just enough to whet your appetite

So, I didn't plan to have these ready for a few days because I'm actually in Yellowstone as this posts but I couldn't wait to get to work on their wedding portraits! Their wedding was absolutely beautiful . . . a photographer's dream with the yellow and red . . . and it was truly a privilege for me to shoot.

Lots more to come -- stay tuned!

bat boys

So, softball is finished for the season. We came in 3rd . . . out of 4 teams. :) With rain-outs and forfeits it ended up being a long season and everyone . . . including Kev who would play in a hurricane if necessary . . . was ready for it to be over. Couldn't resist a few photos of our bat boys, tho:

sharing the spotlight

So, in order to make sure my little starlet of a daughter doesn't get too envious of the attention that will be plastered on her little brother this birthday weekend, I took her into her new room and did an impromptu photo shoot. Funny thing, she's so obsessed with poses and smiling just right (her words, not mine) she actually looks very stiff and uncomfy in pictures. It took forever for her to loosen up and just have fun. I finally just let her bounce on her bed for a few minutes to get her to giggle and she was much better. . . don't tell her Daddy. :)

legos

So, the boys had their birthday party last night. It was a blast!

They each got lots of loot, but my photos of Ethan opening his presents turned out crazy blurry - I'm sure Val got way better ones of him. Val, Shannon and Jolene made the Lego cake for them and after we had all gotten a piece we stripped them down and let them loose. We're both planning to do the individual cakes for their family parties on their actual birthdays but we couldn't resist the photo op.

They loved it! After they had a nice sugar buzz going we dumped them in the kitchen sink to rinse off for the ride home. (photos coming) The water was a great shade of grass green - I hope it doesn't stain Lu's sink forever. :)

Happy Birthday, guys!

eight

years, that is. We've been married 8 years today. Lots of things have changed and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Love him more now than I did that day.

I had planned on posting a few photos from our wedding portraits; you know, a kind of "then and now" situation. But since I can't find any of them in the post-moving disaster that is our bedroom you'll have to be happy with these instead. Gennie wanted to go out and play with sidewalk chalk this morning so we loaded up a bunch of stuff for Josiah to play with and parked on the front lawn. After she had been at it for a while I came over to see what she had been drawing.

"It's an anniversary picture, Mommy, so you can celebrate." I love it.

11 months

So, this beautiful . . . ahem, I mean handsome . . . little guy is 11 months old. Actually, his birthday is next Sat so I figured I'd better say something about this last month of infantcy (sp?) before he's not a baby anymore.

What he's up to:
- walking like crazy. No longer interested in crawling much unless he has fallen down 3 times consecutively and decides it's easier to get there by crawling. I'll post photos of the walking later.
- into everything. We don't have the baby locks up yet so I'm constantly closing cupboards and removing him from the trash can, etc.
- loves the steamer basket. He discovered it once when he was unorganizing my pots and pans cupboard and daily goes back to it to pull it out and open it up.
- sleeps really well again. We had a bit of time there that he was up again several times in the night but he's back to sleeping until 10am or so. Thank God.
- eats just about anything but chokes a lot. We're not sure why he's still choking on foods . . . maybe he just hasn't gotten the hang of mashing stuff up yet . . . but we have to be careful what snacks he gets and how many he stuffs in his mouth at a time. He's eating 2 or so jars of the #2 foods at each meal and still loves the rice cereal.
- has mastered the sippy cup. He does better when they have handles on each side but will take just about anything. Grandaddy taught him to drink from the fountain at church . . . drinking fountain, not aesthetic fountain . . . so most Sundays he's drenched before the service . . . Josiah, not my dad . . . but has a great time!

This week we have his joint b'day party with Ethan and his family party both coming up so be ready for tons of photos! Love me the cake-schmeared-from-ear-to-ear birthday photos!

a fun visit

So, right before we got going on the house my friend Shannon and her family were returning to NE from their vacation and stopped to see us. We haven't seen each other since my wedding in 2000 so we'd never met each other's kids, etc. We went out for supper and then to a park so the kids could run around while we visited . . . we didn't think the people at Don Pedro's would have appreciated the kids running around in the restaurant. We got all caught up on each other's lives and took tons of pix of the kids playing.

They tried out all the equipment at the park:

Josiah ate a pinecone:We had a great time and I'm gonna miss her. No idea when I'll see her again but it's only a short 12 hours-ish to their house . . . road trip, Kev? :)

down with creative constipation!

So, this is my dining room table today . . . yay, I have a dining room! Josiah and his best friend Ethan. . . best friends by default because they are only 3 days apart . . . I think I've posted about them before . . . are having a joint birthday party for our homegroup friends coming up next week so I'm making invites for everyone. I ran out of glue dots, tho, so I'll be handing the last little bit off to Ethan's mom Valerie to finish . . . yes, she offered . . . no, I'm not so mean as to just assume she'd finish them because I don't want to run to the store for more glue dots.

Anyway, I love it when my table looks like this. Sometimes I get so bogged down with all the photos I want to scrap that it just overwhelms me and I sit on the floor next to my computer in the fetal position until Kev comes home and tells me to get up already, it's just scrapbooking. (I know he sounds mean but he really doesn't mind that I LOVE to scrap. He just really likes to tease me about it because he says it's just another ridiculously involved way to look at photos and couldn't we just keep them in files on the computer? I remind him it keeps me off the streets.) Then there's sometimes when I get a project going and the inspiration is there and all the pieces are in place . . . except when I run out of glue dots . . . and the kids take super-long naps and everything clicks and I can get a project finished. No designer's block, nothing to hold me back. I love it! Best days ever!

and here's one for the grandparents . . .

So, I forgot to tell you about Gennie's adventure during painting week. Tues and Thurs nights of this summer Kev plays on the church softball team. We got finished at the house just in time to run out the door to the game and I didn't put any bug spray on Gennie before we left. Check this out:

This was actually the next morning when she woke up. She had been bitten and my mom smacked the mosquito in mid-bite so we didn't think anything about it until she got out of bed and came into our room looking like this. I swear, we thought it was someone else's kid. She didn't look like Gennie AT ALL! It was actually two bites, where the arrows are, and they both swelled up so bad that both eyes took a turn at being shut. I took her in to the dr's on Thurs morning because it just wasn't going down at all even with Benedryl and ice packs and cold washrags. The dr said yes it was a mosquito and would go down eventually and put bug spray on her next time and that'll be $85 thank you. He said that the bug bites were unusually bad this year and he'd seen a bunch of kids looking like her whose moms had brought them in to get checked out. And something about the skin on your forehead being attached so close to your skull that there's really no place for swelling to go so it heads south into your eyelids and the bridge of your nose. Whatever. She looked like Quasimodo.

By Sat. she was looking better . . . still not right but better . . . and more like she'd been in a car accident. The swelling finally went away and left two huge red bruises under her eyes that finally went away this weekend. She kept asking, "do I look like Gennie yet?" We felt so bad for her, especially when she kept running into things and tripping on steps because her eyes were swollen shut and her balance was off. {We also laughed at her a lot when she'd bump into things, but not to her face. :) }

But now she's back to her usual Gennie self!

moving day

So, the mandatory Moving Day Doughnuts.

Funny thing, that was the only photo I took that day. I had high hopes of taking photos during the process but once we got started it was all such a rush that I didn't think again about it. I know, I know, Amy without a camera? Oh, the shock and disbelief! But I think if I had stopped carting stuff and shouting directions the people who were carrying the heavy stuff would probably have stomped me into the floor. We had a bunch of friends from church come over and move the stuff . . . which we have waaaaay too much of for only being married 8 years . . . and the ladies stayed in the new place and put my kitchen together for me. A huge thank you goes out to everyone who came on moving day, too!!! A bunch of us went to the Brewing Co. in RS afterwards for supper. They all look normal but we look exhaused, probably because Kev and I stayed up until 1:30am the night before trying to throw the last stuff in whatever box was still laying around open. (We did take a short break to watch the pathetic GR fireworks . . . quite the disappointment this year . . . and found out that after 4 1/2 years of living there we never knew we had THE BEST spot for watching the fireworks on our front grass. We always went out to the street where most of the rest of GR went for watching and sat in the car because of the mosquitos. During the show this little Australian Shepherd dog came and refused to leave our porch. She was terrified of the noise and had gotten out of her own yard and got confused and insisted on huddling on our porch. We thought we had gotten rid of her after the fireworks stopped but she was there again the next day and we had to chain her to the fence to keep her out of the way of moving stuff. Then in the afternoon I let her off the chain and she loped off down the street without so much as a backwards glance. There's gratitude for you!)

Anyway, here we are at the brewery:

And no, the girls did not have beers, they had sprite. :)

Kev looks crazy tired, and I did too.
Sorry about the crappy photo quality. All I had was my camera phone and it does an okay job if you only want to see an impressionist's rendition of what was happening. And if you like your skin colors tinted red.

We spent that night at the new house and it was fabulous, once we got used to the new creaks and sounds and convinced Gennie that the baby gate across the stairs would in fact keep downstairs any bad guys who came in thru that staircase in the basement.

oh my gosh, if I never see another paint can in my life . . .

So, we started painting. Our awesome friends Karl and Jolene came to help us for Tues and Wed . . . they are pro painters in the summers and had tips and equipment, etc . . . and my parents and Aunt Cathy came so we had lots of people to help for those two days.

As you can see, we all took a turn in Josiah's room and it took a TON of paint to cover that hideous orange. We ran out of blue before we finished his closet but we didn't have time to get more on a paint run so we've just left it for now. Eventually it will get done . . . who am I kidding? . . . it so won't get done . . . but at least you can't see it inside the closet.

Josiah spent most of the time in his pen and was not happy about it. Baby jail indeed. He won't go in there for very long now, but I can't blame the kid.

I got picked to tackle the nasty wallpaper border in the kitchen. Never again will I deal with that stuff. I wouldn't even bless an enemy with it. Yuck. Gennie spent the 2 days pestering everyone with "I can help!! Really I can!" until finally I couldn't take any more so I gave her a brush and let her loose on the orange walls. She had a blast painting faces and letters and was crushed to find out we were going to cover over it. I took lots of photos of it for her. The second day Karl and Jolene started priming the awful downstairs paneling. No more Keebler elves. It took them most of that day, then my dad came over and got the fantastic job of painting it. (the left side is painted and the right side is primer in this photo.)

A huge thank you goes out to everyone for all the help painting and getting the place ready for us to move in. It was a ton of work but it went together quickly with so many people to work on it. Thanks, guys!! :)