Tap, Tap, Tapioca

A while ago, we received a bunch of orange juice concentrate lids from Grandma Van Orden as part of a home-made toy.  This week our kids discovered the lids would stick to their feet and make great tap shoes.





ps.  This is Eliza's post-nap hair, not what she looked like when we took her to church. :)

Jumpin' Pumpkins

Alvin took off work a little early on a Tuesday, so we could go to the pumpkin patch place and enjoy all of its activities when it wasn't so crowded.  A good time was had by all.



Hurricane Update: After only the first 12 hours of rain, we've already gotten some water in the unfinished portion of the basement seeping through our slow-draining window well.  But with a bucket and a wet-vac we're maintaining control of the situation.  With the heaviest rains still to come, we're hoping we can keep the water in the unfinished portion.  They've already cancelled school again for tomorrow.

For Bored Dora the Explorer Fans

If you've never seen the show, just move right along.  Nothing to see here.  But if you have, then you'll hopefully enjoy the great costumes that Tammy made.  Isn't she awesome?



Plus, if you're off of work and school's closed (Thank you, Sandy), then you may have time for this fake trailer for a real life Dora movie.  (Note: Trailer not geared for young children like the show is.)

Henry is the Greatest

Henry just had his birthday...in July.   We went with a baseball theme because he loves playing in the backyard with his dad, and often the first question he will ask when he wakes up is if the Cardinals won.  (Makes his papa proud.)

We played lots of normal games, but gave them baseball names.  The favorite activity, though, was practicing "sliding" into a base, where they jumped at a base on a mattress.  The clips at the end are from the Cardinals/Nationals game we went to at the beginning of this month (not part of Henry's b-day).



If you are familiar with this song, the boy in it expresses the same type of optimism and self-esteem that Henry shows after blowing out his candles.

We Declare the Games "Open"

Rather than think of this post as old news that is 2 months overdue, we hope it will serve as a wonderful reminder of one of the greatest athletic events of the year.

We love the Olympics!  So, in order to build the excitement and help our kids realize the significance, we invited two families to join us for a party on the night of the Opening Ceremonies.



For the record, Miriam actually did clear the hurdle at the end, just not when we were taping.

Clarissa: The Beautiful Beginning

We've been saving up little clips of Clarissa ever since we posted about her coming home from the hospital, and we finally decided to put them all together.  She doesn't have any unusual tics or tricks.  She's just a super sweet baby that has been very easy for us as parents so far.  Eliza gets a supporting actress role by virtue of her constant concern and care for her little sister.

Without further ado, here are Clarissa's first five months...



If you make it to the end, you'll know what we'll watching tonight.

Pole Dancing

This has been a crazy month, so we're a bit behind in our video making.  This is from the Bray Family Reunion in Kentucky at beginning of July.   We spent a long time getting video from other family members, and trying to edit these videos.  However, for some reason our video program rebelled against the format of the movies from the other cameras and kept shutting down on us.  After restarting the video program about 30 times, we finally gave up, so we're missing a few good moments.  Oh well.

One of Tammy's nephews made a mix CD for his family that was played repeatedly in the Party Barn (which came complete with a dancing pole) and is the source of the song used in this video.

Miriam's "Best Friend'

Q:  What do you do when your parents refuse to buy you a dog?
A:  Train your brother



There's no end to what kids will come up with on a boring summer day.

Our Little Sparklers

This content comes from our time in Michigan and Illinois.  On the 4th we had a joint birthday celebration for Henry and the USA.  But Henry refused to celebrate his country in the traditional way of lighting things on fire.  When Eliza took a turn with a sparkler, we could see that he was almost convinced it was safe (not wanting to be outdone by his little sister),....


... but when the sparkler finished burning, Eliza grabbed the hot part and burned her fingers.  All of Henry's fears were confirmed, and he'll never believe us again when we tell him not to be afraid (including jumping into the deep end with dad waiting, going upstairs alone when it's dark, participating in talent shows and eating chicken).

Honey, I Shrunk the Grandparents

This is the third movie we've made at a Bray family reunion, so it has now officially become something of a tradition.  The kids really get into the acting and, of course, love seeing themselves on TV.  In fact, Miriam and her cousins spent a long time making their own movies, which we may or may not post here later.  Some of the humor is inside family jokes and the kids featured are always cuter when you know who they are, but there are some of you out there that will appreciate it. 

Support Tammy's Brother

 

 

Hi Friends,

 

My oldest brother, Greg, owns a small business called Blue Tangerine Solutions.  He is applying for a Mission: Small Business grant which will give them funding to help them grow and be able to develop some new products.  But in order for his application to even be considered he has accumulate at least 250 votes before June 30. (as of this morning he was still 100 votes short)

 

You have to have a Facebook account to vote and you can only vote once.

If you have a minute, please follow the steps below and help him out.

Thanks!

 

Please help Blue Tangerine Solutions receive 250 votes on the Mission: Small Business℠ page to get closer to qualifying for a $250,000 grant.

Go to www.missionsmallbusiness.com.

After clicking “Login and Support” on the home page (bottom right side), search for Blue Tangerine Solutions and vote! 

A Time to Attack Your Children

It's summer time at the Van Orden house, so that means once-a-week theme days. Snow day was a big hit. Make sure you make it to the end.
We also ate tortilla's cut like snowflakes, hot chocolate, and snowman pancakes.  Of course, all of this was topped off with a snowball like scoop of ice cream, but then, that hardly requires a special occasion.

Pixie Dust and Happy Thoughts

Our local airport was giving free flights to encourage the dream of flying (and thus flying lessons $$!). Both Miriam and Henry talked very excitedly about the experience upon first landing, but Henry later admitted to being bored because he wasn't tall enough to see out the window unless the plane turned. Tammy was given a chance to steer the plane without the pilot helping at all. - After the flying we went to the Frederick Arts festival where there was a pretty good band playing. All of the clips come from a song that says "Jump, Jump" repeatedly, thus our creative dance moves.

Everybody Wants to Love Video Clips

A little clip here and another clip there. Throw in a couple still shots and suddenly your video is a couple minutes long. Enjoy this mix of events from May.

Best of the Best of the Brays

For Christmas, Tammy's parents transferred their old home videos from VHS cassettes to DVD, hours of timeless moments of the Bray family between '89 and '00. For Mother's Day, Alvin condensed multiple DVDs worth of material down to 8 minutes. Note: Eight minutes is still a LONG time, so you may want to wait to watch this until Tammy's birthday (Memorial Day). It was enlightening for Tammy to see that not all of the silly kid genes (that she sees in our kids and often gets annoyed by) come from Alvin. If you choose not to watch it, I can summarize 90% of the occasions when the video camera was brought out of the Bray family closet: 1. Christmas and the family vacation right after Christmas (thus winter coats on the beach) 2. Concerts and recitals 3. Family pictures at reunions (These clips look like they belong in a frame at Hogwarts).

Bringing Home Baby

Birth really is a little miracle. Here's Clarissa from the first few moments to home...

Helping the Baby to Know that Its Time

Tammy has been very active this pregnancy, exercising more frequently than with any of the first three kids, and we think it's been helpful in limiting the leg pains she experienced with Eliza. Either that or we've just been lucky.

In the last week, Tammy has continued to be active, hoping she could encourage this baby along. We doubt it had anything to do with the timing of the baby, but as a consequence, we have several outside videos and some other clips we've been meaning to use.



Since this morning's post, things have not progressed as quickly as we thought, but that's how we had time to put this video together. As its over an hour to the hospital, we now have permission to head out. Hopefully, we'll have good news soon.

We just haven't met you...yet

After 9 months of waiting and planning, you start to get excited to meet the little person waiting inside of you. What do you do when you're waiting for a baby to come? What if you've already finished everything on your to-do list and you're afraid to schedule anything else in fear that you will have to cancel? Well, you could make a movie....




While this movie is meant to be light (we had to explain it to our kids), it seriously is time. It started in the middle of the night not unlike this, and we should be headed to the hospital soon. This is the kind of breaking news only you regular blog readers get to enjoy.

The Dueting Duo

When she opened the April Friend magazine and saw that there was a simplified Easter song, Miriam decided she wanted to learn it. Upon closer investigation, I noticed that the Duet Part 2 was written at about Henry's level and decided it would be awesome for our kids to play their first duet!

They each worked well on their own to learn their parts, but putting it together was extremely challenging. Our goal was to videotape the song and post it for your viewing pleasure on Easter Sunday. Obviously that didn't happen. (Can we blame it on the random scheduling of Easter?)

In spite of Henry's repeated protests and tears, I refused to let them start a project without finishing it. So, with the reward (bribe?) of refreshments following their recital recording, the two were finally able to pull off a presentable performance this morning. There's definitely room to improve and polish, but I took mercy on Henry and decided he had reached his limit.

Here's hoping for more duets in the future, when Henry's a little more up to the challenge. Nothing cuter than two siblings sharing a piano bench and tickling the ivories together! Eliza just wishes it could have been a trio.

We wish you a Happy Belated Easter!

Egg Hunters

Eliza didn't care what was inside the colored plastic eggs. The joy was in the finding.



Hope your Easter was full of just as much happiness.

Yellow Time Machine

We broke out the guitar last week. One of the kids' favorites is Yellow Submarine (because the lyrics are easy). Coincidentally, we recently found an old video of Miriam dancing, originally taken by her Grandpa Bray at an outdoor concert in NC. Miriam is almost exactly the age that Eliza is now (and though you can only see Tammy's leg in the picture, she was as close to childbirth as she is now).




Miriam and Eliza have similar dance moves, though that's about where the similarity ends.

Roller Skating Survival Guide

Miriam has been wanting to go roller skating for ages, and Alvin has fond memories of roller skating in his basement. But with no rinks in town, it has taken until last weekend for us to finally introduce our children to the wonderful world of roller skating. You may need to watch this in full screen to be able to enjoy the picture-in-picture video.

Called to Dance

Alvin was called to the bishopric last Sunday. By Saturday, Alvin was doing this at the ward talent show...
[Alvin makes his appearance at 1 minute if you want to skip ahead. You can also just skip the whole video altogether.]



If Alvin had been part of the bishopric sooner, he probably would have steered the bishopric talent in a different direction, and at the very least, he would have started putting together something as important as a talent show act much sooner than the night before. It wasn't our best performance from a technical perspective, but there was a good energy in the room. Lots of laughter and lots of 'compliments' expressing their surprise at our dancing ability. It was a complete success.

We're not crazy....at least Tammy isn't

This video is a mix of a lot of different things and they are not shown in chronological order. They include Valentine's Day, Alvin's Dad's birthday party (pin the heart on the heart animal, a puppet show, and balloon popping to find jokes made up by the kids), and some random dancing and belly flopping.

Caps for Sale (Adorable 2 year old not for sale)

Eliza turned two yesterday. It is still undetermined whether the twos will be terrible or terrific, but we're off to a good start.

As a theme for Eliza's party and cake, we chose one of Eliza's favorite books, "Caps for Sale" by Esphyr Slobodkina. It's a 1938 classic.



Those of you familiar with the story of the peddler who has his caps stolen by a bunch of monkeys...



...will hopefully also recognize our attempt at recreating a scene from the book in chocolate, cake, frosting, and other edible delights.



This lead to some Caps for Sale themed party games, such as 'See How Many Caps (Beanbags) You Can Balance On Your Head' and 'Try To Steal the Cap (Beanbag) Off the Sleeping Peddler'. Not captured on video is some 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' dancing (to the Monkees, of course).



This party actually happened last week, so we could celebrate while Alvin's parents were in town.

Virtual Recital

As Tammy is Miriam's teacher, Miriam doesn't have any opportunities to perform at formal recitals, so instead, we encouraged her to work hard on her song for a virtual audience. The song, As A Child of God, is a step up in difficulty from her typical piano books. She hated slowing down enough to play it right, but she did it for the camera. [No editing was done of this performance, though we were tempted.]



If you actually watched (or even listened) to this video, you may now treat yourself to punch and cookies!

A Star in the Making?

Eliza loves to sing along with various songs in our limited CD collection. We can't help but laugh every time she enthusiastically belts out a note at the end of a phrase. Here's a selection from the current favorite.

This clip shows her zeal, but she her enunciation has improved since the filming of this video.