Branching Out

While I do take a lot of pictures I do not usually mess with them too much.  This includes doing anything creative with them, even if a particular series of pictures might lend itself to a fun pictorial adventure.  This week I Heart Faces challenged folks to create a collage.  I came up with this...

It's a little late on the final day, so I'm not sure that it will be included in the choices, but it was fun to play with the pictures and come up with different scenarios.  As I was experimenting I realized that a collage is a sweet idea for a gift for someone, or for a special area that you want to decorate with photos.  Wouldn't something like those pictures of Eliana be cute in a bathroom?

Visit I Heart Faces to be inspired by other creative takes on the collage!

Well...I went to add my link and it's closed!  So...this is what I would have done.  I thought you could add your post until 9pm PST.  Now I know!  Until next time...

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the House

I am supposed to go to Seattle in less than two days.

LESS THAN TWO DAYS!

And by I, I mean me and myself, and only Christina, and no one else.

ALONE!

This is strange.

And scary.

And exciting.

And a whole lot of other words, too.

Now, Eliana has had a fever since Saturday around midnight (Sunday around midnight?).  It was very high this morning, but came down with some Tylenol.  The nurse at our doctor's office still wanted her to come in because of the high temp plus a cough, but she was pronounced to be all clear.  I am grateful for that and hope that it doesn't turn into anything worse in the next day or so, but I have gotten way behind on so many things that I wanted to do before I left.  Just when I got motivated!

Of course, these are all things that I could have been taking care of all along, but haven't.  My list has gotten a mile long and includes the normal things like packing, getting the stitching ready for Friday, cleaning the bathrooms and putting away all of the laundry that I have managed to wash, as well as special things like make a myriad of dishes from some American Girl cookbooks that Michaela has.  She took the major back burner today because Eliana was so needy.  I really want to do the things that she would like for me to do tomorrow. 

And Christian.  What an interesting guy.  He has been a bit snippy and grumpy with me today.  Tonight it seemed as though he were looking desperately first for trouble and then for something to cry about.  I finally asked him if he was upset that I was leaving and he, amidst tears that were something like water breaking through a dam, cried out,"Yes!  But not that you're leaving, but..." and he couldn't quite articulate whatever powerful feelings he was having, and then he lay down and wiped his eyes and got quiet.  He went to sleep in a few minutes, while I sat with him quietly.  Maybe he just needed to be able to say he was going to miss me, without actually saying it. 

The dishwasher is running and the counter is wiped off BUT the floors need to be swept, and I really do need to clean at least two of our bathrooms.  The laundry HAS to be put away...you would not believe my laundry situation unless you saw a picture of the piles of clean clothes that I have loitering around my house.  They are getting a bit surly and I have heard from some very reliable undercover sources that there has been talk of mutiny.  Before things get really out of control, I need to counter this rebellion with a hard hand. 

All of a sudden it got quiet...that means that the dishwasher is just about finished and the laundry needs to be switched.  Before I add mass to the angry mob, I must subdue and dispatch.  Off I go. 

Arrgghh!

Does This Look Like First Grade to You?

Christian's class is reading A Bear Called Paddington.  His teacher is also making sure they get to experience some of the adventures that Paddington has in his stories.  One such adventure (I gather, I haven't read it-can you believe that?!) is a sandcastle competition.  The classmates drew names in order to create teams, then worked to design their sandcastle in class (after some standardized testing they had all last week...what fun to follow a couple of hours of hard work each day!), brought in supplies, and headed to a playground in order to execute the architectural plans they had laid out on paper. 

It was a little hard to tell what they thought of playing in the sand working together to build their sandcastles instead of sitting in the classroom for the last two hours of school.

 The sand area was big enough for all of the teams, as well as the younger siblings of the students to have a space to dig and build, too.

An almost finished castle...

Christian was on a team with another boy as well as a girl.  They designed what they called a dungeon, and they named it "The Dark Castle". 

By the time they had set the characters and smaller details up around it, I found myself thinking of both Skeletor's castle (please tell me you remember Skeletor) as well as Prince Humperdinck's "Pit of Despair" in The Princess Bride.  If you have only seen the movie (which I do think is excellent-one of my all-time favorites) then you must also read the book.  That is an order, and I am not a bossy person in general.

They had to speak with the judge (Christian's teacher's best friend and Expert Sandcastle Judger) about their work.

This interview was followed by more climbing...

and some very cute cupcakes (what is wrong with me that I didn't take a picture of those); then the bell rang.  

Wait!  There was no bell, since we were at a playground!

I don't remember doing anything like this in school!  Christian has had a great year, and I can't believe that it's almost over.

I also can't believe that that means he will soon be a second grader.  You look at those feet and tell me that he's not still my baby!  I won't believe you. 

I won't!

OoooWeeeOooo I Look Just Like Buddy Holly...

Recently I broke my glasses.

I did.  I had them in my hands and I twisted the stem right off.  I was trying to be so gentle, and just tweak the part that goes over your ear ever so slightly.  Apparently I am as gentle as an angry Incredible Hulk. 

I am also as smart as I am gentle.  I left the remainder of my glasses on the table next to my bed, and Eliana finished them off.  I suppose she may have thought she was doing the right thing, since Mommy had twisted one stem off, she was helping by doing the other.  It was a total act of kindness. 

I was left with...

I got these frameless glasses several years ago.  They were a big change for me.  For a long time I had what you might call chunky glasses.  I don't remember my first pair, but these are hard to forget...

These glasses along with my braces made quite a combination.  At least my Richard Simmons and Diana Ross' love-child hair was growing out.  Just in case you missed that...

Once I started wearing contacts there was no looking back for me.  Glasses of any kind were a thing of the past. 

Until I had babies. 

Babies require waking up in the middle of the night, and sleeping at all hours of the day to make up for it.  I couldn't be fooling around with contacts all day and night.  In and out, in and out.  Forget it!  I decided to get some new glasses just before Michaela was born.  It was agonizing.  To revisit something that brought back so many memories and made me feel just like I was back in the seventh grade was hard.  But Mike was with me and we talked with the sales person, and I tried on hundreds of pairs, and we reasoned about which kind of frame would be good for such a strong prescription (I'm practically blind).  We finally settled on what came to be known as the Buddy Hollys. 

For the next four years or so, I wore these glasses A LOT.  I did wear my contacts for special occasions, and during the summer when I wore sunglasses, but with small children, it was so convenient to have glasses!

After Michaela and Christian got a little bigger, I began to wear my contacts more again.  I felt like I looked less tired, and it helped me to have more normal days when I didn't think,"I can just close my eyes right now!" 

Then I got pregnant with Eliana...my prescription had changed and so had the times.  I needed an update.  Buddy Holly was so...1950s.  Or 2001.  I ended up with a very different pair of glasses.  These didn't even have frames.  But the tech who made them was confident that they could still handle my prescription.

(YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE PRESCRIPTION!  I'm thinking of you, Ree!)

After Eliana was born I wore these glasses A LOT.

But again, I often felt like they made me look tired and feel tired.  It's just too easy to close your eyes when you don't have your contacts in!  Or maybe I need toothpicks.

At any rate, I have been trying to wear my contacts more lately, especially since my little accident.  But there are defiinitely times when I just don't want to hold my eyelids open and stick little plastic circles onto my eyeballs.  The eyeballs rebel.  And for those times, I have once again pulled out the Buddy Hollys...

It's like we were twins separated at birth...and by 38 years.

Maybe I should have been born in another decade...there seems to be no escaping it.

And for all of you nerds out there who are perplexed as to the way I used Buddy Holly's name, with an "s" and no punctuation...I tried to figure out how I should write it and that seemed like the right way.  It's not possessive, it's not plural, and I couldn't find a hard and fast rule about using a proper noun this way.  I'm happy to learn if you have info about that.  I think that would qualify me as a nerd, as well.

A Walk

While Christian and Michaela were at Bible study tonight, Eliana and I went for a walk around our block.  We had our respective missions.

Mine involved being still.  Hers involved a lot of movement.

There was some conflict.

I was hoping to get some pictures of her eyes.  Have you tried to photograph a two-year-old's eyes in the nice light just before the sun goes down?  It requires a very wiggly person to STOP WIGGLING.

I got a lot of this...

or this...

(although her eyes do look nice there)

and pictures along the lines of this one...

(no eyes, but you can see that she had M&M's as well as milk earlier in the day...note to self:  wipe off your child's mouth before photo session)

Oh, here's a good one for "Mission:  Shoot Eyes"...

(but look at her fingers...aren't they sweet?)

Now.  This one I love because it looks like pictures of me when I was little.  (Not the afro one, but further back, when I was actually cute.)

Oooh, there are her eyes!

And then some girls on bikes came along and they were much more fun to look at than my camera.  I got her cheeks, though.  I could kiss them all day.

Eyes, elbow dimple, and paint-bonus!

She is a people watcher...the choir members were showing up at church for rehearsal and she wanted to know what each person's name was.  "Who is that?"

I will say that while our missions were not fully synchronized, we each were able to accomplish what we set out to do.  And we had fun, too.

(You better believe I touched up that picture...man, I've got some wicked wrinkles.)