The boys and I are back home after a nice, relaxing trip to Iowa to visit my parents. I was born and raised in Iowa and I have many, many happy memories of my childhood there. We go back to visit every Christmas, but we usually don’t have the money to fly there in the summers so this trip was a special treat for us.

Christmas is great and all, but Iowa’s most captivating charms spring forth in the summer months. It can be oppressively hot and humid there, but I don’t mind — in my mind that is what summer is supposed to feel like. In the Bay Area, we shiver through the summers, which just feels wrong to me. I like sitting outside in the evenings wearing shorts and a t-shirt and I love the warm weather activities: trips to the pool and the park, walking up to the Dairy Queen for ice cream, watching lightning bugs. I know that memory has a tendency to cast a golden hue on our childhood memories — I know that — but sometimes am overwhelmingly sad that my children are missing out on these things I hold so dear. So this year we went there in the high summer!

And I tried to relive every positive memory I have of the place via those kids!

There were cuddles with Grandpa:

And lots with Grandma too:

Old toys (my brother’s 35 year old Matchbox cars):

And new toys (Grandma knows that Batman is the way to this kid’s heart):

Lots of 3D-related activities with my 3D enthusiast Dad:

There was corn on the cob, lots of sweet, fresh, delicious Iowa corn:

And a hand full of s’mores:

We spent time with the cousins:

Took four trips to the splash pad:

We blew ginormous bubbles out on the deck:

And we listened to the droning of the cicadas at night (Augie got fed up after a while):

Wyatt and grandpa made a homemade periscope which was just awesomely cool:

We went to the park that was my home away from home as a kid. When I was playing there, this was a real firetruck. This replacement doesn’t quite cut it but it’s still pretty cool.

We scrambled across the big rock by the creek, too.

And I spent some time with my besties from high school. Did I mention it was my 20th high school reunion weekend? It was fantastic to see these beautiful faces again!

So we didn’t do much of anything, but we did a little bit of everything.

Two weekends ago, our family set off on an adventure at the Maker Faire! If you are unfamiliar with Maker Faire, it’s a festival sponsored by Make magazine that showcases artists, crafters, DIY-sters, and other people who do really, really cool things. There are demos, exhibitions, shows, booths and all kinds of fun interactive things to do and see. Here are just a few of those things:

Warning: super photo-heavy post ahead. It might take a while to load.

Just about the first things we saw when we entered were a couple of cupcake cars whizzing by! These have been a fixture at Burning Man and the Maker Faire for a few years now.

And here’s how one looks disassembled:

Zach and Wyatt really wanted to see the mini-boat battle next and I wasn’t so interested in that, so they queued up for the next show and Augie and I hit the Bazaar Bizarre, a hall completely filled with craft vendors. Here were some of my favorites:

The first thing I bought was a two-pack of these felt paper bags beer cozies for Zach from My Imaginary Boyfriend. They just made me laugh, so I had to get them.

I loved these wooden robot cabinets too. The vendor was nice enough to tell me all about them and let me take some pictures, but I didn’t get the name of her business and now I can’t locate it online.

I also really loved these pillows from Eristotle and I talked to the woman who makes them, Erin, for quite a while. She hand cuts the beautiful, detailed animal shapes on the front of each pillow from recycled sweaters. I loved this elephant pillow but it just wasn’t in my budget right now. (Also, I could just see one of the kids smearing chocolate on it within moments of bringing it in the house!)

Sweet Meats was another booth that made me laugh. I love these big cartoon-y hams and steaks. I bought a little ham charm and now I need to get a chain to hang it on.

I also bought this pink robot headband (sorry no picture) from Beyond Wonderland. Her whole shop was full of accessories made from adorable Japanese fabric and I had to stop myself from buying one of each.

When Augie and I came out of crafty-land, the boys were done with their boat battle and waiting in line to go up in this amazing rocket. They waited in line for over an hour and when it was time to climb the scaffolding to enter, Wyatt got half-way up and decided that it was nuts to be that far off the ground so they came right back down.

We were all starting to get hungry at this point, so while Zach and Wyatt waited in line, I zipped off to get some food. There were lots of standard fair food offerings — deep fried stuff, barbecue and more deep fried stuff — but when I walked past this gigundo paella pan, I knew exactly what I was having for lunch.

Augie loved it too!

There were lots of flaming sculptures at the Maker Faire. These were a few of my favorites:

One of the big hits of the day for Wyatt was this big pile of tires that kids could play on. He climbed on them, rolled them, stacked them and knocked them over for at least a half hour.

And when he was done, he was a totally happy, filthy little ragamuffin.

At that point, we decided it was time to hit the big exhibition hall and when we got in there, Wyatt made a bee line for the Lego pit. There was a giant train track and village set up with lots of amazing buildings and structures in it. My favorite was this zoo:

While the boys played with Lego, I went over to the ProvoCraft booth to do their make and takes.

There was a really long line, but I got to see the Cricut Cake in action, silkscreen a tote bag with the Yudu (which I totally want and absolutely can not justify buying), and make a Batman mask for my little Bat-fanatic. You can see how much he loved it.

(He was actually getting really tired at this point.)

We decided this was a good time to head home because, we were all tired and…oh yeah…the Maker Faire was over! On our way out the door we decided we needed to do a little hula hooping. It looks like I’m a really great hula hooper here, but I actually stink. I think I had just let go of the hoop when this photo was taken. Photography is magical.

As we were walking to our car we saw R2-D2 getting loaded into his minivan…er…land speeder so Wyatt stopped to have his picture made with him.

A fine, crafty, making, DIY time was had by all!

And honestly, I’m not even showing you half of the fun things we made, saw and did. We’re already looking forward to next year!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a fantastic December and enjoyed their holidays tremendously!

As is often the case, the new year has spurred me to do a little reflection on my life and look at some places I’d like to make some changes. Most people refer to these ideas as “resolutions”, but I much prefer to think of them as goals. In the past, I’ve had some grand ideas about how I would make change happen in my life — lose weight! spend more time with friends!  de-clutter the house! do more creative stuff! — but my follow through on those nice ideas has been less than stellar.  Last year I set some much more specific goals and I’m happy to report that I actually achieved (and even surpassed) many of them.

This year I want to get even more granular in my goals. One of the big things I feel like my life was lacking last year was self-fulfillment. My lay-off and the subsequent transition from career-lady to stay-at-home-mom left me floundering a bit. I could write a whole big post about this topic, but for now I’ll just say that I found myself dedicating the majority of my time to satisfying other people’s wants and needs and significantly less time doing things I enjoyed and that made me happy. So this year, I’ve compiled a list of small, achievable goals for myself. Most of them are fun and all of them will make me happy in some way. I’ve grouped them loosely into five categories: cooking, crafts, kids, organization, and personal projects.

There are a gazillion things on the list already and I suspect that I’ll add more from time to time. It’s possible that I won’t complete them all this year (though I hope I will) but even if I only get to half of them I bet I’ll feel happier.

So without further ado, here is my list:

1. Actually make those pretzel crayon thingies for Wyatt’s lunch.
2. Bake bread.
3. Find five reliable, healthy, delicious soup recipes.
4. Learn to make pickles and/or marmalade.
5. Make a split the layer cake.
6. Make a twinkie cake.
7. Make macarons.
8. Make red beans and rice from scratch.
9. Assemble paper Christmas train with the kids.
10. Assemble paper Christmas village with the kids.
11. Assemble Project 365 scrapbook.
12. Do another photo-a-day project.
13. Etch glass.
14. Finish my project 365 blog posts.
15. Finish the fingerless mitts I started before Christmas.
16. Knit August a cute hat.
17. Learn to crochet.
18. Make a Santa outfit for Wyatt’s Imaginext Batman.
19. Make a softie for my niece-to-be.
20. Make a special birthday hat and get a special birthday plate.
21. Make at least 30 scrapbook layouts.
22. Make Augie more felt food.
23. Make car organizers for each of the kids.
24. Make felt gingerbread men for the kids.
25. Make some felt flower barrettes.
26. May some air dry clay flowers.
27. Set up a light box for photographing food and crafts.
28. Take a letterpress class.
29. Add five new foods to Wyatt’s eating repertoire.
30. Do a potato stamp art project with the boys.
31. Find a park with a splash pad for the kids to play in.
32. Read more with August.
33. Read more with Wyatt.
34. Sign up for a “Mommy and Me” type class with Augie.
35. Take Augie for walks around the block.
36. Take August to ride the steam trains.
37. Take my kids to Iowa in the warm months.
38. Take the kids swimming.
39. Take Wyatt to the King Tut exhibit.
40. Use our zoo membership.
41. Visit Little Farm with the kids.
42. Buy a laundry hamper.
43. Clear miscellaneous stuff off the top of the living room book cases.
44. Clear out the basement storage room and Freecycle like crazy.
45. Clear the clutter from my bedroom.
46. Get rid of half the stuff in our horrible, scary office.
47. Organize my crafting.
48. Re-organize and purge my craft supplies.
49. Re-organize and refresh bento supplies.
50. Set up a desk for Wyatt.
51. Attend BlogHer 2010.
52. Buy an every day skirt.
53. Double Wendolonia’s blog traffic and subscriptions.
54. Find a babysitter.
55. Find my copy of “Wreck This Journal” and wreck it.
56. Find some kind of exercise I enjoy and do it regularly.
57. Finish my book proposal.
58. Get a new couch.
59. Go on more than one date with Zach.
60. Go out to a grown up restaurant with another couple.
61. Go to Nordstrom for a bra fitting.
62. Hold another diaper drive for Help a Mother Out.
63. Make a bento box how-to video.
64. Make more lists.
65. Print and frame a “Get Excited and Make Things” poster for my office wall.
66. Read To Kill a Mockingbird.
67. Start Weight Watchers again.
68. Stay in a hotel alone for a weekend to sleep late, scrapbook, blog, and do whatever else I want.
69. Take a day (or weekend) trip to Santa Cruz.
70. Take periodic “days off” from social networking.
71. Take some naps.
72. Volunteer in Wyatt’s classroom.
73. Wean Augie.

I’ve already posted my list to the sidebar of this blog and I’ll be crossing them out (and likely blogging about many of them) as I complete them.

Did you set any goals for the new year? What fun, fulfilling activities are you planning for yourself?

I resisted getting an iPhone for quite a while. “Why do I need one,” I’d ask my husband. “It’s not like I need to keep track of clients or appointments or anything and I already have a regular cell phone to make calls with.” Oh, how naive I was! I finally caved to my desires and now I think I use my phone more as a stay-at-home mom of small kids than I ever would have in my former professional life managing a multi-million dollar website.

Beyond the obvious parental-type things I use my iPhone for (texting my husband to pick up bananas on the way home, calling the day care to say my son will be late) here are some of the ways I use my phone to be a happier mom:

1. I Entertain Myself While Breastfeeding

I love breastfeeding — let’s just get that out of the way right up front. I talk, sing and make contact while I nurse my baby. But after he starts to get sleepy, I need to be quiet and avoid eye contact so he’ll relax enough to go to sleep and at that point I’m stuck sitting quietly in the rocker for another 20 minutes or so. And when he was a newborn I did that 10 times per day! Besides normal web surfing and blog reading, I love to use this time to play games. Some of my favorites include: Wurdle, StoneLoops of Jurassica, Bejeweled 2, CandyMania PileUp and my most recent favorite, Blowfish Lite (sorry, couldn’t find a link). And even though it’s slow going to type on the iPhone keypad, I even use it to write sometimes. In fact, this post was partially written using the WordPress app!

2. I Take Photos of My Kids When We’re Out and About

This one is sort of a no brainer, but as a photography obsessed mom I love being able to take photos of my boys without lugging my big camera everywhere. I use these photos for scrapbooking in general and my Project 365 photo essay in particular and I recently had a “Duh!” moment when I realized I could email these photos to my mom and dad to give them a grandkid fix when they’re at work. No one ever said I was the sharpest tack in the box….

3. I Listen to Podcasts to Keep Myself From Going Insane

So very many of the mommy things I do in a day require that I use my hands and pay attention to my surroundings but don’t require that I be particularly mentally engaged. Housework and driving around running errands are a few examples of these horribly boring, mind-numbing chores. To keep myself from spiraling into a deep depression triggered by mental atrophy, I like to listen to podcasts while I do this stuff. Some of my favorites are the Manic Mommies, NPR’s StoryCorps, Meal Makeover Moms, and I’m looking forward to checking out this list of creativity podcasts Lain blogged about the other day.

4. I Record My Kids Laughing

…and babbling and telling jokes with the voice memo app. Photos are great and all, but those recordings of their little voices take you back to the age when they were recorded in an instant and oh my, they are sweet.

5. I Entertain My (Big) Kid at Restaurants and in the Car

I’m obviously not handing my iPhone to my 14-month-old baby, but my five-year-old is careful enough to be trusted with it occasionally. I don’t often let him use it, so when I give it to him to play with it’s a very, very special treat and he is absolutely thrilled. Some places I let him use it include: doctor’s office waiting rooms, in line at the post office, drives of over an hour and a half, and on airplane flights. I have a number of kid-friendly apps on my phone, but he also likes “playing” the same games I do. I also have an episode of Handy Manny on there for extreme circumstances and my husband has Wall-E on his phone for even more dire distraction emergencies.

I also use it to take notes for my son’s #babybook, but I already wrote about that.

How do you use your phone to make parenting your kids easier or more fun?

May 28, 2009:  Thursday, I made Wyatt a dinner bento box to take with him to child watch at the gym, but Augie was having a hard night and I decided to stay home with the kids at the last minute. It was kind of interesting to watch Wyatt eat his bento because I think I’ve only ever seen him do that once before.

May 29, 2009: Friday afternoon I set up a little photo shoot with Augie. These are a lot harder to do now that he’s mobile, because he keeps crawling away from the backdrop. I did get some cute ones though.

May 30, 2009: I spent a great day with my friend, Allison on Saturday. She moved down to the South Bay about a year or so ago and I hardly ever get to see her now, so it was super fantastic to get to spend some time with her. We went shopping for hours and hours and then hit T-Rex BBQ for dinner in the evening.

May 31, 2009: Wyatt was invited to a birthday party and the big treat was a visit from Darth Vadar! Augie and I got our picture taken with him, but even though Wyatt knew it was just a guy in a suit, he decided he needed to keep a good distance away from him.

June 1, 2009: I handed the camera to Wyatt and he took this shot. This is an “M” for “Mama” that he drew on my Etch-A-Sketch. Awwwww….

June 2, 2009: I love looking at my kids sleep. All the day’s sins are forgiven.

June 3, 2009: Augie is officially a “stander” now and I might even go so far as to say he’s a “cruiser”.

April 30, 2009: By the time Thursday rolled around, Wyatt had had a fever for over 5 days in a row and he had developed a bad cough. I wasn’t really worried about Swine Flu, but a little voice in the back of my head started to nag at me, making me think, “What if he actually is a carrier for the pandemic and I just ignore it?” I logged onto the CDC website to look at the list of symptoms and it was like a checklist of everything Wyatt was suffering from. Of course, it was also a checklist of symptoms of a bad cold, but the fever had me pretty worried, so I called into Kaiser for a little peace of mind. The advice nurse decided that a doctor should check him out so we went in. When we got there, his oxygen reading was a little low and after listening to his lungs the doctor immediately sent a nurse in to give Wyatt a nebulizer treatment because he was having an asthma attack. Gah! I hadn’t even noticed! We went home with an albuterol inhaler and Wyatt has been taking it a few times a day since then. You’ll be glad to know that he’s almost completely recovered now, except for a lingering cough.

May 1, 2009: I took a minute to run around the house gathering up all the magazines I haven’t managed to read and I found myself with a stack of twelve! Pictured here, you see Cooking Light, Weight Watchers Magazine, Memory Makers, Wondertime, Simple Scrapbooks, FamilyFun, Martha Stewart Living, Cook’s Country, Scrapbooks Etc., Better Homes and Gardens, and Creating Keepsakes. I couldn’t find my two most recent copies of Real Simple. Yes, I know I have a problem.

May 2, 2009: Zach was in Reno for a bachelor party for the weekend, so I was home alone with two crabby, sick kids. (Augie and I had both caught Wyatt’s illness by then and Zach was suffering through it on his trip, too.) I refused to let Wyatt watch any more movies and the energy required to keep him from whining was eluding me so I broke one of my big rules and took the kids to Toys R Us for no reason whatsoever and bought them toys. Wyatt got this marble run, Augie got some fancy see through balls with stuff inside and I got myself a big Lego house kit.

May 3, 2009: There’s nothing cuter than a baby in sunglasses. Except maybe a basket of kittens…

May 4, 2009: Poor Buzz. Wyatt broke his leg off (accidentally) about two seconds before I took this picture.

May 5, 2009: Now that Augie is a super-crawler, he’s exploring all the nooks and crannies of our house. He especially loves hanging out around the vacuum cleaner.

May 6, 2009: Wyatt finished up his lunch for his after school snack.