Merry Christmas from the Lawton's

Check out our eCard with the children in it.

Tags for Soap

Well, I have handmade Goat Milk Soap to sell and I had a little tag that I taped on that told the name and ingredients of the soap. My good friend Raluca bought some soap and saw my slightly pathetic attempt of a tag and decided that it could be improved by using her Cricut. So she came up with one and then came over to help me make them for the rest of my soaps. I wanted to print the information on each tag instead of pasting paper with the information on the tag so I used my Graphic Arts skills to align the text just right for the Cricut machine to cut out my info in the form of the tag. We only had two slight mishaps with this method.

It took us about 4 and 1/2 hours. Thank you so much Raluca for coming and helping to improve the image of my new soaps. Tirzah and Azariah also helped by using the Cricut Machine and then punching the holes in the tags. Now to wrap all the soap and attach the tags.

Here are each of the tags for the six different kinds of soap.

The pile of tags that we made. Whew, glad that is done, but it was fun.

Three of the soaps all packaged with the new tags.

Oh, and if you want to purchase any you can check out my Etsy Store or email me.

Zuri Smilling

It took awhile for Zurishaddai to start smiling and even now it isn't real common yet, but here is a picture I was able to capture of him doing it.

Family Pictures

We had our family pictures taken at church a couple of weeks ago, here are the results.

Getting six children to smile and cooperate is not easy. Talitha for some reason would not smile for the Camera at all that day.

I love this one of my boys.

Review of the Game "Monopoly Revolution"

My very gracious Grandmother and Aunts purchased the older children some games. They purchase Operations, I SPY Go Fish and Monopoly Revolution. Here I want to talk about Monopoly Revolution. I am very grateful for these games and am thankful that they thought about the children. I do want to make some observations about this "New" Monopoly Game.

The first thing that is obviously different is that the board is round and not square. This is kind of cool and looks modern. The property cards are smaller and the tokens just have pictures on them instead of being in the shape of the objects. The biggest change is there is no physical money. Each player receives a credit card in which their money is kept on (well kind of). The game has a machine in which you stick your card in to add or subtract money from it. You also use the machine to transfer money from one player to the other. All prices are have been adjusted from the 1930's game. The prices are now in thousands or millions instead of tens and hundreds.

Each player is given a "debit" card instead of money.

Another nice change in the game is that there is no Community Chest and Chance can either happen by landing on the board or randomly when you remove your card from the money machine. So you might purchase some houses and when you pull your card out after paying a Chance can come up applying to you. I do like that feature. The game also allows for you to force a trade with another player. This speeds up the game and makes it possible to get all of one color group when a player isn't willing to trade for anything. Over all some nice improvements have been made. The lack of physical money makes the game easier to deal with because you don't have a bunch of loose bills.

This is the cash machine that keeps track of how much money a player has.

All that to say, my biggest complaint is also the money issue. In order to add or subtract money from your account you enter the amount press if it is K's (thousands) or M's (millions) and the bank machine does the rest. For a game that I think is a good game to teach children about money, how to spend it and how to count it there is very little need for counting your money. You just plug in the amount to subtract or add and the machine does if for you. It does not take a lot of skill to do that. The game still has strategy but it is easy to just spend and not consider how much money you have left because it is in the computer. In my opinion this is a lot like what is said about credit cards "It is easy to spend more when you put it on a card instead of paying cash because it doesn't seem real."

The Property Deeds

My conclusion is that most of the changes in the game are an improvement to it, adjusting the costs, the way Chance works and being able to force a trade are all good. The biggest drawback to this new monopoly game is the fact that it removes the concept of cash and replaces it with Credit Cards. I want my children to learn to handle money wisely and learn to count it out and count back change, this game does not allow for that now. I believe it is a dumbing down of the game.

Zuri's Full Name

After a week of trying to decide Zuri's middle name, we finally have it: Drum roll please...

Zurishaddai Alexander Lawton

As with all of our names it does mean something. It means "Rock of the Almighty, Defender of People"

Airsoft BB's and Ears Don't Mix

On Sunday night, Gil was on the floor with Talitha. She found a green Airsoft BB and the next thing Gil sees is Tally pulling her hand away from her ear. Sure enough, she put it in her ear. This was not an emergency as she was not in pain.

Later that evening, she fell asleep on the couch and then Gil and I started working to get it out of her ear. We tried sucking it out with a straw. Then Gil used the outside casing of a pen to try to suck it out. We attached a hose to the end of the pen and still we could not suck it out. We did try to glue the ink part of the pen to it that night and it did not work. After many attempts of sucking, we decided that we sucked at sucking and we gave up for that night.

Yesterday, Monday, I looked and it was still in her ear canal. But since she wasn't in any pain we did not do anything to try and get it out. Both Gil and I continued to think about ways to suck it out. One of my thoughts was to use my milk machine vacuum to suck it out.

Today, Gil brought the milk machine in and we tried to suck out the BB with it. It did not work. We tried some different modifications for the suction but since we didn't want to hurt her eardrum either we were very careful about the amount of vacuum used and tried it on ourselves before tryng it on her. We really needed a better end attachment to suck to the BB. There may have also been a suction between the BB and her eardrum making it need more suction than we were willing to use. When that didn't work, we decided to try to glue something to it again. This time though, Gil used alcohol to clean and dry the BB before we tried to superglue a stick to it. Talitha also fell asleep on the couch so she was still and wasn't moving around.

A few issues we needed to make sure happened. One, when using super glue, we needed to make sure the glue did not come in contact with her ear canal. We also needed to be able to see what we were doing. Here is what we used.

A clear outershell of a pen with some of the end cut off. We were able to stick the pen casing into Talitha's ear and have it reach the BB. We first used it to try and suck the BB out on Sunday. Please note that we were extremely careful not to push on the BB at all as we did not want to lodge it further in the ear canal or even possibly rupture the eardrum.

We used a wooden paint brush with the end of it cut off to glue to the BB. This paintbrush fit perfectly into the pen case so that as we inserted the tip with super glue on it there was no way it would touch anything but the BB. Talitha was a sleep and so she was not squirming which would have made it hard.

This picture shows how the paintbrush fit inside the pen casing.

We also had a otisscope with the light shining on the side of the pen casing which allowed Gil to see what he was doing. We prayed to the Lord asking that we would have success in getting the BB out this time. Then as Tally slept we inserted the pen casing into the ear so that it was just touching the BB. I shined the otisscope light on the pen casing, then Gil put the glue on the paint brush and inserted it down the pen casing to the BB. He held it there until Tally started moving and he pulled out both the pen casing and the paint brush and the BB was stuck to the end. Initially, Gil thought it didn't work because she started moving, but the Lord was gracious to us and allowed the procedure to work.

This picture shows the BB on the end of the stick. We were so grateful for the success. The Lord's goodness indeed never fails.

I did use the otisscope to check her ear to make sure there was no damage to the ear drum.