Quick: Salt Lake City or Beijing?

They look surprisingly similar these days…

First time skiing

Hard to believe this was her first time ever.

Q: what do you call beginning snowboarders?

A: obstacles.

Divine intervention

[Note: this was a post I found in my drafts folder. It’s an oldie (from Dec. 2009), but still cute.]

Needless to say, our kids love the snow.  They love it so much, in fact, that they pray for more snow every day.  Before family prayers the other night, Maren and I half jokingly told K not to pray for snow again.  He started off his prayer by praying that “Mom and dad will start to like the snow.”  Then he prayed for it to snow “even badder.”

Hiking

Here’s K at a recent scout campout in Hobble Creek Canyon. Sorry that you can’t see his face for the shadows, but this is day 2 of the campout, so you wouldn’t be able to see him for the dirt anyhow.

Fishing

The boy and I went fishing last weekend as part of the ward’s Fathers-and-sons campout. The campground was next to a little lake that is stocked weekly with trout, so the fishing was good. Good, that is, if you don’t use the lures that come with the little fishing-pole-and-tackle combo that your dad (i.e., me) bought you because he doesn’t know anything about fishing. After about 6 hours of determinedly fishing with lures the were ridiculously big and not catching anything but watching everyone around him pull fish out of the lake with almost no effort, we got someone who actually knows what he was doing to show us how to set up the hook and bait. K had success almost immediately and caught two fish in a row. He had plans for how he was going to cook them before we even got them back to the car. Here’s the result: “the tastiest fish ever”.

My main contribution to the affair was to sit next to him on the bank reading my book and humming this song.

Dress ups

Apparently, two is the perfect age for dressing up.

The accessories were birthday gifts from her Aunt Bethany. The glasses lasted about long enough for us to snap this photo and then she broke them. The Hello Kitty bag has been quite a hit, though, and it’s what she brought to me this morning when I asked if she had any toys she wanted to take to church.

Let me take a moment to point out a few of the features of this outfit. There’s the raincoat that belongs to her older sister (which makes everything that much cooler), there’s the Snow White dress-up, which we’ve only recently re-discovered. Oh, and don’t forget the hand bag there. You can’t see them, but there are too-big shoes in there as well.

The book, not the TV show

The other day, I put up a picture of the brain from Gray’s Anatomy during one of my lectures. I mentioned that the picture was actually from Gray’s Anatomy and is quite accurate and then moved on with the lecture. One of my students raised his hand and said, “Wait…I don’t remember that picture. What episode was that in?”

In which we go to the library and are surprised

Maren needed to run some errands downtown today, so I took the kids to the library to exchange some old, boring books for fresh, new, and exciting ones. We were able to pick new books fairly quickly (I got some fantasy novels, because that’s the kind of nerd I am, L apparently didn’t make it out of the children’s non-fiction, and K got some children’s fantasy books because that’s the kind of nerd I’m making out of him). On the way back out to the car, I noticed that the Children’s Book Festival was happening that afternoon. We’ve attended the festival in the past and had some time, so we dropped off the books in the car and headed upstairs for the Festival.

As in previous years, they had authors and illustrators set up to sign books and do drawings (among other fun activities). It was much less crowded this year, though, and therefore much more enjoyable.

This was A’s favorite part:

Clifford the Big Red Dog was also there and got many hugs from our toddler.

L. bought a copy of Rapunzel’s Revenge and had it signed by the illustrator, Nathan Hale. Hale was also doing portraits of anyone who asked (and waited 1/2 an hour in line). Here’s L getting her’s done. Note the somber expression.

K bought a copy of Brandon Mull’s Beyonders and had it signed by the author. I was waiting in line with the girls at the time, so no picture of that auspicious event. Instead, here’s one of my favorite part of any trip to the library–the post-library reading surge and general cessation of inter-sibling confrontations: