January

Hey guys! It's been a while, but I love sharing my life with you, and I'm looking for an alternative to Facebook. Hopefully I'll find this to be a better way of sharing my life with my family and friends.

Here are some pictures from January:

Big L did a science project to see what size balloon has the most potential energy. He hypothesized that the biggest ones would have the most energy.

We used the balloons to propel a straw along a string and measured how far they went. The big ones went the furthest, just like he hypothesized!

I've had to cut short little L's naps ever since our dear carpooling friend moved away. He used to wake up as soon as I opened the door to his room, but you see that he's still soundly sleeping even though I turned on the light as well. We've worked it out so he gets more sleep now, but there were a couple weeks where his naps didn't work out so well.

Little L figured out how to open up our doors! Since the knobs are an unusual shape, I had to make the knob covers myself. I found some examples of crochet ones, made up a pattern, and whipped out a few during a movie with Austin (Ant Man and the Wasp). This photo comes to you courtesy of C, who loves to take pictures with my phone anytime he can.

Big L recently started the gifted program at his school. On his first day, they made "brain focals!"

Eating frozen blueberries makes him look like a monster!

Sitting in the toy box

A was asleep, so the boys got a hold of his glasses

Lots of cuteness ensued!

I did something Pinterest-worthy!

Usually cutesy crafts and Pinterest things aren't really my forte. However, I think this little project turned out really well!

My entryway closet had been a jumble of shoes, and it was bugging me a LOT. The mess was the main thing bothering me, but it was also annoying to have to hunt for shoes when we needed them. I wanted something in the closet to help organize the shoes, but didn't want to have to look for (or spend the money on) a shoe organizer.

Enter the myriad of diaper boxes we've accumulated over the last two years or so. We've used them in all of our moves, and since we're planning on moving again in the near future (in less than a year, to a house - no solid plans yet), we've saved all of the boxes that are in good condition. They're so ubiquitous that one of my sisters teases me about them on a fairly regular basis.

Anyway, I have a lot of diaper boxes.

Boxes can be used for a lot of things. They're very useful! So far, we've used them for organizing without really trying to make them look nice, but this time I wanted something that would look good in our closet, especially since the front closet is so public.

I decided that some small shelves made out of a couple of the diaper boxes would fill the bill for organizing the closet. Cover those with some tasteful contact paper, and it should look pretty good, right? The next time I went shopping, I purchased some contact paper with a cute pattern, and got to work the next day.

First I found two boxes that were the same size.:

Next, I lined them with contact paper:

Levi actually took this and the next picture. He did a good job!

Voila!

The finished product!

A Day in the Life

So a few months ago I saw a blogging idea that I thought was pretty interesting. The idea was to take one picture for each hour of the day and then put it up on your blog. I finally tried it! Here we go:

We start out with breakfast. Levi is my alarm clock, and I get up when he does (~7:00 AM). As soon as he wakes up, he wants breakfast. Depending on his mood, he'll either yell until he gets it or desperately say, "Aah, aah, aah," (translation, "I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry!") until he does.

 Playing with the tablet is not part of Levi's routine, but it was in his reach so I let him play with it this time. This picture was taken around 8:00 AM. In the time since breakfast, I cleaned up the living room some (gotta clean for those pictures, right??) and did some cleaning in the kitchen (dishes, I think?)

 "Mom, let's go outside!"

Going down the stairs, ~9:00 AM

 My son is so cute that I couldn't stop myself from taking a few more pictures ...

Mid-morning snack!

Losing it for no reason. We were both sad :(

~10:00 AM, Levi's favorite show Pocoyo. It's really cute and he can watch in either Spanish or English.

Levi was able to relax while he was watching, and he was fine for the next 2 hours.
[EDIT: Levi did not watch Pocoyo for 2 hours. 30 minutes was all that took to calm him down.)

Levi saw me cleaning up some food he spilled on the floor, and wanted to try it out, too :) (~11:00 AM)

I make about one smoothie per day. It's great for helping both Levi and me eat more healthily! (~11:30 AM)

Naptime! (~12:30 PM)

Me telling myself, "You're so cool!" to try to psych myself up for having a flattering 

expression for a selfie. It worked better in the next picture ....

A better selfie! I figured if I was chronicling MY day, then I'd 

better put some pictures of myself in there.

After the selfies, I did some FamilySearch indexing! If you haven't tried it, then you should. It's basically crowd sourcing out the work to make all of the world's records searchable by computer. (~1:00 PM)

Mmmmmm! I made lunch and ate it. Which of these three pictures do you think is the yummiest looking? I did a much better job with these pictures than with the soup that I thought was so good :) (~2:00 PM)

We went on a walk (~3:00 PM)

We splashed in the pool to cool down our feet after the walk. (~3:30 PM)

I got tired of and forgot to take pictures for a couple hours. This is Levi and me after driving to 

a missionary appointment that fell through (sad day!), waiting around for a while, and then coming 

back, all without air conditioning. We were both kind of pink when Austin took 

this picture, but you can't really tell here. (~7:00 PM)

Austin watched Levi while I cooled off and exercised at the same time in 

the pool for my apartment building. (~7:30 PM)

I forgot to take any more pictures at all yesterday, so this picture from today will have to suffice to represent all the hours after I came back from the pool, because I spent all of them with Austin!

I did a lot of things not pictured, so don't think that this was everything I did all day

Word Cloud

One of my sisters made a word cloud of her blog. I thought it was really neat, so I decided to do one, too! I Googled "Blog word cloud" to find the one that I used.

The word cloud didn't actually use all of the words on my blog to make this; when I submitted the URL of my blog, it just took the text from the home page of the blog. So I copied the text from several different months to get this one. About half of the months that I've blogged have been left out. One of the posts that I included was the one about Levi burping and spitting up. I know that I wrote "up" just as much as I wrote "spit" because I wrote them together as spit up, but I can't seem to find where it says "up." 10 cool points to the first person that finds it!

**Edit** Evidently "up" is a "common English word," so it wasn't included. Silly!

Getting the most out of Blogger

I've been blogging consistently for about eight months now, and getting the hang of Blogger (the platform I use for this blog) has taken that whole time. I know there are features that I still don't really know how to use. It's not as intuitive as some websites are (such as Facebook). Because of that, I wanted to write a post for the benefit of those who would like to know more about keeping up-to-date on friends' blogs (you don't even have to have a blog for this one!) or making your blog the best it can be.

Let's start with following your friends' blogs.

First, you have to have an account. It doesn't have to be a Google account, but I don't really know any other way since that's all I've done. I've heard that you can sign in with Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL, so I know you can do it.

If you already have a Google account (Gmail, Goggle+, YouTube, etc), then it should be really easy to find Blogger. Sign in to your Google account, and at the top of the screen, you will see a black bar with several options listed. Go to the far right where it says "more" and click. In the drop-down box that appears, select "Blogger." It should look something like this:

When you click on Blogger, you'll get to a page called the "Blogger Dashboard" that looks like this:

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the blogs you are following are on the bottom left, and updates of those blogs are found on the bottom right/middle. This makes it very easy to check for updates on the blogs that you follow. Just click "Blogger" on your Google account, and you'll see any updates your friends have posted on Blogger. This way, you don't have to go to the individual blogspot web pages to find out if your friends have updated their blog.

To see updates from a particular blog instead of all of them, just click on the name of the blog you want to see. When you are done looking at that one, you can click "All Blogs" at the top of the list to see the most recent updates from all of the blogs that you follow.

Following a blog is pretty simple, as well, as long as there is a "followers" box on the blog you want to follow. This is a picture of what that should look like, as well as what pops up after clicking "Join this site" underneath the "Followers" heading:

Click to enlarge

As you can see, I have the following option on the right-hand side of my blog. Some people do not have the following option because they haven't added that feature to their blog, but you can find this on most blogs.

I think I will have to wait for another day to write about making the most of your blog, but here's to enjoying your friends' blogs!

Why blog? or, Why should Katie blog?

Hello everyone, and welcome to my Blog! Haha, blog sounds much less poetic than humble abode. Like slog! Hello everyone, and welcome to my Slog. Just kidding. This blog will be high-quality and not sloggish in the least. But, as you've already seen, this blog is prone to puns.

So! A little background on why I decided to blog:

1. Peer pressure. OK, not really, but several of my friends have blogs, and it's really great to be able to read their thoughts in detail instead of just little blurbs on Facebook. So this blog is for my friends who'd like a little more detail on my life, thoughts, and aspirations.

2. One of my sisters is going to start a blog, and told the family about it and why she's doing it. I thought she had good reasons.

3. I actually don't have a third reason but you need to have at least three reasons to have a good reason to do something, right?

Now for the reason for the title of my blog!

1. I love playing Boggle, and am known among family and some friends as the Boggle champion (ps, if anyone wants to challenge me, I'd love to play! Just let me know when and where)

2. Boggle and blog are doubly alliterative and are fun to say together.

3. Boggle blogger was already taken, so Boggledy blog was the next best thing!


Well, that's it for my reasons! I hope you enjoy my blog. I will post musings, interesting happenings, and whatever else may strike my fancy for sharing with the world at large (and family and friends in particular).