Arane Pictures

I took roughly a million pictures of Arane while we were visiting her. (Lizzie and Justin were inconsequential to the visit. :P We just wanted to see Arane. Haha.)

Dad and Arane at the hospital.

She was completely zonked.

Mom and Arane.

Mom asked Lizzie if she could hold Arane first. Humph. :P

Justin and Arane at home.

She was still asleep.

Justin could hold her in one arm.

Arane was kinda yellow so Dad took her out on the porch the next morning before it got too hot.

And she hated her mittens.

Her headband kept falling off.

Isn't she cute?

The blur in the right is a man who came to fix the air conditioner and a step. Arane wasn't fazed by the banging at all. That was also one of the first times we saw her eyes open.

She hated her bath.

She smelled really good afterwards, though.

Justin said she had a new person smell.

Mom liked feeding her.

They had small group at their house one night.

Amachi (Am-ah-ch-e) and Arane.

Miss Laura Ellen, Amachi, and Arane.

Arane liked all the people.

Lizzie and Justin like her. They're not going to give her back.

Arane was so wiggly that Mrs. Nyhuis wiggled with her and this is the least blurry picture of them I took.. They came over to play games after small group.

Mrs. Roush and Arane. They came over on a different day.

Mr. Roush and Arane. I'm surprised Arane wasn't scared by his beard. (I used to be really scared of Mr. Roush.)

Arane and Dad.

I didn't once drop her!

And I even managed to watch her for a while all by myself without her dying.

This was her normal face.

She was actually really happy in this picture.

Arane hardly ever cried unless she was hungry.

I think this was when Lizzie was holding her and Arane almost fell off her lap.

She really liked that chair and the wall.

Her blankets are really cute.

Justin wasn't drunk or anything. He was just tired because he's the one who gets up at night with Arane.

She got kinda good at moving her head.

And got the hang of eating.

Dad moved and scared her. Her arms shot way up.

I don't know what that face was for.

Her yawns are cute.

And massive.

I think this was the time her eyes were open for more than two minutes.

She's perfectly fine here, just looks worried.

She'd sometimes try to open her eyes by raising her eyebrows.

Either Dad surprised her or she's yawning.

Sleeping wore her out so she had to sleep more.

I had a math lesson with Justin while there.

Arane helped.

"Hey, Dad, I don't think Auntie knows what she's doing."

She sat on the table the whole time.

Or fell asleep from Justin's teaching. :P

And kept spitting her binkie out.

So ate her dad's hand instead. 

Arane's Here!

Here's Arane!

Isn't she cute??? She's 7 pounds 6 ounces and was born at 8:27 tonight. Lizzie and Arane are both fine, and Lizzie is going nuts from the medicine and tiredness and happiness. Arane looks just like Lizzie did (and so will probably begin talking in about a week and never be quiet, just like Lizzie :P ).

We're going to go visit them soon.

Learning to Write

I really like to write and learn how to do most of it all by myself. So, these are the things that've helped the most. (In no particular order.)

A writing class from an online school

It was for 6th graders and covered almost everything. (And the teacher was one of Mom's old students and a friend of one of our friends from church. It was kinda funny because she said that the only thing from Mom's class she remembered was The Rite of Spring.) The class was really fun and it helped a lot.

What happens to most books.

NaNoWriMo

NaNo is for writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. Ruth told me about it so I signed up on the adult program (for ages 13 and up) and the Young Writer's Program (for ages under 18). I wasn't technically old enough for the adult NaNo, but signed up anyway. (I was twelve. Apparently lots of twelve year olds have done that. Haha.)

It got me to write regularly (every day) for a month, and it kinda stuck after that. And it made me a lot faster with thinking and typing. And it has really good, free workbooks on novelling.

Everybody's reaction.

Script Frenzy

Script Frenzy's Young Writer's Program has workbooks, too. They're almost exactly like the novelling workbooks except for scripts. I'm not very good at scripts and don't like them as much, but tough it up and do Script Frenzy every year for practice on the basis that it might come in handy sometime. I only write scripts at random times, but it's still helped a lot.

I'm with the jet-pack guy.

One Year Adventure Novel

OYAN teaches high school kids to write adventure novels, but can be used for any kind of novel. I use it for fantasy (which is a kind of adventure, but not strictly adventure because it takes place in another world; I'm not sure how that works for urban or paranormal fantasy, but I don't write either of those so don't worry about it too much). It doesn't use many novels to teach with, and when it does, there are questions like, "How does [insert character's name here] make his deciding moment? How is it unexpected?" which are really good questions.

They also have a curriculum for science fiction and fantasy (Other Worlds). It uses what OYAN taught and then teaches more. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds really good and helpful.

This is my reaction sometimes, but I think the librarians have gotten used to it by now...(For those who have trouble reading the titles on those books, they're "Serial Killers", "Kidnappings", "Harpoons".)

Writing Magic by Gail Carson Levine


This is the first writing book I ever remember reading. It really helped to get me to write. Mrs. Levine also has a blog, which I read and is like the book except with more information. (The comments section is really helpful, too, because the readers talk about the post and problems they have.) My copy of her book is all marked up, taped up, and basically falling apart.

If he was writing a novel, that'd be awesome.

Worldplay

This is a writing blog which mostly talks about writing techniques and writing life--stuff like saving on taxes by keeping a list of how many packs of pens I go through in a year or how to get people to leave me alone so I can write, neither of which I've ever needed to use, but it's helpful to know in case I need to sometime.

Yep.

Author Culture

This is the same idea as Wordplay. (They also have posts on Friday where they talk about something funny relating to words or writing or writers. I like these two the best so far.) They have more writers making posts on more topics, though.

It's helpful to know grammar.

Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real

Pretty


This is my garden. It has a shasta daisy, prairie mallow, some geraniums, pansies (most of which have already been ripped up, but I left some because they're still alive and it's not completely hot enough to kill them yet), petunias, and some other things I forget the names of but looked pretty. I tried planting flowers from seeds, but the day after I planted them, there was a tornado so I think they all got washed away and left massive weeds which I had to dig into the ground to get out. Most of the flowers were on clearance at the store, too. All of them together cost about thirty dollars (counting the daisy, prairie mallow, and pansies). There's also a lily from some Easter decorations in there. I forgot where it was and dug it up while digging up the weeds. Hopefully it'll survive.

Happy


This is Dummy. He's a robin which we met last week. He sat for hours on our front window sill and Mom took this picture of him. I named him Dummy because he still has the dumb, goofy baby look on.

Funny


Dad sometimes makes startling speeches in his sermons. Week-before-last on Pentecost Sunday/Memorial Weekend, he said, "It's not Memorial Day. Memorial Day is Monday. Today is Pentecost Sunday." Mom went to Wal-Mart and got these little American flags because of the startling speech. I think it's funny.

Real


Somebody set fire to our van, which we loaned to a family from church. It caught fire in the middle of the night and set the apartment on fire and exploded. (And was on the front page of the newspaper with a typo in it which said, "...south-west of time" instead of "...south-west of town" on it. That typo gave a story idea which so far has nothing to do with exploding vans.)

That dent was from before the explosion. Somebody backed into the telephone pole about a month after we got the van.

(Nobody was hurt in either the pole-backing-into or the explosion/fire.)

You can go here for more Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real posts: www.ourmothersdaughters.blogspot.com

Also, I have two new books for sale on Amazon and CreateSpace. Here are the links. I think they'll open up into new windows. They should because I checked the little box thingy on the link gizmo.

This song is very applicable to me, especially since we're traveling a lot this June, starting whenever Arane is born probably. I agree with Xanthias (the second singer, the one who hates to travel). It's from The Frogs by Stephan Sondheim, based off of The Frogs by Aristophanes.