New Year's Eve and a new baby!

Okay. So. We had a new baby on December 16th. He is tiny (under five pounds!) and dark-haired and cute as anything. This means, of course, that my blog went silent, and I haven't written much (read: anything) recently, and there have been many tantrums from a certain two-year-old who wasn't prepared at all for this intrusion, thank you very much. But things are normalizing, and I know from experience that I will someday get more sleep and everything will be a little less crazy. I would show you a picture or two, but that will have to wait until I find my phone, so in the meantime, here is a cute older baby laughing at tearing paper.

Someday my youngest son will laugh, too!

Cats!

I shall post this video, instead of something more productive, because it is a celebration of surviving a dentist appointment! Also because wet cats are funny. You should've seen what our cat, Scout, did when she accidentally jumped into a full bathtub--she can leap really high, and my poor husband had a pretty scratched-up leg (he was in the aforementioned full bathtub, and it was our other cat, Ophelia, who chased her there). Anyway, happy wet cat watching!

Pictures

My four-year-old (who is less than a month shy of five!) drew some new pictures this week. He asked me to share. So here they are, in all their glory:

This one is titled "Lots of Lasers and Arrows"

...and this one is "ghhhhhhuuuu"

I think he misses the A-Z blogfest, when I posted pictures of monsters every day. I'll have to draw something some afternoon and post it because he is awesome. (Once my lap shrinks and he can fit on it again, which should be soon!)

My First Kickstarter

So I've never supported a Kickstarter project before (shameful!), but here's my first: To Be or Not To Be, by Ryan North. I've always liked Dinosaur Comics, because I think the writing is hilarious, and a choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet is just too awesome to pass up. Especially when proceeds go to cancer research. And...three great books for fifteen or twenty dollars? Sign me up!

Looky! Pictures by Kate Beaton! You can't buy this kind of coolness. Well, I guess technically you can, and that makes me happy!

Must...start...submitting...

Here is a secret: I don't like submitting my manuscript. I don't have a neat time of the day for it (I teach in the morning, watch two very cute children, write during nap time, and do chores-ish stuff after bedtime), which makes it like grading (no neat time for that, either), and I hate spending my writing time on queries. But this means that even though I love my second book I've only submitted it a little over a dozen places, and some of those places were referrals. So...I'd better get going! I DID suck it up and work on my query Saturday, and this means I will go and look up submission guidelines and get some queries out there. Right now. I'm going, I swear!

But I will leave you with this:

Yay for balloons!

Festival of Trees

I love the Festival of Trees. Every year the Utah one is right in Sandy, where we live. Every year we can see Santa and eat scones and look at lots and lots of shiny lights. And this year, since our tree (which has a base we've held together with twine for the past two Christmases) decided to topple, I can actually get ideas for (or possibly buy?) a new tree there. Yay!

Here's a video of the coolest tree I've ever seen there, possibly the coolest tree ever. Someday I will try glass blowing, but you should go to their website and watch the video of this tree's creation to see how awesome Holdman Studios is at creating art!

If I only had a brain...

This is about how I feel right now:

I am not sure if I have crazy non-matching subtitles going on, but I probably do. At least the scarecrow's always been the coolest of the Oz gang to me.*

*(After the witch. I love the Wicked Witch of the West. I had a green-faced witch for a birthday cake when I turned five, and it's still my favorite cake ever.)