This is Why I Love Spring!

Sophie's Fabulous Fashion Fun Birthday Party

Sophie's birthday party was today, so here is a peek at her birthday party fun. She wanted a fashion theme, so her cake is a stack of hatboxes. I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

Invitation:

The cake:

The games: first we played a matching game where the kids had to guess which fashions went with which years.
Then we did a "not-so-fashionable relay"


As the final activity, we had the girls partner up and make dresses on each other using only tissue paper and tape. Then they modeled the outfits and the lone boy of the party got to be the judge (thanks, Ethan, for putting up with all these girls!)

And the winner was:

And the fabulous prize was:

With such a great kid, it's hard not to spoil her. Here are a few of her gifts:

Rollerblades (or "rolling boots" as Claire called them)

A sapphire ring and amethyst necklace from Grandpa.

Happy Birthday my lovely little lady!!

"One" - Not So Lonely If You're Janelle

Janelle told me at dinner today all the things she can do if she's in a time-out in her room all by herself. She's quite adept at entertaining herself, I've found. Our conversation went something like this:

Janelle: I can still have fun in my room, Mom, even when I'm in time out. I'm very good at entertaining myself.
Mom: The only thing you're allowed to do is read though. So what else can you do?
J: Sometimes I run laps around my room for excercise. Or I pretend I'm racing someone.
M: You find that fun, do you?
J: Yeah! Also sometimes I turn around in a circle to get myself dizzy and pretend the room is spinning around me.
M: Oooh, fun!
J: And I can play hide and seek with myself.
M: Ummm...how?
J: Well, I hide somewhere until I fall asleep and forget where I am, then when I wake up, I have to figure it out.
M: Alright, what else do you do?
J: I have races with myself.
M: Who wins?
J: Well, I'll pick a starting place and a finishing place and walk, and whichever leg gets to the finishing place first wins.
M: Wow! You're more fun than a barrell of monkeys!
J: [blank stare]......I don't get it.

Green Day

For St. Patrick's Day today, the girls wanted to make their hair green. They had a grand plan to not wear any green at all (which Janelle obviously changed her mind about) and to wear a large raincoat with the hood up. Then when some unwitting fool came up to pinch them, they would whip off the hood and say "Ah Ha!" exposing their green hair underneath and delivering a well-deserved double pinch to the fool who fell in their trap. Thus the pincher becomes the pinchee...

So this was as green as we could get it, using green hairspray and green facepaint left over from our Shrek themed Halloween (in which Todd -aka Shrek -was mistaken more than once for the Incredible Hulk).

General Update

I figured we were due for a general update, since it's been a while since I've posted anything about our goings on as a family.

We had a little crisis here over the weekend that had me in the hospital overnight, but I'm fine now. I'd give details, but it might just be TMI for too many people. Suffice it to say that I had a miscarriage, passed out from blood loss and had to be taken to the emergency room. We had a great outpouring of love and support from so many friends, and we're grateful for that.

The girls just got their report cards from school and I'm pretty sure they're all smarter than me. It won't be long before they've surpassed me and I become useless as a mother to them. Claire is following right in their footsteps and has really impressed me lately with her letter and sound recognition. Although when counting, I cannot get her to go from four to five. Seven invariably slips in between. But she's just about the cutest thing on two legs around here. She's singing all the time, and her playing is becoming very imaginative with characters having conversations, going to balls, and all sorts of other princessy things.

Todd is three days away from regaining his sanity, as his gigantic thesis paper is due on Thursday, and for better or worse, he will be done with it then (well, at least the first draft- and the bulk of the associated stress).

Sophie is on the brink of turning 10, and we're starting to plan the birthday party to end all birthday parties. I don't know about topping last year's Harry Potter deal, but we've got something in the works. She really wanted to do a pet shop/dog show type of thing, but the more I thought about putting a bunch of dogs together with naught but a child to control each one, the more I thought it was a recipe for disaster. So dear cousins of Sophie's, you need not fear a dog party anymore. We've come up with some fun stuff, I promise!

And I have a new obsession to focus on: my dream house. I have a friend in our area who ownes the most beautiful craftsman style historic home. She knew I loved her house - at least what I'd seen of it - so when they decided they wanted to move, she asked me if I'd be interested in buying it from them. I was pretty ecstatic, as were the girls who came with me to take a little tour. It's got so many quaint details that I'm in love with. The door between the dining room and kitchen swings, like saloon doors. There's a big huge rope coming out of the wall just inside the closet in one of the upper story bedrooms - it's the fire escape! There's a cupboard in the kitchen that opens up to the basement below with a dumbwaiter system attached. One of the closets is really deep and has a built-in seat at the back of it. And one of my favorite things is a little brass plaque by the front door that says "On this site in 1897 nothing happened." It'll still be an undetermined amount of time in the future, but it's not stopping me from mentally moving in :)

Simple Explanation for Hard Times

I came across this AMAZING article (alright, so my dad wrote it) that very succinctly sums up what the combined causes are that have carried us into the economic crisis we are currently facing. I usually have a hard time wrapping my head around economics, but this explains it very well. And if you're too thick to hang in there for the full thing, at least be sure to catch the joke at the end!:

What is going on with the Economy??

What now? We have heard a lot about sub-prime mortgages but many don’t understand exactly what that means and more importantly what caused it. So a definition is in order. Most of us can remember when you had to save to get a down payment, keep your credit rating in good shape and have a work history of at least two years to qualify for a mortgage. If you qualified for a loan you were a prime borrower, meaning that you were a good risk for the bank to loan money to you.

Then in the 1990’s a wave of ‘everyone should be able to experience the American Dream of owning your own home’, especially those that were poor swept the country. The government then passed legislation mandating that lending institutions relax the criteria for making loans to poor. These loans were sub-prime loans meaning that the borrower qualifications were sub-standard and therefore higher risk.

Banks lent money to everyone and were making tons of money. Many may remember that you could get a loan for 105% of the value of the home. This worked very well for some families who were having trouble making the down payment or coming up with closing costs. Many people who would have otherwise been unable to own their own home suddenly qualified and they were home-owners. But with every program, abuses immediately surfaced. Because the housing market was skyrocketing pushed by the increased demand for housing, many thought the best way to take advantage of this situation was to buy a home they were totally unable to pay for – hold it for three years and sell it for a profit. Hence came the ‘creative payment structures’ such as interest only payment, balloon payments etc. This all worked well as long as the housing prices were going up and the market demand was still increasing.

Some of the banks were a little worried about the risk they were incurring with these sub-prime borrowers so they bundled these loans and sold them off as a package to large banks and mortgage institutions. These banks and mortgage companies then leveraged these loans or securities using them as collateral to make even more loans. When the bubble finally burst the houses came back to the bank and in turn eroded the collateral of the large banks putting them upside-down. The greed of the bankers took advantage of the mandate of the government to make risky loans –the banks for money and the government for votes!

Now the government is intervening again not with lending regulations but with bailout packages to keep the large banks afloat. With the housing market flush with an over supply of houses in foreclosure, it will be some time before the market can right itself and use up the supply of houses. This will take place if the markets are allowed to work independent of outside forces; The down-side is that many people are going to get wasted in the transformation and bailing out the banks and homeowners is going to but forestall the inevitable. The market will solve the problem but many are going to be hurt in the process.

The sub-prime mortgages are only one of the problems whose roots lay in the 1990’s. Many will remember the trade agreements the government made with foreign countries to boost the global economy. We were racing head-long into the global market forgetting the idea of fair-trade and trading it for free-trade. As these trade agreements started to flourish, the USA found that not only were our import versus exports numbers going upside down, but that with cheap imports, our US companies could not compete. Made in China was on everything! Unable to compete with these cheap imports, US companies were forced to set up operations in foreign countries to take advantage of (1) lower taxes, (2) cheaper labor, (3) cheaper input costs, (4) lower quality standards and (5) less regulation. With that came the erosion of the industrial base in America leaving the economy to turn to the service sector. Even Levi’s are made overseas – who could have imagined that something as American as jeans would no longer be made in America.

The problem with a service-based economy is the fact that when things get a little rough, the first sector to be hit is non-essential services. i.e. when money gets tight, you mow your own lawn instead of hiring it done. The ramifications are that all businesses slowdown.

It is hard to make mortgage payments when you have lost you job so the combination of these two unusual circumstances have crossed paths sending us into a spirally downturn the seeds of which were planted in the 1990’s but have taken fifteen years to mature.

We experienced similar problems in the great depression of the 1930’s and the government decided then to dry up the credit markets which plunged us deeper into depression. The war brought us out of that. Not willing to have that happen again, the government is throwing money at anything that moves in order not to fall into the trap of no money available such as was the case in the 1930’s. People are wary of spending money right now because they are uncertain about the direction the economy is headed and although it might be good for the whole for everyone to spend money now – it might not be good for the individual. So the fear is that if you personally start spending, you might be the only one – better to see what happens first. I predict that we will be numbering bailouts and stimulus packages by the end of the year. The government is already talking about another stimulus package which will make three in as many quarters. It will not work because the market must ground itself first which means that everyone is going to wait and see where the bottom is before they start spending again. The backlash is that if we continue to throw trillions of dollars at the problem, we will have inflation or hyper-inflation to look forward to in the coming years.

So what now? I don’t know but as the joke says, what is the difference between a Tennessee divorce and a tornado, - I don’t know but someone is going to lose a trailer. I think most of us will be hunkering down until this blows over.

Out of Season, But Amusing Nonetheless

I recently found this note and remembered what the story was behind it from way back in Christmas 2006. Here's the story:

I had the girls write Santa letters just before Christmas, and since Sophie had written about 15 beginning in the summertime, I told her she had to write one final one and to tell Santa to disregard the others. She wrote that she wanted a ruby necklace and a safe to put it in. I mailed them that day, and the next morning she begged me to write just one more. She got really emotional about it and I was curiuos why, so I told her she could. When I found it, this is what it said (with corrected typos):

Dear Santa,

It's me, Sophia Bevans.
Nevermind about the ruby necklace. It was too much. Just the safe will be enough. Sorry for being selfish.

From,
Sophia

(She got a ruby necklace that year in her safe)