I like this picture of Nicole. I found her sitting on the kitchen floor, wearing her father’s hat and looking at this book that she took from our bedroom.
There’s just something about this picture that seems very silly to me. Maybe it’s that she didn’t just take the book or the hat, but the two of them together and then walked all the way into the kitchen to sit down and ‘read.’
General Container Considerations:
It occurred to me today that I ought to make a habit of posting well check stats here .(particularly for my children’s grandparents, but also for anyone else who wants to know)
Name: Ila Jane Cochran (side note: It annoys me that most fonts don’t differentiate the capital I from the lowercase L so it looks like they are the same letter.)
Age: 4 months, 1 day
Weight: 11 lbs 4 oz 9th percentile
Length: 22 3/4 inches 7th percentile
Head Circumference: 41.0 cm 50th percentile
The test of a well organized space is if it stays organized over time and use. It should be easier to put things back where they go, then to put them back improperly. Accomplishing this is not as black and white as some of my other tips. I often have to ponder the items and the space that I’m organizing and sometimes try a little trial and error. If I organize a space and it doesn’t stay organized then that’s a good hint that I need to rethink my organization scheme and try something else.
Here are the ideas that I have which fall into this area:
For me the least accessible/useable shelves have always been top shelves, corner cupboards, and the cupboard over the fridge. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever find a way to make the cupboard over the fridge accessible/useful without the use of a chair, but I have come up with some good ideas for the other two problem areas. 
Top shelf items should either
Although I cannot reach the top self, I can usually reach a handle or container. Click here for another example with explanation.
I only have one solution to making better use of the corner cupboard space and that is to use a container. 
Corner cupboards tend to be deep and only the items in the front are easily accessible. When a corner cupboard is filled with items, you would have to move front items to get to back items, however, a container allows you to reach the back items by simply pulling the container forward (much like how a drawer works), thus allowing you to easily access the deeper space. You can also make use of the corner by using can rotator which allows you to load the top and access the bottom items.
I enjoy organizing. I think it’s the payoff at the end. I find a problem with how things are and I think about it until I have a solution. Once I reorganize something, I find great joy in looking at the place I reorganized. I recently embarked on a project to reorganize a kitchen for someone. As I worked through this process, I started mentally making notes about the things I think are essential to organization and I thought I’d share them here on this blog.
Consider the ‘real estate’ in your kitchen. An item’s usage should determine it’s ‘real estate.’ High use items should have prime locations which are the easiest to access and most functional to their use. The drawer below is the perfect example for this post.
This drawer is located under the breakfast bar which separates the kitchen from the dining room. It is the perfect location for food storage containers for the following reasons:
This drawer previously housed a collection of office supplies (rulers, pens, calculators, glue, ect), kite strings, phone books, and cookbooks and many of the items in the drawer were inaccessible under other items. The majority of these items were what I would consider low use items (at least low use for a kitchen).
Yesterday I was on my way home to Knoxville from visiting family in Northwest Ohio. I figured I’d take a detour and try to find the origin of my Cochran ancestors. The first record I’ve been able to find of any Cochrans puts a James and John Cochran in cabins in what would become Higginsport in 1819, when a Stephan Colvin moved in.
There’s a stream north of the town named Cochran Run. It’s not much to look at.
James Ziba Cochran, the first recorded Cochran in our family tree, was born in Higginsport in 1824. His son, James Mason Cochran, was born in the same town in 1854. Sometime after that they pulled up stakes and moved west.
I stopped at the cemetery in Higginsport to see if I could find any other ancestors. It was in shoddy repair; gravestones toppled and illegible, many markers destroyed. I looked at every single stone I could find to see if any of our people were there. They might be; there are many unmarked graves and many with just a small, square, marble marker with a number on it. There was no sexton to ask and no parking except at a home business (a trailer with a crude “bait shop†sign) next door.
I’m not holding my camera funny; everything really was slanted.
I asked at the people at the bait shop if they knew anyone named Cochran. The man there said he used to mow lawns at the cemetery in Felicity, and that there were lots of Cochrans there. It was a dead end; there were a few kind of similar names, but no Cochrans.
I had hoped to stop in Maysville, Kentucky, just across the river, to find another ancestor. By the time I got there, it was getting late in the day and I had to head for home. The cemetery there is much larger and in better repair, so I think I could call ahead and have someone to direct me.
I realized awhile ago that Isaac thinks the defining characteristic of a hug is to have your cheeks touch. So you can hug without using your arms. I’ve noticed that sometimes when he has been asked to give someone a hug, he just lean towards them with his face. He brought home this picture that he drew at school of a hug and I loved it so much that I scanned it into my computer and posted it here on my blog.
I love that the stick figures have no arms, but they are face to face and I love the smiles on their faces. The smiles seem to portray feelings of being happy and secure. I like to think that Isaac feels happy, secure, and confident in his parent’s love.
His favorite thing to do is build or create. He has three sizes of Legos and many other kinds of building sets. Recently he has been interested in ‘building’ is art projects. He doesn’t care much for coloring or other traditional art project staples, he is much more interested in creating something out of the paper or other materials.
When he goes outside to play, it doesn’t take long before I find him trying to “build†with outdoor toys and yard tools. Below you can see him beginning one of his creative sessions. He used the rake to attach and then pull his bike/step ladder creation.
He will build with anything and has at times annoyed his parents with things like furniture creations. His favorite books at the library are “mechanical books†and he enjoys studying maps and pictures that show the inside of electronics. His building toys include:
He has also enjoyed using Bristle Blocks which we borrowed from PERC when we lived in Utah and we’ve already purchased a Georello Tollbox for his next birthday.
I decided to make pie the other day for an impromptu get together with some friends (who happen to also be relatives), but when I looked in the cupboard I only had one of each kind of pie filling, so this is what I did:
And it worked out perfectly!
I made a lattice top, but it didn’t work out as perfectly, the divider left me a little short on pie crust so I didn’t take a picture.
She’s a funny little girl. She seems to really like Ila, but she’s not quite two and can be a little rough in her attempts to be kind. I generally try to avoid laying Ila anywhere Nicole can reach her when Nicole is awake, but today I thought Nicole was distracted so I laid Ila down while I poured drinks for dinner and when I went back to check on her, this is what I found:
Nicole had neatly laid trucks and trains around Ila
I came into the kitchen the other day and found this: 
It made me smile because I am sure I know exactly which child made the mess. Nicole has a thing for wire whisks.
I’ve never been that good at documenting my kids milestones, but I’m trying to blog more often and I’m too tired to write a longer blog so here it is.
Minor Milestone = Ila has just started to have an interest in toys and has been holding them. She has been calmed down with a toy and even got a few all the way up to her mouth to suck on.
This was my solution for allowing the kids to have popcorn while watching a movie without making a huge mess. They are sitting on a towel and Nicole was asleep, so it actually worked out quite well.
The movie they have been choosing lately is “The Sword and the Stone†because they’ve been listening to the audio book while they fall asleep each night. I’ve put the movie on several times, but Isaac would rather be creating than watching, so he has yet to see the entire movie.
I think my favorite treat as a child was homemade fruit leather. Both my mom and my Grandma O’Bryant made it. I remember them making it in strawberry and in raspberry. I loved the flavor and the texture of it and I never thought I got enough of it.
So I went out with the kids to play, even though I had cleaning to do inside.
Nicole enjoyed laying on her tummy in the dirt with her arms reached out as if to make upside-down dirt angels, she also tasted the dirt.
Since moving to Tennessee and adding one more child, I’ve noticed some changes in 
how the kids relate to each other.
Isaac and Charlotte still get along very well and play together all the time. It seems like they’ve been conspiring more and getting into more trouble since the move, but maybe I just think that because I am much busier and have less family support out here.
There were eight people (6 kids, 2 adults) in my family growing up, but most vans only 
had seat belts for 7 so space was always an issue. A car top carrier seemed like the perfect solution for baggage and it worked ok for us for a little while. The straps would make this buzzing noise as they vibrated in the wind when we drove fast.
I remember that we’d fill it as full as we could and then still have things packed in the back of the van. We went through a few car-top carriers, but I can’t remember why. The experience I’ll never forget is our last trip with a car-top carrier.
We were traveling home from Canada and were in Ontario with about 3 hours left till we got home. As were cruising along down the highway at a good speed, car-top carrier flew off of the car with a thud and landed in the middle of the highway. I can remember feeling panicked and wondering what we would do and how we could possibly fit all of our things in the van. I remember that by the time we had all of our things packed into the already full van, we could no longer see the floor of the van and we had to rest our legs on top of luggage.
Charlotte has missed all the little girls her age back in Utah. 
In primary, there are no girls in Isaac’s class and she’s the only girl in her class. So the closest girl in age is in the class one year younger than her and ironically that girl’s name is also Charlotte. If that wasn’t enough of a coincidence, the other Charlotte’s birthday is the day before my Charlotte’s birthday (Charlotte C = 12/14 /05 Charlotte H = 12/13/06).
Anyone who knows my Charlotte knows that she loves her name. For a long time, the phrase you’d hear her say the most was “I’m Charlotte.†The day she
severed her thumb, we knew the pain was relieved when she looked at us and said “I’m Charlotte.†So you can only imagine her excitement to meet another Charlotte who happens to be close to her age.
She announced to me the other day that she wanted to write a book about Charlotte coming. She choose paper the color of the sun and came up with the text all on her own. For days she would make comments about the other Charlotte regularly. She’d say things like “the other Charlotte likes pink too.†Today, after Charlotte H left, she said “Jesus accidently made two Charlottes. One is four and the other is three.â€
I came into the living room to find this scene, luckily I always have a camera close by. Editor’s note: Nicole is trying to sit in a tiny doll-size high chair. 
So my best friend David has been down at NAS Pensacola for some training, and I thought this was the best time to go see the National Museum of Naval Aviation with him. I’ve always wanted to visit; they have a great selection of aircraft. Naturally, a road trip these days means bringing Isaac with me; bringing Isaac usually means bringing Charlotte too. Hit the jump for a boatload of pictures and a quick summary.
