Blizzard in Bville

You probably know about or experienced the big storm that dumped over a foot of snow along a 2000+ mile swath of the U.S. from Oklahoma to Chicago and New York. We thought we’d share a little about our experiences here in Bartlesville.

Last Saturday the high was over 70 degrees. We knew the weather was supposed to turn colder but we hadn’t really been paying attention to the news until Sunday evening when we realized that we were under a Winter Storm Warning starting on Monday and extending through Tuesday evening. The kids went to school and I went to work on Monday. I checked the weather a couple of times and then called Leslie to tell her that the Winter Storm Warning had been canceled… in favor of a Blizzard Warning. The kids never went to school again (at least for the rest of the week)!

There still wasn’t much to see when we went to bed on Monday night, but when we woke up on Tuesday morning it looked like this:

 

Needless to say, I got the day off of work. The kids and I decided to go outside and have some fun. I was excited to use our snowshoes again (they have been sitting in our garage for the last two and a half years feeling lonely and unloved).

 

After we came back in we kept watching the snow fall outside. Finally it stopped late in the afternoon. Official reports said we got 16-18 inches of snow. It looked pretty neat outside.

 

I started thinking that we could make a quinzee (a.k.a. snow cave made from a pile of snow rather than a snow drift). That is probably not something that we will have the opportunity to do often while living here. We took almost all of the snow from our driveway and some from our yard to make a huge pile of snow (probably 7 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter). We got some help from friends who live close by.

On Wednesday I went to work for half a day, but I had to walk out to another street to catch a ride with our friend, since our street was still full of deep snow. When I got home, Morgan and I started digging out the quinzee. When it was big enough for me to crawl inside I would fill up our sled with snow and pass it out to Morgan to dump it. After a couple hours we were done. And then we got our crazy idea… we would sleep in it!

After all the other kids were in bed, Morgan and I went out and crawled into our cave. We each used two mummy sleeping bags and took a bottle of hot water to keep our feet warm. We knew we had to be prepared because the forecast was for a low of -14 degrees! We covered the entrance with our trash can lid and then filled up the entrance tunnel with our snow clothes on top of the sled. It was so comfy and warm in our quinzee that I had to remove my hot water bottle and even poke my head out for a while to cool down. I was so proud of Morgan! He did great. He even wanted to sleep in it again the next night (we didn’t). Here are a couple pictures:

 

When we went inside the house in the morning, around 7:15, we checked weather.com to see what the temperature was. At 7:30 AM it was still -11 degrees outside, and for those who don’t believe it, here is a screen shot:



Leslie said I should email pictures to the local news station, so I did it and lo and behold they showed them on the weather segment of the 10 ‘o clock news on Thursday night. We recorded with our video camera to show to Morgan. Here it is (I didn't know that "Nate" was such a difficult name to pronounce correctly):



On Saturday we played outside in the snow again (it’s going to be around for a long time). Here are a few more pictures, including a collage (which you can click on for a larger version), of us in the snow cave. The ceiling is a little lower than it was the first night! Sadly, I was never able to convince Leslie to sleep in it.





Morgan and Emma also had fun collecting icicles and making a “city” in the snow. I think it looks a lot like the place that springs up out of the ice on Superman. Anyway, we hope that if you were also affected by the storm you have been able to have some fun, too!

Journey to Utah

Being alone for Christmas was made much easier because we knew we would be seeing family just a week later.
On Christmas Eve we left early and drove to Utah. Yep, all the way in one long day. It took us 21 hours, through 4 states, and a 72 degree temperature drop (from 58 in Bartlesville, OK to -14 in Green River, UT) but we made it to my parents house just as we welcomed in the New Year. It was so fun to be there. My sister, Katie, drove in from California the same day and it was one big party. My parents have remodeled their house since we were there last. It looks beautiful! We loved every detail of what they did and had so much fun in the new space.
We got to spend some time with the Willises, our good friends in Provo and saw lots of friends when we went to our old ward there. I saw Jill in her new house in my parents' Stake. We visited Nate's brother Jamie and his family. We went bowling and ice-skating and to the planetarium and just generally had a lot of fun.

ice skating for Morgan's early birthday party

hanging out with cousin Lochten

bowling at the U of U

We also got to meet my brother Greg's fiancee. They got engaged a few days after Christmas. It was fun to meet Meisha. We are excited for her to officially join the family in May.
On Wednesday my youngest brother, Clark, returned from his mission in Canada. It was so, so fun to see him. We all went to the airport to meet him. When he left, Talmage was not yet 3 months old and he had never even met Peter. It was fun to introduce our little boys to there very cool, good, handsome uncle. In the next picture, that cute girl in the gray jacket is my youngest sister and Clark's twin. She was so excited to see him. Once she caught a glimpse of him she could not hold back the tears. It was great to see them together again. Also beautiful Karen and Annie and in the back, Greg with his new fiancee.

Waiting. The red, maple leaf t-shirts say, "on the 'Eh' team". They were made by Greg

Cute Clark. I love that kid

On Friday we had our family gift exchange. As our gift theme for this year we chose Moe the Dog in Tropical Paradise as our guide. It is a little picture book about a dog who creates a tropical paradise in his own house to escape the winter drudgery. So everyone gave someone else an imaginary vacation. Holly gave me Moe the Dog in Austria. She gave me salt (Salzburg), a PEZ (invented in Austria), a curtain (think Sound of Music), etc. I gave possibly my favorite gift ever. My mom said something that gave me the idea and I sent Moe and my Dad to "Musical Merryland" I wrapped up a favorite family musical DVD, but what i really gave him was his very own musical. I found a karaoke accompaniment and changed the words of a song from a musical. It was all about my Dad and how great he is. Then i emailed all my siblings to help. When we all got together we practiced anytime both my parents were out of the house (I wanted to surprise my mom too). I assigned speaking parts to a few people so that the talking melded into the song - just like it does in an actual musical. We had a few "technical difficulties" getting the music going but my dad was surprised and it was a lot of fun. Thanks to all my brothers and sisters and in-laws and Nate for going along with my crazy ideas. I included the video of it here. I handed my Mom the video camera and told her "just in case she wanted to use it" but i neglected to show her how to use it or take it off zoom. So the video is pretty much just for the sound. Watch at your own peril. Enjoy.

It was a great trip.

Christmas

I know the blog police may come after me for posting about things that happened so long ago, but I have to report on our Christmas. Our Christmas this year was heavenly! It was a really happy season. This was our first year staying home with just our little family. Honestly, I didn’t know how it was going to go but it was really nice.

It started out with a really fun Christmas Eve party with some of our good friends. {Thanks so much, Kim and Clark, for having us over.} Christmas day was really peaceful. We opened stockings first and then, when everyone was ready we moved on to our family gifts that were under the tree. Talmage was just the perfect Christmas age. He was excited about everything he got. We spent the day playing with new legos, building mazes for new (and old) hexbugs, and singing our Sing-a-ma-jigs. Nate and I read from all our new books. The little boys took a nap at the same time. I even took a cold but lovely walk around the neighborhood. It was so nice. For dinner we had steak and twice baked potatoes. We got to talk to Nate’s sister, Hermana King, in Honduras, and my parents gave us the report on my brother, Elder Brimhall, in Canada. Everything was just calm and restful and wonderful.

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.