Kevin’s Vent

Natalyn and I went to the rock climbing gym for our date last night. This was her third time there, and she finally made it to the top, and not only once, she made it up three times!

I also was finally able to make it all the way up the “hard” wall without falling. So a first for both of us.

Thanks for the fun date, Natalyn.

My inlaws are moving and need to be near a Veterans’ Hospital. I tried to find which ones were nearby but couldn’t find an easy list. I ended up writing a script that took all of the addresses from the VA website and mapped them online at batchgeocode.com

Click on the image to browse the map yourself. The Blue pins are clinics and the Red pins are (usually) larger hospitals.

My nephews totally love all things Star Wars. Well their girl cousins put them to shame yesterday.

I messed up Kathryn’s video, but I’ll post some pictures soon.

Montessori Dayspring of St George puts on a Christmas play each year to help children in Africa. My oldest two were in it, and they both did a great jorb. Here are some clips from it.

The girls’ school had a cake auction last night as a fund raiser. Here’s our entry.

I made most of it, and Meg did the hard part, piping the frosting onto the tombstones. It sold for $65, which I thought was pretty good, but even better a friend from work bought it, so I got to help eat it today too!

Meg also made a batch of scary looking cupcakes that fetched a pretty penny!

The girls all started school today, and they looked so pretty with their new outfits. They were all quite excited. It is Alaina’s first day of school, and we were a little worried, but she is excited to be a “Big Girl” and was out the door right behind her sisters. Good luck, Little Ladies!

So here are the girls modeling why they need a new bunk bed

Ok, actually the modeling part is making a scale model out of the plans.

I printed the plans onto cardstock, and then Natalyn helped me cut them out and glue them together. I probably didn’t need to do this since I had to have a good picture in my head to draw it in the first place, but I know that some of the family couldn’t quite picture it from the drawing, and it was also a nice quite Sunday activity I could do with my sweet, eldest daughter. Here are some pictures of the Model

Now that we know what it will look like the next step is to do some shopping.

Once we brain stormed what we wanted our bed to look like, it was time to formalize the design on graph paper. In school I took a drafting class and a woodworking class and really enjoyed both. While I don’t remember much, some of the basics came back as I worked on the plan. I started with the front view, the dashed lines are all hidden by the front of the bed, so it looks kind of busy.

You’ll also notice that I’m not including anything fancy like a slide, playhouse, or dresser. I don’t think I’m ready to build something like that yet. It does have shelves for each bunk as well as under-bed storage and a fold out desk.

A more simple view of the front shows the castle without all the hidden “features”

The side and back views are also simple, showing the desk, the climbing holds, and the window.

These drawings don’t look like much, but I spent several hours drawing and erasing trying to get them just right. The scale is 1 square=1 inch

Next I’m going to take these drawings and make a scale model out of them.

After looking at a lot of different plans in Part 2, we needed to come up with our own plans. I enlisted two local artists (very local) to sketch me some sample castle beds. We really liked the Caterbury castle, and focused our designs on a similar motif: simple, good for boys and girls, and an elegant style without being gaudy.

Natalyn did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the castle:

Meg’s sketches we’re remarkably similar to Natalyn’s in overall design, although with several extra features.

She had a very unique idea I really liked of a fold out desk built into part of the castle as well:

Next step will be combining these drawings into a workable plan.