I have such a love hate relationship with Halloween.  My kids love it, and I do love their imaginations and love of dressing up.  But EIGHT pumpkins?  That’s a lot.  Couldn’t 3 or 4 be sufficient?  All the candy?  It drives me crazy.  Gore and evil?  Hate it.

I do love happy excited kids, though, so I guess I’m not too down on Halloween.  They had a lot of fun just getting into their costumes (and character) and trick or treating.

Was that enough photos for you?  I think the funnest thing about Halloween for me is looking back through the photos of past years and seeing how my kids have changed and grown.  I mean, look at my Brenna.  My big, beautiful, grown up girl.  She’s always had very strong opinions about what she’d be for Halloween.  Never again will she be a hermit crab.

If you just haven’t had enough here are some links to past Halloweens:

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2005

I came home from the store the other day with a new orchid.

I do so love to have a blooming orchid on my kitchen table, but seeing how I am incapable of getting them to rebloom it has been a long time since I’ve had one.  I decided to remedy that with $15 and an impulse buy at Costco.  Much easier than monitoring humidity, seasonal temperatures etc. etc.

Yesterday I sat down with a scrap piece of watercolor paper and my little box of paints and painted.

It wasn’t long until I had company.

We all felt so happy– it’s so easy for me to forget that I love to paint and that I don’t need total solitude to do it.  My kids LOVE to sit and watch me.  They love to paint along side of me.

It’s a habit I need to create.

My life is messy– as in snot encrusted, dog hair covered, crumbs on the floor, fingerprints on every door, little bits of cut up paper everywhere messy.  I have friends who don’t let their kids play with play dough or paint because of the mess it makes.  Sometimes I wish I had rules like that– and the spotless windows, counters, and hardwood floors to go with them.

But would I trade days like this– the self made masks, spaceship controls, jammies turned costume kind of days– for a house that stayed clean for hours on end?

Never.

(I can say that now that they’re all in bed and I’m alone with the mess.)

Ever since I got the sewing bug while I was pregnant with Brenna and in my last days of art school I’ve thought it would be fun to design fabric.  Then I became a quilter, discovered designers like Amy Butler and Anna Maria Horner (who also has 6 kids) and have thought over and over, “I could do that….. if I could just figure out how to do that.”

Well, I decided this is the year that I will learn to be a fabric designer.  I got myself some books

which have helped me immensely.  I learn by reading.  If I can read about how to do something in a book, then I can do it, but reading directions on the computer, experimenting by trial and error– they just don’t do it for me.  Kim Kight’s Field Guide to Fabric Design is fantastic.  All the tutorials for digital design are for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but since those aren’t quite in the budget I’m having to translate things into GIMP and Inkscape, which are free.  I also got a vector drawing app for my iPad call iDraw and a stylus so I can draw right on my iPad.  It’s like a glorified sketchbook, though I have been using my real sketchbook a lot too.

And then there’s Spoonflower.  I’ve known about it since it first started in 2008 or 2009 and signed up as soon as it wasn’t just by invitation only, but have never figured out how to make designs until now.  And look!

My first test swatches came in the mail!!!  My designs are printed on real fabric!!!

Anyone remember the story I told about Ian coming downstairs one morning and telling me, “Mom, we’re going to get a girl baby and her name is going to be Eva and she is going to be zero and she will have a pink shirt that is a dress”?  Well, he further described that pink shirt that is a dress as having blue butterflies on it and a skirt that is blue with pink butterflies.  I’ve been on the look out for pink shirts with blue butterflies, pink fabric with blue butterflies, blue fabric with pink butterflies.  None.  I guess I’ll have to make some.

And I can!!  How fun is that?

(So, these pictures are completely unrelated to what I’ve written here today, but they sure make me smile.  I love that my basement is Thor’s motorcycle course.  I love that Ian has all his clothes on backwards.  I just love it so much I can hardly stand it.)

It’s the end of the first day of the year and I feel like I need to just sit and write something. 2011 was good. I grew a baby, fell deeper in love with my husband, watched my children grow into more of themselves. I feel privileged to be here to witness it all.

I’m also feeling like there is more growing I need to do, like I’ve been in a state of stagnation, like I need to push a little deeper and grow into more of myself. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions (generally because I’m horribly inconsistent and not super good at following through on things) but I do believe there is power in putting things in writing so I’m just going to make a list of things I want for this new year.

• I want to read more– to have meaningful things to think about.
• There are three things I want to do just about every day– scripture study, yoga, and writing.
• I want to design fabric.
• I want to feel like I’m using my time just as God would have me use it– to end each day with no regrets.
• I want to stop comparing myself to others.
• I want to stop worrying about what others think of me.
• I want to feel confident that the relationship I have with each of my children is just what it should be. I want to feel confident that there is no doubt in their minds how much I love them.
• I want to organize and decorate my home with beauty and intention– filling it with things that are beautiful, meaningful, and useful.
• I want to be a source of inspiration for someone- to somehow make another’s life better by something I say or do.

I’m sure I could go on. There is always so much room for improvement. I have t his mantra I often repeat to myself

Be content and reach.

Be happy with the place you’re at, but always, always keep trying to be better.

How about you? What do you want for the new year?

Have I mentioned that my 2 littlest boys are like little tiger cubs– constantly chasing and pouncing and wrestling each other?  Running and squealing and slamming doors?  As happy as I am that they love each other so much, it is exhausting trying to keep them from doing real damage to people and property, and the hugging and kissing of bonked heads, fat lips, and squished fingers is near constant.

We spend lots of time outside.  They wade for hours in their little inflatable pool on our back deck where I can watch them from the comfort of my air conditioned kitchen.  But everyday I’ve tried to have some mom-made activity to keep them calm and absorbed for an hour or so.  Lately that’s been painting.  Usually with watercolors,

but they use them up so fast (it’s all about the process for them, not the finished product) that I decided to try making some paint the other day instead.

I used the recipe found over at Small Things.  It made a lot of paint!  I’ve got four 8 ounce jelly jars of it in my fridge.

It’s at the ready so I can have an hour or so of peace…

until clean up, at least.

Ian: Mom, do you know what would be prettier than what you’re wearing right now?

Me: What?

Ian: A dress for preg-a-nant moms with lots of pink hearts on it.  It could have some green hearts because you think green is pretty.  That would be really pretty , Mom.  I really like you to be really pretty.

Sometime back in September Ian came down the stairs in the morning with something to tell me.  “Mom,” he said, “we’re going to have a girl baby and her name is Eva.  She is going to be zero and she’s going to have a pink shirt that is a dress.”  He told me about our girl baby every day for at least a month.  After a few days her pink shirt that is a dress also had butterflies on it.  He would talk about where she would sleep, where she would sit in the car, how she would fit at the dinner table.  Sometimes I wondered if he really knew what he was talking about.  Other times I just attributed it to the imaginary friend stage he was in.

Barry and I had been talking about whether or not it was time to add another child to our family.  He definitely had that “someone is missing” feeling.  I guess, maybe I did too, but I also wasn’t quite sure if I could really add another child to my plate.  If there was going to be another baby I really, really wanted it to be a girl.  I read books and charted my cycles all summer, but it wasn’t until the fall that I felt like I was ready to try and would be fine with whatever Heavenly Father sent us.  I would certainly do my part to make the odds for a girl as high as possible– but if a boy was what really needed to be added to our family, then that would be perfectly okay.  So, for the first time ever, we actually tried to get pregnant.  It took a few months, and on the month I actually ended up with a positive pregnancy test I had absolutely no signs of ovulation.  My certainty and plans were completely thrown up in the air!  How could I know if our timing was right?  Were the odds of having a girl really in my favor?  I was convinced that I’m just meant to be the mother of one girl and lots of boys, and since I was trying to manipulate things and take matters into my own hands Heavenly Father just had to intervene.  He must have different plans.

But still, through those sick and tired days (read Christmastime) Ian still talked about our girl baby and her yellow hair and pink dress and where she would sleep.

And guess what?  That little Eva is 20 weeks along, kicking around in my tummy.  We had an ultrasound today and 2 sonographers corroborated the evidence.  There were no little boy parts (which I am very accustomed to seeing) just 3 little lines that are the tell-tale signs of a little girl!

So, I’m announcing to the world that the 6th little Croker person will be joining us at the end of the summer!

Ian’s little Eva was not just an imaginary friend.  She’s his sister– and he knew she was coming all along.

Meet Four Fusion– our resident super hero who just turned 4.   He picked the name (with help from his sister and a dictionary and trying to find a word that started with F that sounded good with 4) just for his super hero birthday party.  Barry was in charge of the cup cakes and I was in charge of the super hero costumes.

I made a dozen little capes,

and a dozen little masks.

The little supers all drew their own super hero emblem on the back of their capes.  (I can’t take credit for the genius idea though, I found it at Creative Kismet while I was asking dear Google how I was going to make a super hero birthday party really fun for 3 and 4 year olds.)

Brenna and Jonah created Super Hero IDs for everyone to color and fill out what their name and super powers were.

We attempted to play some Super Says,

but ten 3 and 4 year olds have attention spans about the length of one stint of standing on one leg with one arm in the air.

So they mostly just went wild in the basement.

The kids loved their capes and the really hard-core heroes loved their masks too.  The felt was a little itchy on their faces– so if you want to try this I suggest using craft foam or something else that wouldn’t stretch out on the eye holes and wouldn’t have the itch factor for the masks.

Happy Birthday super guy!  You really are one of the cutest people that have ever existed.  We love your imagination and your strong will.  We’re so thankful you were born– and especially that you’re ours!

(I think every one of these pictures that I picked for this post were taken by Barry– so thanks Barry for being a good photographer!)

We played a game of pictionary, pulling words out of a bowl and drawing them for all to guess.  The big kids thought Ian’s drawings were too cute to erase until they were documented with photos.

After he was done drawing each one he insisted on copying the word from his slip of paper.

Can you stand the cuteness?

He was much more eager to erase than anyone else was.