yes, it's really Bedlam

that banner is huge. I'll probably change it in a few days so I don't overwhelm too much. I did want to post that picture though. It's so quintescentially Joshua. It's my life. I don't often talk about how crazy my kids are on my blog but believe me they are nuts.

Take last thursday as a fine example. The baby is (still) sick, so we aren't doing much of anything. we stay home and the kids are getting stir crazy. by the end of the day, I had had enough and sent them all outside to play even though it was very hot. I was a nice mommy and said they could play in the sprinkler. So they go get soaking wet and try to come back in. I said no. They switch the sprinker head for a spray nozzle and get each other even more wet and try to come back in. I said no. They proceed to turn the front flower bead (sans flowers, we're still working on it. I guess you could call it the front dirt bed) into mud pies. then, you guessed it, they wanted to come back inside. I made them all go play in the back yard after this. five minutes later, Bubba is back in the house bawling because his brother hit him in the face with a bat. yes, a bat. Joshua didn't mean to hit Matty, he was actually trying to hit himself. yes. himself. don't ask. I didn't. I couldn't bring myself to so I have no clue why a seven year old would want to hit himself in the head with a bat.

This is a normal day at my house. This is why I call it Bedlam. fits doesn't it?

guess what?

Libby took four steps last night. :)

my town is stupid

so you remember my beautiful perfect road? the one I gushed over? the one I was willing to carry 30lbs of books and herd five kids for? yeah. that one. the one that is no more.

They gravelled it this morning. laid the tar and then a horribly uneven bed of loose gravel over it. there are piles where they laid out too much and holes where people have already ruined the surface with their tires. It's yucky. Oh I'm sure they could show me how this nasty gravel bed is supposed to make our lovely blacktop last longer. personally, i think the windshield replacement guys have been bribing the city council.

yet once again, I live on a stinky road. sadly it will take years for it to smooth out. we really don't get enough traffic to press it flat enough.

sigh. I never did get out my roller blades, either.

(see you didn't know I had roller blades did you? I'm not that predictable. People can now say "Amy had roller blades ? . . . . huh."*)

*please excuse my lousy Friends reference. we just started Netflix and we're starting at the begining.

more ooohing and aaaaahing

I am up late playing with pictures. thought I would post my favorites from this evening. don't you wish you had eyelashes like that?
true baby style, she eats everything. that's my lens cap. well, my only lens cap. I seem to lose them pretty easily. gotta love her dimples in her fingers. makes me want to do that "Sqeee!" thing that only women can do when they see a baby.
and that is the face I love. sigh. what a cutie.

all photos taken with my Rebel XT and 50mm lens. 400ISO, f-1.8, around 60 shutter. (I was in AV mode. it varried a bit) the sepia tone was done in camera in the BW parameter with sepia toning. red filter effect.

Who Needs Typepad

Not me! ok, so it would have been a heck of a lot easier at Typepad, but I got myself a custom banner. Pretty snazzy huh? Thanks to a link to Lindsay Teague's blog, I can now change my banner anytime I want. Once you get the coding set up it's a pretty easy change. And since I was already messing with my coding, I added some links on the side just for fun. One of these days I'll figure out how to do the cool links to music or books like Lindsay has, but today is not that day. I can get the hyperlink for the webpage for the book, but my book image comes up as a litte red x. I will have to play more with that. The coding that I stole off Linsay's blog was very long and complex.

anyway, you may all oooh and aaaah over my cute baby now. 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . now! aaaaaahhh!

Summer all summed up

Nine o'clock is my favorite time in the summer. Dusk is starting to settle in and the heat is disapating. And my children are usually in bed. This is the time that Steve likes to mow the lawn.

I love watching him too. He loves the puttering around in the yard stuff. He even likes to mow. When the house is mostly quiet and i can hear the hum of the mower out the window, I feel compeled to go out and see him. He looks so content, with his routine, up and down the yard a slow march behind the mower. The air feels good after a day of scorching heat and the summer smell of fresh cut grass permeates everything.

Summer isn't my favorite time of year, but in these moments I can apreciate it for itself. a time to unwind and let the world pass. A time to let go of the day to day and find the moments that define your life.

Ten Years

That's how old she is. Ten years ago I was laying in an old hospital bed holding a sleeping baby. My first baby. I had a pillow over my stomach to protect my incision and I was desprately trying to figure out the nursing thing. (I didn't get it figured out with her. my milk went away less than six days later.) She was so beautiful though. dark brown hair. opaque blue eyes that I was sure were going to stay blue and everyone else knew they weren't. Her blue eyes didn't last two weeks. She was so tiny and her cries sounded like the mewing of a kitten, tiny and squeeky.

We've had fun with her. She's always been intelligent and curious. She could recognize a letter as a letter before she was ten months old. She could distinguish the A and the E when she was a year, name all the letters at 16 months, and read before she was 3 1/2. She reads so well now that she's had a hard time finding books at the school library. There are shelves and shelves of books she's not allowed to read because they are too far under her reading level. She read the entire Narnia series in first grade. Read Harry Potter 1-4 in second grade. She spends hours everyday reading. Reading the same books over and over or devouring a new one. I love that I've been able to share my love for fantasty books with her. And she likes Anne of Green Gables too. how cool is that?

She's a great big sister and always wanting to help with the baby. She and Joshua fight like cats and dogs but she almost never fights with Rilla or Matt. she's pretty even tempered and is sensitive to other people's feelings.

I'm glad she's my girl. Happy Birthday, Sarah.

messing with Macro

I have a macro setting on two of my lenses. I don't use it on my short lens much because it's mostly worthless. I do, however, like to play with the macro on my long lens. it's not a true Macro, only a 1:2 ratio and I have to stand back 2 1/2 feet from my subject, but it's fun to play. Fun to see things in new ways and cut out the background. Macro intensifies your focus on the world.

Look! I can scrap after all

it's been months, but i finally managed to scrap again. for awhile, i wasn't sure the desire would ever come back. i like this one though. it looks just like it did in my head and anyone who scraps knows just how rare that is.

I read too Fast

I'm done. I waited two years for the book and I'm done already. I had it in my hands on Saturday and I was done by that evening. I shouldn't be surprised. That's how I eat chocolate. I don't savor; I devour.

Yes, I'm talking about Harry Potter. I discovered the series right before book 2 came out. before my almost ten year old was even born. I love Harry Potter books. they are fun escapism. I'm glad that my daughter is now old enough to share the excitement with me. She devours the books too. She's read them more than I have.

We even went to a release party with my sister and her daughter. My sister is a big enough fan that she posts on a message board for HP fans. We walked to the store and on the way home she read the first chapter outloud while the three of us listened in and the girls kept trying to read over her shoulder. We have plans to attend a release party for book seven together. There's a huge store in Portland I want to be at for that one.

guess he had better go eat worms . . .

poor matt. He has an imaginary friend named Nanngy. (aprox. spelling based on his pronunciation.) today he brought me the phone and said with a very sad look on his face, "Nanngy won't talk to me."

even his imaginary friend won't talk to him. poor guy. it doesn't get much more pathetic than that.

Sunset at the beach

two vacations in one year?

We went to a family reunion on the Washington Coast. we stayed at the Cape Disappointment state park. They have yurts. (http://www.yurts.com/) yurts are cool. unfortunately, since my parents were paying and there weren't enough beds, my family had to stay in a tent. Tents are 80% of why I hate camping. Sleeping bags are the other 20%. anyway, it was a beautiful area. we were right next to the ocean. the crash of the waves lulled me to sleep every night. The wind was too cold to spend much time in the water, though. Amazingly enough, the Washington coast reminded me of Hawaii more than California did. California didn't smell right. It didn't feel right. The beach we were on somehow reminded me of Bikini Beach in November. it was nice. I could close my eyes and be there again.

(sorry about the funky coding. I have no idea why this is underlined or how to get rid of it. yes I did the whole control u thing. )

Here's some highlights:

this is the North Point lighthouse. we got to go up to the top. the view was amazing. The wind was something else though. this lighthouse and the cape disapointment lighthouse are both still working lighthouses.









here's the lighthouse at sunset. the picture is a bit dark, but I didn't have my tripod. I guess there was a guy from a magazine out taking pics that same night, so we picked a good night to watch sunset at the beach. I have better sunset pics. I'll post some in a seperate entry.



crossing the Astoria bridge. it's three miles long and the big arch thing you see in all the pictures is only 1/4 of it. the rest is flat and much closer to the river.








Star fish. we saw quite a few in the tide pools at the bottom of the cliffs. This particular one was having a good time trying to eat a crab. I'm sure it succeeded. the crab was already dead. The black shells are hundreds of muscles (that's what I was told anyway.) we did see living crabs. Steve kept catching one and releasing it in the tide pool so we could watch it bury itself.

all in all it was a good trip.

Update on my balding son

I took Matt to the dr. yesterday. She checked him out and was not at all concerned. it seems that hair loss is somewhat common in young kids. basically, when it only happens once, you dont' worry that much. She gave me a steroid cream and I'm supposed to use it twice a day until the hair grows back. no big deal and I don't have to feel guilty about matt's eating habits making him go bald at three. isnt' that nice?

my addiction

I can't help myself.  I love making annimated GIF files.  I made my son dance, , my husband shake his head, my baby jump and here she is clapping her hands.  I take pictures just to annimate them.  must be my old fantasy about being a Disney annimator squeezing out.  

oh, and that's not dirt on her cheek.  She's reached the black and blue stage of her babyhood.  you know, when they first start pulling themselves up on furniture and they fall over and bonk their faces.  poor girl.  She'll probably be like her siblings and spend the next ten years of her life with a bruise somewhere on her body. 

Every Morning

This is what I wake up with. Every morning, Libby wakes up at 6:30. I don't wake up at 6:30. I manage to sleep walk myself to the girls' room and get her out of her crib and bring her back to bed with me. She eats and we snuggle. Eventually, I'll convince myself that the kids really shouldn't be left unattended and I'll crawl out of bed (can you tell I'm not a morning person?) Libby will often still be asleep when I get up so I surround her with pillows and the comforter. She looks so sweet sleeping there I can't bring myself to wake her up. Usually, the sounds of Steve and I getting ready for the day will penetrate into her dreams and she will begin to stir. She stretches and wiggles and rolls onto her back. Then her little eyes start to peek open. They flutter closed a few times and then they pop open and she looks around for me. Then she smiles. I pick her up and we go start our day

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