Our Budding Photographer

With our fairly recent acquisition of a couple new digital cameras we found ourselves with an extra older camera. And what better thing to do with a camera than give it to a 3 year old? Ella loves taking pictures. There were over 200 of them when I pulled them off the chip onto the computer. She takes pictures of all sorts of silly things. For example:

Ceiling fixtures are one of her specialties. She's quite good at them.

Alex is also a central subject of her pictures.

Sometimes we get really special ones like my rumpus when I'm still in my pajamas in bed trying to sleep. Or,

Daddy peeking over the shower cutrtain while mommy is showering. (naughty daddy)

But of all the things in the world that there are to photograph, Ella has 2 absolute favorites, herself:

and her feet:

Now it doesn't really matter where or when, but the important factor of a good Ella face shot is,

the goofier the better. Silly faces are a must.

And the closer the better.

Odd angels? You bet.

And her feet? Well you better believe she gets pictures standing up,

sitting in chairs,

or at the top of the stairs,

and sometimes...

even upside down!!

She is destined to be a fabulous photographer someday. Now lets just hope she can find some new subject matter before then! She's such a doll, I love her to pieces!

Another Weekly Update

OK, so I haven't been to good on updating the blog this week. I guess I feel I can't blog without pictures, and I haven't taken many pictures this week. But I'll do my best.

Last Sunday Anton felt inspired to make a cake. It was truly painful watching him try to frost it. My hands were itching to reach over and take the spatula from him and do it myself. But I resisted and he managed to do OK in the end. Here he is with his proud creation:

It was an orange cake with vanilla orange frosting. Pretty good.

That night we went to John and Emily's house and had a Scrabble competition with them and Tonia and Andre. We actually won. I don't think I've ever won Scrabble in my whole life. We perplexed them with our use of the word "MI" as in do, re, mi, fa, so, etc. It was a fun game.

On Monday we had Tonia and Andre over for dinner to help us eat the cake. The dinner was just a formality before getting tot the cake. Though it was really good. I made a recipe from the Pioneer Woman's blog. Yum. Good stuff. If you haven't heard of Pioneer Woman you need to go check out her blogs. Fun stuff.

Anton actually met with the Commodore that morning too. Finally. It lasted all of 2 minutes. He asked him a couple questions and signed his papers and sent him on his way. He has since met with a couple other people and things are moving along. His paperwork will head up the chain some time this next week and it should take a month or more to get his separation orders back. Hopefully we can get out of here by Christmas. We'll see.

Thursday there was a tornado near here. It was a little bit concerning. We don't have a basement and the only interior room we have is the pantry full of canned goods. Luckily I never had to resort to emptying it. That night we went out to dinner right where the tornado had gone through and you couldn't even tell it had been there. They cleaned it up really fast.

Friday I went to lunch with the girls, which was really nice. Not having to interrupt conversation to chase kids and so on felt so nice. We sat and chatted forever.

Today we went to 2 BBQ's. In the afternoon we went to one at Anton's cousin's house. It was fun. Then tonight we went to Tonia and Andre's. We played yard games and ate way too much food. I was a total slacker and didn't take pictures of a thing. Emily was good and took pictures of our lunch on Friday and the games tonight so you'll have to check out her blog and hope she puts up pictures.

And in order to give you fun things to look at I'll show you Alex's new skill:


He can climb up the front of the cupboard and get into the sink. this particular time was right after his bath so he was neked and brushing his teeth. What a silly boy. He makes me laugh.

He also likes to eat everything. Here he is after an afternoon "playing" with side walk chalk:

What a cutie!

So that's been life for us. Sortof the cliff notes version.

Our Week

We've been doing random things here and there this week so I thought I would save them all up for one big post. I'll start back on Sunday.

There was a Conference for our church all weekend and to pass the time I usually pick up one of my unfinished crafts. This time around I worked on these:

They still need their eyes, but you get the idea. The blue one is for Alex and the pink one for Ella. I haven't decided yet if they are play toys or decorative toys. Alex picked his up and straight away put the trunk in his mouth. So we'll see.

That night we really needed to get out of the house so we hopped in the car and started driving. We love non-planned roadtrips. We ended up driving over 100 miles in a big circle around our house. We saw fires, and police cars, and a beautiful sunset. It was good to get out.

On Monday we gave into temptation and went out to dinner. We went to a little Italian place near-by since we didn't feel like driving into town to go to Olive Garden. All was going well until we ordered our triple chocolate cheesecake for dessert. I could see into the kitchen from where I was sitting, and I watched as our waitress coughed into her hand then used the very same hand to pick up the cheesecake and put it on our plate. Gross. Anton didn't care. I ate out the insides of it and let Anton eat the contaminated outside. Disgusting. Blech. We should have complained, I know.

Tuesday must have been uneventful because I can't remember a thing we did. In fact, we may even have gone out to eat on Tuesday and not Monday. My brain is mush. I can't remember.

On Wednesday I took Ella to story time in the morning and I hung out in the library working on family history stuff. It's my new obsession. Scrapbooking is on the way out, family history on the way in. I go in cycles that repeat yearly. Here I am very intently doing family history:

So fun!

Anton went mountain biking sans mountains that evening. He had tons of fun and even came back with a battle wound:

Barely brushed up against a tree, but still enough to brag about, I guess.

In order to rebel against the Navy Anton decided to not shave. He managed to get quite a beard going:

On Thursday we found out he has an appointment to meet with the Commodore on Monday. Anton shaved in celebration. Though I'm not holding my breath since he has had 2 other appointments with him and both were canceled. We'll see.

Thursday night our friends volunteered to watch the kids so we could go out on a date. Even though we had just gone out to dinner a couple days before we couldn't pass up the chance to go out. We went to a place right on the bay. It was a really nice restaurant with mediocre food. It was nice to get out though. We didn't stay out too long because we had to get home to watch the Office. We've been sucked into a TV show. It's pathetic, but funny!

Friday morning it was so nice outside we had to take the kids to the park. They hadn't gotten the chance to just run around free for a long time. Ella's new playground skill is climbing to the top of everything:

Alex got monkey lessons:

He must've learned it from Ella:

That night we switched off and watched out friends' little girl so they could go out. We just sat around and watched the kids play. Not terribly exciting.

Today we did a couple fun things. In the morning we went to a Bike Festival. It was pretty small, but something to do. We took the opportunity to go on a bike ride ourselves. It wore me right out.

Then this evening we went to a fair at a local Catholic church. They had a little carnival and booths, food, games, etc. We always let the kids pick one thing to go on. Alex really wanted to ride the big rides but we all compromised on the bounce house thing. They loved it.

Alex had a little trouble staying up, seeing as he doesn't even know how to jump yet.

Ella had the most fun purposely falling down and saying "We all fall down!"

And of course posing for pictures like always:

There was also a petting zoo where Ella got her finger bit by a donkey. She wasn't too thrilled about that. The animals wouldn't eat anything because they were so full from having being fed all day long. Oh well.

That's been our goings on. In other random news this week, Ella planted a seed in church a few weeks ago and brought it home. Now it looks like this:

And this week it grew a bean:

It's right there in the middle. Ella gets all excited to see what new things her plant has done.

She also is getting much better at writing her letters. Anton was practicing with her this week.

Her's are the green ones. You can't see them very well because they all started over lapping, but she really did pretty good. She knows all her letters by sight and can even spell some words. Smart kid.

So that's about it for now. Hopefully next week we'll have some good news from Anton's meeting and maybe some more fun activities to tell about! Have a good one!

Random Smatterings

I have all sorts of random things to blog about tonight in order to get caught up, so here goes.

Last night we had some new friends come over. Yes I know, amazing that we actually have more than one set of friends. But here they are, meet Emily and John:

We found that we have a mutual semi-obsession with the game Settlers of Catan. So we arranged a tournament, if you can call one round a tournament. We had dinner and I made a special cake just for the occasion:

I had too much fun with this.

Yes I even painted the numbers on the little circles. I had to make it authentic!

Anton was very pleased that he got to do the destruction on this one.

See the game in the background? Looks just like it doesn't it? It was a super yummy cake too. Same flavor as the baby shower one, white sour cream cake with raspberry filling. I also threw in some of the left-over lemon frosting I had from making these cupcakes for a church function last week:

Recognize the flowers?

They were left-overs from the first practice cake. The cupcakes were lemon with raspberry filling and lemon buttercream icing. I finally managed to use up all that raspberry filling with the Settlers cake.

Speaking of Settlers, Emily slaughtered us all in the game. It was quite sad. I only managed to build 1 road and a settlement. Terrible. It was really fun though.

Today we were wandering Wal-mart in order to get out of the house (you know you live in a small town when...) and we happened to see the cutest little bike that was really cheap. So what did we do? We bought it of course!

Ella loves it. Except for the part when she first got on it at home and went careening down the driveway and off the curb onto her face. That wasn't so fun. But she got right back up and got right back on her bike. What a trooper. But now she only likes to go slow and uses the brakes a lot. Anton is really excited to turn Ella into a biker. Alex is jealous. He really wanted a pink bike too. Well, any bike really. We also got Ella the final part of her Halloween costume. She chose to be Cinderella. We're still not sure what Alex will be.

I also put up a new set of templates in the store on Monday. The whole camping thing made me totally forget to post them. So here they are:

You of course are free to go to my store here and buy them up. This is my favorite set yet.

So that is my smörgåsbord (look at all those foreign letters! got to love spell check) of random bits for the day. Have a good one!

Heat + Humidity + Bugs = Fun!

We went camping on Tuesday. It's one of the advantages of having Anton home all the time so we can go play whenever we want. There are a lot of photos involved in the telling of this adventure, so be warned. You might want to grab a snack.

So we chose to camp at a state park near here since Alex had never been camping before. That way, if everything went wrong we could pack up and go home. We arrived in the afternoon and got our tent all set up. We were all nice and hot and sweaty after that so we decided to go swimming. The campground is by a river that has white sand beaches. Kindof an odd place to find white sand beaches, but I won't argue.

The river was shallow too so Ella could play in it to her hearts content. Alex of course kept on with his favorite beach activity:

eating the sand. He picked up a new fun one this time too:

drinking the water. What a goof. We all had tons of fun playing in the water:

Ella liked floating down river on daddy's back.

What a cutie!

And again!

After all that beach fun we got pretty hungry. So we headed back to camp to get our fire going.

Look! A picture of me! How did that happen? But there is our roaring fire.

Anton thinks that Ramen noodles is an appropriate camping food but I convinced him that foil dinners are much more suited to our style of car camping. We've done the foil dinner thing before and they turned into charcoal briquets, but we wanted to brave it again. This time they only came out partial briquets.

We had to pick out the edible pieces, but those were good. We're determined to figure out the art of the foil dinner some day. But when all else fails you can always turn to the standard camp fall back:

S'mores.

Yum.

That made up for every piece of burnt potato.

We made the mistake of leaving Alex's sippy cup at home. We couldn't have the little guy being dehydrated so we had to be creative.

We took a regular old water bottle and poked a hole in the top.

It worked great until he figured out he could dump milk out of the hole. Oh well. He pretty much hung out in the pack and play the whole time so he wouldn't get in the fire or run into the street.

He did get to move into the booster seat for dinner, which he promptly tipped over and fell flat on his face. Poor kid. Camping is no fun.

Ella liked the fact that there was a playground right across from our campsite.

We let her play over there to keep her out of the fire.

Before calling it a night we went on the hunt for a geocache. We found one before the swarms of mosquitoes drove us into the tent. It was 7 PM and we didn't dare venture outside. So we just sat there in the dark playing whispered word association games while the kids slept. Such fun.

The next morning, with a fresh layer of bug spray on, we were ready for more. We were up bright and early, thanks to Alex, so we went on a morning hike. To preface this I have to show you the spider we saw on the way to the beach the day before:

This guy was probably the size of a quarter and about as big of a spider I really ever want to see. However, we do live in the swamp so I should have been prepared for what we encountered next.

Now this guy was big. We had to duck under his web while we were hiking. Yuck. Heebee geebee's galore. But just wait. There is more to come.

On a side note, while on our morning hike it took us past another one of the river beaches and it had this sign:

Um, thanks. You couldn't have posted this by the beach I was swimming on?!? Though it's probably a good thing I didn't see it until after or we wouldn't have gotten to go swimming.

Here's my darling family on our morning hike. We came back to camp and packed everything up. Anton found an ingenious way to deflate our air mattress (yes I camp with an air mattress, I'm a sissy):

What a silly head. We then drove over to the other side of the park to hike another trail. Ella hiked well over a mile during the course of the morning.

I only had to carry her at the very end. What a trooper. And all in a pair of crocs!

So you ready for the rest of the bug story? We're hiking along and come to this beautiful open area amongst some pine trees:

Well, what you can't see in the picture is right above Anton and Alex stretched across the entire trail is a HUGE spider web. And in the middle of it, a spider. Now my camera would not cooperate in getting a picture of this guy and I wasn't about to get close enough to get a good one so a substitution will have to do.

It was this big and that same kind of spider. Got the creeps yet? Well there's more. We walk on and notice that between almost every pine tree out in the wooded area there is another large web with another large spider. There were hundreds of them!!!! If I thought I could've run out of there I would have. Darn humidity with my asthma. I kept as close to the middle of the trail as I could and kept a very wary eye out. I'm shivering just thinking about it. yuck.

Our purpose in going on these various hikes were to find additional geocaches, which we succeeded in doing.

Here's Ella checking out the haul in this cache. She chose a set of Spiderman playing cards. She also scored a purple necklace and Alex a firetruck. We leave little gifts in exchange. The kids love "treasure hunting" as we call it. Though next time I'd like to do it without the spiders. By then the heat and bugs had done us in and we headed home to showers and air conditioners. No more swamp camping for us!