Dr. Carlson in the News!

Russel's class got filmed for a local TV news spot. If I'd known they were going to send a TV camera that day I might have insisted he wear a collared shirt. Oh well. He doesn't always wear a T-shirt to class, really! Maybe they wanted it to look like we were suffering so much from the budget cuts our teachers couldn't afford to dress up for class.

Here's the link:http://www.kvbc.com/global/video/WorldNowASX.asp?playerType=native&ClipID1=2083639&h1=Nevada%20State%20College%27s%20plan%20for%20surviving%20budget%

ORANGE JUICE!!!!

My two-year old asked for a drink of water.

To those of you who have never had a two-year old, I must say that you can have no idea what this entails. It sounds simple and straightforward, right? Get a cup, fill it with water, give it to the child.
Ha.
I try that. I get a cup and fill it with water and offer it to the child. My act of kind service is met with fury and tears.
"NO! YELLOW CUP! YELLOW CUP!"
Apparently, the child wants water in the yellow cup.
"Ask mommy politely," I insist.
The toddler pouts and looks at me pleadingly.
"Say, please may I have water in a yellow cup." I prompt.
"Pease (mumble mumble mumble)" he says, very contrite.
So I get a yellow cup from the cupboard and fill it with water.
More fury and tears, "NO!!! ORANGE JUICE! ORANGE JUICE!"
"Ask mommy politely," I insist again. "Say, please may I have some orange juice?"
"Pease may I orange juice?"
Now I open the refrigerator and get out the orange juice. I pour half a cup into the YELLOW cup and hand it to the two-year old. All seems to be well. I pick up my address book and start looking up the phone number of a friend who just had a baby. I want to call and congratulate her.
CLUNK! SPLASH! WAAAAAA!!!!
The two year old is screaming because he dropped his orange juice.
Very calmly and sympathetically, I say, "Too bad. You spilled. That's okay. I'll clean it up." There is a pink hand towel from yesterday's laundry lying on the floor, conveniently near by. I mop up the orange juice and go back to the phone book.
"ORANGE JUICE!!! WAAAAAA!!!!!"
"Stop crying and ask mommy politely."
"Okay," the two-year old sniffles, "Okay."
After a long pause, I prompt, "Say, please may I have some more orange juice?"
"Pease (mumble mumble)"
Once again, I fill the cup. Once again, I look down at my phone book. I'm getting close, I'm on the right page.
CLUNK! SPLASH! WAAAAAA!!!!
This has nothing to do with orange juice. This is some kind of scientific experiment. The child wants to know how many times he can persuade me to give him orange juice when all he wants to do is drop it on the tile.
This time I clean it up in perfect silence. Once again, I make him ask politely. As before, I half fill the yellow cup. This time, however, I watch him like a hawk, daring him to drop the cup on the floor right in front of my eyes.
He drinks the orange juice.
"More juice! More juice!" As soon as it is gone he wants more, of course.
"Ask mommy politely."
Another long pause.
"Say, please may I have more orange juice?"
"Please uh may I juice?"
Good enough. I pour him some more, but this time he just holds the cup and watches me.
"Drink it," I say.
The two-year old turns and starts walking away with his cup.
"Drink your juice or I'll have to put you in your chair until you finish it," I warn.
"NO!"
"Drink it," I start after him.
"NO! NO! NO!" he is hopping up and down, nearly sloshing orange juice out on his shirt. "Wanna sit chair." He starts pulling the step stool across the floor towards the sink, barely balancing the orange juice upright in his other hand.
At this point the phone rings. I go and get it. When I come back, I see that the child has dumped his orange juice in the sink. I take the cup.
"I wa' orange juice!" he demands.
"Forget it." I say. "If you're thirsty, you can have water."
I decide not to call my friend to congratulate her on her new baby until later, so she won't have to listen to my child screaming in the background. It would be just too ironic.

The Tyranny of the Alarm Clock

I finally turned the alarm clock on again last night. In my opinion, alarm clocks, like coffee, are cruel instruments of sleep deprivation. If you get to bed early enough, you shouldn't need them to wake up in the morning.

Ideals are all very well until you have a five year old that must be gotten up at two a.m. for a visit to the potty and a two year old who crawls in bed with you and pulls your hair around three a.m. every single night. So, after resisting for several months, I am back to relying on the alarm clock.

Early in our married life, we had the alarm set to turn on NPR every morning. That worked only moderately well because we liked to lie there and listen to the news, and then even after we turned it off we would lie there and TALK about the news. It took a half hour to get going! Then I decided to switch to a Spanish speaking radio station. Nothing like a loud Hispanic polka to get me leaping out of bed to hit the "off" button as fast as possible! When that grew tiresome I tried tuning the dial between stations so that I'd get a loud, jarring, static buzz to jerk me out of my dreams. Last night I realized that I might as well flip the switch from "wake to radio" to "wake to alarm."

So this morning at ten till five I woke terrified that the house was on fire, until I remembered that I had set the alarm. Nothing like a little alarm clock induced adrenaline to get you going in the morning.

Happy 2008!

Greetings and welcome to 2008! Today I stuffed all the old Christmas decorations (plus some new ones I bought yesterday at K-Mart for 75% off) up in the loft over the garage where they will wait for another year to roll around.

With the holidays over, it is time for a fresh start! Here are my goals for the coming year:

Spiritual:
Take time for scripture study and prayer every day as a family in the morning, on my own during the day, and with my husband in the evening.

Parenting:
1. Show my children they are more important to me than my housework, hobbies and recreational pursuits by STOPPING what I am doing and giving them my full attention when they ask for it.
2. Expect more respect, show more respect.

Home improvement:
Remodel the upstairs bathroom and install a drip irrigation system in the front yard.

Writing:
Finish writing my second novel and go to the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Children conference.

Family History:
Finish interviewing my grandmother for her life history and catch up on printing out my photo-journal.

Housekeeping:
Constant maintenance will replace emergency disaster relief.

Music:
Memorize some new songs on the harp, practice the piano a little every day, and transcribe and arrange some more harp music out of the Edward Bunting "Ancient Music of Ireland" book. Oh, and build another 29 string harp!

There, that should keep me busy for a year!

How to Take Your Five Children to Disneyland and LOVE IT!

For Christmas this year we asked the children if they would like a ticket to Disneyland in lieu of any other presents. They all jumped up cheering "DISNEYLAND!" and so the decision was made.

Taking five children anywhere is a daunting task. I will now share with you what we did right and what we will do better next time.

What We Did Right:

1. We stayed with friends. Yes, we are lucky enough to have friends who live within thirty minutes of the park. This was really great because the children had a place where they could play, feel comfortable, and get a good breakfast before going to the park. It was also so much fun hanging around and talking with our friends that we missed morning rush traffic and rolled on over to the park without any difficulty.
2. We bought the one day- one park passes. These were $66 for adults and $56 for children. That is a great deal! To get into the park was $50 when I was eighteen, so the ticket prices have not kept up with inflation. If you're going to be there for four days, go ahead and get your park hopper, but we only had one day and there was more than enough to do at one park.
3. We went to the Jedi Training Academy. Awesome show! Don't miss it! About half of the kids in the audience got to go up and learn a light saber routine.
   
4. After dark, we bought one of those flashing necklaces and put it on our five-year-old. That made him really easy to spot and hard to lose in the crowd.
   

What We Will Do Better Next Time

1. We will bring a picnic lunch. While my husband stood in the long line for food, my kids had enough time to run all over Tarzan's Treehouse. Then when we rejoined him and got our lunches, there was no where to sit! We had to wait until someone else finished their lunch and then we could finally eat. We could have gone on one or two more rides if we had just brought a picnic and ate it at the picnic area.
2. We will not go into the Innoventions pavilion. There were VIDEO GAMES in there. My boys can play video games for free at home, but at Disneyland we are paying to even be there!!! I could not believe they wanted to play video games at Disneyland!
3. We will not leave the park after ten o'clock and then drive all the way to Ventura.
   

Yes, the scariest part of the trip was not the spooks in the haunted mansion, but driving through Los Angeles at midnight on Christmas Eve, trying to stay awake after hiking around Disneyland all day. Thrills for young and old alike.

I always used to say that going to the beach was better than going to Disneyland. So, to prove my point, on Christmas Day we went to the beach. The trip began auspiciously when my husband drove the van's front tire off the pavement and got us stuck. We called our roadside service, but how are you going to get a tow truck on Christmas Day at some remote place on Highway 1? The dispatcher said she'd have to call us back. Then, in the true spirit of Christmas, another family noticed our situation and the father and teenage son propped the tire with some rocks and pushed the van onto the road while Russel backed it up. It was our best Christmas present all day!

The beach in December is NOT more fun than Disneyland. It was windy and cold. We got sandblasted and pretty soon everyone was crying for their shoes. So much for dipping our toes in the icy Pacific! Still, the thrill of seeing the ocean was enough that none of the children wanted to leave. I had to promise my daughter a return trip in the summertime to get her to leave the beach.

So that's the report on our Christmas Vacation! Happy New Year! Happy Three Kings Day!

I Had a Bad Feeling

For a long time, I just had a bad feeling about that upstairs bathroom floor.

I thought that the floorboards were rotting. There was a squishy spot. If I put my heel down on it just right, it gave a little bit. I wanted to rip up the vinyl flooring and see what was going on. My husband assured me that there was nothing wrong with the floor, and that I was only suffering from old-home-owner's anxiety.

Then, one day as I was scrubbing the floor, I noticed the vinyl had already started to peel up in one corner by the vanity. Experimentally, I pulled it up a little more and saw that the wood underneath was WET! Soaking WET! AHHHH! DISASTER! Where had that water come from? We were going to have to tear up the whole entire floor and rebuild the house!

I started digging in the cupboard under the vanity and found several ruined rolls of toilet paper and a puddle under the sink. It turns out the little lever that controls the sink stopper had been dripping water every time someone ran the tap. This had seeped down along the back wall and then into the floor, all without me noticing!

Fearing for my floorboards, I ripped up the vinyl until all the wet wood was exposed. At first I felt terrible, but after a while of working at it I started to calm down. I let it all dry out for a few days, then treated it with chlorine bleach to keep it from getting rot. The floorboards are fine. That squishy spot wasn't the wood at all, but a place where the vinyl wasn't stuck down well enough.

Now I get new vinyl for my floor! My kids have been having fun peeling up the rest. In fact, I think I'm going to paint the bathroom and maybe even get a nicer vanity to replace the water damaged one. Every disaster is a triumph waiting to happen!

Gingerbread Church

My daughter and I made this gingerbread church complete with "stained glass" windows and a little bell in the bell tower. We've never tried a church before and I thought it turned out rather well.

My daughter handled all the drafting. She got out paper and a ruler while I mixed up the dough. I discovered I was out of molasses, so dark corn syrup had to do. To create the stained glass effect, I rolled the dough out on cookie sheets lined with greased aluminum foil. Then I cut the excess dough away from the wall pieces, and lastly cut out the delicate windowpanes using templates my daughter designed and drew. She smashed up Jolly Rancher candies with a hammer, and we carefully spooned the crushed candy into the windowpanes. Bake for fifteen minutes at 350 degrees Farenheit, and then cool completely before removing the foil. Spectacular!

I used an egg white based frosting to glue the house together, but all the decorations were made with ordinary shortening based icing. I like the way the roof turned out, with just the suggestion of shingles. Next year we can cut a hole in the bottom of the board and run a light up inside.