A kind friend picked him up and brushed him off and we were all surprised when he started laughing. Then he walked across the campsite to where i was cooking and said with a chuckle, "I funny. I funny, Mama! I fall, funny."I could tell you lots of other reasons i love him like how he can curl his tongue, and how he sticks his tongue out so far that it pulls his epiglotus up, and how he tells me when he is stinky, and how he totally loves Peter, and how he sweetly says "Good Morning" to everyone, and how he loves squishing into my rocker with me while i feed Peter, and how he says "Hello" to everyone we see everywhere we are, and how he spends most evenings sitting on the counter to watch me make dinner, and on and on.
Talmage is wonderful and i am glad he is all mine, and just one of four wonderful boys in my life.

Calgary

Finally, here is the last post in our series on Canada - about Calgary. After our adventures in Banff we went to downtown Calgary. I have to clarify that this post shows Calgary through Leslie's eyes (and more particularly, her camera). If I talked about my experience, you might hear more about Canadian oil sands than you want to. But while I was immersed in presentations about in-situ steam-assisted gravity drainage bitumen production and supercritical solvent extraction of asphaltenes, Leslie and Peter got to explore the city. So, here we go.

We'll start off with a autobiographical picture of our beautiful photographer and her little sidekick:



Near our hotel was a pedestrian mall called Stephen Avenue. During the day, the street is closed to traffic, and the young professionals of Calgary enjoy the restaurants, boutiques, and historic buildings. While strolling along Stephen Avenue one day, Leslie had a chance to show how professional she is. In preparation for an upcoming exhibit the art gallery had put out a canvas for passers-by to paint on. Leslie painted the flower in the middle top. Awesome, huh?!



Another day, Leslie and Peter ventured out to Prince's Island Park in the middle of the Bow River, which creates the northern border of the downtown area. Here is a view of part of downtown Calgary from the park.



While there, Leslie also noticed a building on the other side of the river with a very familiar-looking architectural style. Can you guess what it is?


(Yes, when we checked later on Google Maps, we were able to confirm that it is an LDS chapel. Since Leslie's brother, Clark, is on his mission in Calgary she had to take a picture just in case he had ever been there.)

She also saw a woman who seems to have taken the idea of "surround sound" a little too far. (If you can't tell, that is a sleeping bag and a backpack in there.)



Because Calgary can get a little cold in the winter (okay, so it can get really cold), they have a system of walkways between all the buildings called the Plus-15. It's actually the world's most extensive pedestrian skywalk system with a total length of 16 kilometers (and Wikipedia doesn't lie). It's called the Plus-15 because the bridges are about 15 feet above the street. All the signs for the system feature a stick figure with a cowboy hat going up some stairs. Here is a picture of one of the bridges:




After trying many doors, we finally found a building that was still open after 6:00 pm so that we could get in and explore the Plus-15. Here is a view of our hotel from inside a bridge:



And here is a look at the Calgary Tower:



One of the coolest things about downtown Calgary is that it is still growing. This is the new Bow Tower, which will be the tallest building in Canada outside of Toronto when it is finished. It is named for its curved shape and view of the Bow River.



Overall, we thought Calgary was a beautiful city in a beautiful location. We wouldn't mind living in a place like it.

Banff National Park

This is the next post in our Canada series. I have to warn you up front that this post has a lot of pictures, but Banff was so beautiful that we couldn't keep from putting in a lot. We wish you could all experience it some day. The mountains are amazingly sharp and rocky. Apparently the Canadian Rockies are newer than the mountains in Colorado or Utah. I can't imagine being able to reach the top of many of them without having to use a climbing rope. As Leslie said in her most recent post, we went to Canada for a conference I was attending for work (related to the Canadian oil sands). We dropped off the three oldest kids in Salt Lake, and then Leslie and Peter and I flew to Calgary, Alberta (by the way, it is pretty hard to take passport pictures of a four-day-old!). Once we got there we rented a car and drove the hour and a half to Banff National Park. Here is the entrance to the park:



We stayed in the town of Banff (inside the park). The temperature was about 40º cooler there than in Oklahoma (it was a good time to be gone with actual temperatures around 105º and heat indexes around 115º). Luckily, we had some pretty Kuhl jackets to keep us warm. And don't you like Peter's crocheted boots? They were great for Calgary, where people take their Western wear very seriously.



With only three days to spend in Banff we knew we couldn't waste any time. Our first evening there we walked around the town just absorbing the atmosphere - it's a fun touristy mountain town kind of like Park City, but not as big and with more of a European flair (Leslie already mentioned how often we heard other languages being spoken around us).

The next morning we drove along the scenic route to Johnston Canyon. We wanted to go on some fairly easy hikes that would allow us to experience the beauties of the park. The hike up Johnston Canyon is a few kilometers and goes by two sets of amazing falls. Here are a couple pictures of Leslie along a particularly cool part of the trail and by the Lower Falls (pictures of both falls are in the slide show below).





Next, we hopped back in the car and drove up to Lake Louise, which is a definite must-see for first-timers to Banff. Being the outdoors enthusiast that I am, I was a little leary of going to a famous lake with a humongous (both in size and room price - there is a picture in the slide show at the end of the post) hotel on the shore, where I new we would be surrounded by tons of tourists. Let me say I'm glad we did it anyway. The lake is amazing as you can see in the next two pictures. And the color of that water is real - a milky blue-green! The lake is glacier-fed (you can see the glacier on the mountains in the background).





There are a couple trails that go around the lake and I did convince Leslie we should take the harder one, which was nice because it was definitely the road less traveled. We got to enjoy the quiet beauty of the forest around the lake as we climbed to a lookout point (the pictures of the Chateau Lake Louise in the slide show were taken from this lookout). Many of you may remember a post when we talked about the kids deciding to name a certain part of our backyard "mossland". Well, we found the real mossland on this hike! Peter didn't appreciate our efforts to capture the discovery, though.



Here's a picture of Leslie taking some pictures :)



After Lake Louise we went to Morraine Lake, which had similarly spectacular water color (although less milky). No picture here, but there is one in the slide show. We were pretty tired at this point in the day, so we didn't go on a hike around Morraine Lake, but we did get to watch a French-speaking woman take a quick dive (on purpose) into the 4ºC water. Brrrr! We decided to stick with taking pictures.

On Sunday, we went to church (there was an LDS church about a block and a half from our hotel). One of the missionaries we saw knew Leslie's brother, Clark, who has been serving as a missionary in the area around Calgary for the last year and a half (he comes home in January!). We wanted to spend the rest of the day doing things that would be more calm and peaceful than our Saturday activities, so we visited some of the sites close to town, including the overlook for the falls on the Bow River and Lake Minnewonka (where we enjoyed a wonderfully quiet and non-strenuous hike through the forest along the shore - more pictures in the slide show, including some of the horned wildlife we saw). Here are a couple of pictures to prove we were there.





I couldn't resist taking a picture of this sign:



Monday, our final day in Banff, we had a decision to make. Either take the gondola up to lookout at the top of Sulphur Mountain (which everyone in my group at work said we had to do) or take the bus up to Sunshine Meadows. We decided to do the latter and we are very happy we did. Sunshine Meadows ended up being our favorite hike! An old school bus takes you up the steep muddy road to the top of a ski resort and then lets you free to hike around on the trails. Sunshine Meadows is not technically part of Banff, but is an alpine meadow in a provincial (read "state") park that crosses the Continental Divide and goes into British Columbia. The trail to Mt. Assiniboine starts there, so there were a few backpackers on the bus up with us. There was also a group of very in-shape seniors on the bus with us (I would love to be hiking around at several thousand feet when I'm seventy!). The weather called for rain most of the day, so Leslie and I had some water-resistant jackets on (Leslie's was more resistant than mine). The next pictures document some of the beautiful sites we saw.

Rock Isle Lake:



Leslie at a quaint stream crossing:



You have to click on this panorama shot to see it bigger:



Leslie and Peter with British Columbia in the background. (The weather had actually been very nice until about this point in the hike. This was where we stopped for lunch, but when these clouds came rolling into view we packed up in a hurry and started for the bus pickup to get back down the mountain.)



After some rain and hail and a crying, wet baby (remember how I said my jacket wasn't as water-resistant as Leslie's?) we made it down and enjoyed a rainy, foggy drive back to Calgary (and I'm not being sarcastic; it was a cozily beautiful experience).



Well, with that, anyone who is still left reading this post can now enjoy the slide show of more pictures. And if you ever get a chance to go to Banff, take it!