{Mother's Day}

I had a wonderful Mother's Day with my family.  My husband and daughter even went shopping for me at my favorite antique store!

An old camera, some old spice containers and a Fiestware pitcher in a cool color!

My brother came and the boys BBQ'd lunch for us.  We sat around visiting and eating all afternoon.

One of my Mother's Day requests was a picture of me and my kids, cause on Mother's Day you get whatever you want, right?! And I do not have enough photos of me and my kidos since I am usually  on the other side of the camera (and much happier there I might add).  Seems like a pretty simple request though, it's not like they are 3 year olds that don't understand the concept of sitting still to take a nice photo . . . some days I do think it was easier taking their picture when they were 3!!

My brother, Mom and Me!  Just missing Gina!

And I was hopeful for a nice family photo too . . .

So, while this wasn't exactly the vision I had in my head of how the photos would turn out, this is a perfect representation of my family right now, my life right now, so really, these are the perfect photos!

{The Mustard Weeds Are Here}

My most favorite thing ever to photograph, cute girlies in the Mustard Weeds!  They seemed to have made an early appearance this year so we went out on a beautiful afternoon last weekend and played, the girls in the weeds and the moms with our cameras!  I've been experimenting with shooting into the sun, liked how some of these turned out but anxious to get back out there and keep playing! 

 My Favorite

 

Stuff

I've somehow managed to miss another entire month of blogging, , sheeesh, I started out so good! We are getting ready for spring break over here, although the rain has finally decided to appear so I'm hoping it's not a rainy spring break. I'm taking some days off and we are excited that our Oregon cousins are also going to be here visiting, so I'm really hoping for some more mustard flower photo shoots and mom wants some photos of the girls in her old Mexican dance outfit ~


Meghan brought home her progress report last week. She is doing very well in 2nd Grade, but I have to say it was the last sentence in the comments left by her teacher that cracked me up! She said "I would like Meghan to work on being more organized and clean at her desk." Have I not been saying that for, uummmm, forever?!


We are working on ways that she can keep herself a little more organized, I'll keep you posted on how that goes!

And today was picture day, again . . . you know how I just love those school pictures that I feel completely obligated to buy! Anyway, since Meghan and I couldn't agree on what to do with her hair, we asked Kaitlyn to come over and do it for her, she is just so much better at it than I am! She looked so cute . . .


Well, off to figure out how to work my new pressure cooker! I figure it goes perfectly with my love of mason jars.

School Pictures {Flashback 2011}

School pictures. Never really happy with them, I would prefer to just do my own, but for some reason I can not let a year go by without purchasing them!

Trevor - 9th Grade

Trevor's Football Photo

Meghan 2nd Grade

Meghan's Candy Inventory {Flashback 2011}

So since I have a lot of catching up to do, I just might go back and try and capture some things that I missed in 2011. And then again, this just might be the only post that I do on somethings I missed in 2011, really only time will tell, it's only the 3rd and I've still got high hopes! And for the record there will be no rhyme or reason to my posts, because remember this year is all about "Simplifying", and the old me would have to get it all organized and in chronological order, preferably on an excel worksheet, before I posted anything.

This goes back to November, the day after Halloween. First you have to understand the constant battle, and I mean CONSTANT battle I have with my daughter about keeping things picked up. And while I can be completely OCD with organizing I do not hold her to that level. I just need her to put her things away after she uses them, put her clothes away or in the hamper when she takes them off, basically just pick up after herself. But for some reason it just doesn't happen. And I'm at my wits end trying to figure out how to get it through the cute little head of hers.

I help her get her room cleaned up and tell her that THIS is what it needs to look like every night before she goes to bed, by the next night, it's a train wreck. I find clothes shoved under her bed, at the bottom of her bed under her sheets and anything she takes out of her closet, even just to look at ends up in the dirty clothes. I just can't seem to get it through her head to put things back where you found them when you are done with them. Everything has a place, everything in it's place! One of my favorite sayings.

I asked her to clean out her very out of control back pack, I come back a few minutes later and this is what I find ~


seriously, I don't know where I went wrong with this child!! But, this same child will find out of place items in a store and run and put those things back where they belong, she has been doing this since she was 2 years old!

So back to my story. There was no school the day after Halloween, so she went with candy in tow to Mimi's house. When I dropped her off I was telling Mimi about how we had spent some time getting her room picked up and organized over the weekend. Again, telling her my sad tales about how Meghan can't keep anything clean.

A little while later I get a text from Mimi stating that Meghan has some organizing genes in there somewhere because she was taking an inventory of all of her Halloween candy and writing it down. I sort of laughed and responded back, to bad she didn't know how to sort it in excel!! Mimi then sent me a photo of the inventory list and at that moment it all became so clear to me ~

Her brain thinks very differently than mine! I looked at that picture and just started laughing. While I'm a very straight, lined up, in order all nice and pretty kinda person, she is one big circle scattered, no rhyme or reason kinda girl. This is the reason that we don't see eye to eye on how our stuff should be kept. I need the organization in order to be productive and apparently she does not, although you know this will be a constant battle between us. But I do try and keep things in perspective and realize that organization is not as important to her as it is to me, and she is only 8 years old, but, somewhere in the middle we can hopefully find some happy ground where we can both live.

Back to School

It is back to school time around here ~ while I did enjoy the lazy days of summer and not having to get the kids up and off to school every morning, I so miss the routine that school brings to our day, especially the earlier bed times!!!

Trevor started High School on Monday, I don't know how that happened so fast as I'm pretty sure I just sent him off to his first day of Kindergarten a year or so ago!


This is the only photo I got of him on his first day, it was his idea to wait until the Tuesday morning so that we could include Meghan, aaahhhh, so sweet, right? Tuesday morning it was the "it's not the first day of school so why do we have to take pictures" line, somehow I knew his "thoughtfulness" was to good to be true!

He didn't have a lot to say about school besides "it's boring, my German teacher was trying to be funny but no one was laughing, it was really awkward, and there are only 2 freshman in my math class, all the rest are juniors, that is awkward". He went straight from classes to football practice, as he will just about everyday until the season is over so I didn't pick him up until 5:30, man that's a long day!

Tuesday was Meghan's first day of school, she wasn't overly excited to get back to school, although part of it may be that her cousins are in town and she would much rather be hanging out with them than going to school.

She is still at Gehringer and her teacher is Mrs. Snider. I don't really know the 2nd grade teachers but I did know Mrs. Snider and was hoping that is who she would get. I've heard from another parent that she is awesome, so I'm really excited to see what this year brings for little Miss Meghan!

Antique Store Finds

I love going to Antique stores and finding just the right something that I never knew I needed but can't live without! Steph and I went over to our local Antique store a few weekends ago, I had been wanting to go for weeks but hadn't made it over there, and I found several new treasures!

I've decided to collect mismatched silver (thanks Steph for the great idea!) so here is the beginning of my collection, needs a little polishing though!


Then I found this cool tin, I've always love containers! And I've been wanting something to put the dog food in, this is perfect and fits perfectly by the dog bowl, it is very rusty but love how it looks. And I must be rubbing off on husband, I thought for sure he would wonder what the heck I saw in that, but he actually liked it!


And the an old suitcase, these are good for storing craft supplies in, and it was brown and red and matched my scrap room, so I had to have it, right?

And my best find of the day was an old headboard, I've been looking for headboards for both the kids beds and saw some possibilities in this one. The best part is the lady said it was priced to high (I didn't think so, and I'm so not good at bartering with them!) so she took $10 off!

So after a little sanding and a few coats of paint and some more sanding, Meg got a new headboard for her bed.

I love how it turned out and the little table that I picked up in Sutter Creek in December that was still waiting for a little make over looks perfect with it.

Love the babies tucked into her bed!

LIPstick

LIP being the operative word here. Meghan called me into the bathroom tonight after she had taken a bath, this is what I saw! When I asked her what the heck was all over her face, she said Lipstick! I had a moment of "oh my goodness what the heck have you done to yourself, you are so in TROUBLE!" But then I decided it was best to just close the door, laugh, and of course yell for Trevor to bring me up the camera!

Luckily with a little baby oil it came right off. And this is her "I'm so sorry Mom" face!!!

Catching Up

Seems like I'm always catching up, why is that? I'm either terrible with time management or there is just to much to do or that I want to do! I'd like to think I'm not too bad with time management, LOL!

I think we are all finally healthy. Since my last post Meghan had a relapse and Daryl finally joined in our fun. But it's been a week now and we are all well.

We celebrated Trevor's 14th birthday, here are a few bad photos! Boy am I ready for springtime and some light. I've got to figure out how the heck to get decent pictures in my dark living, oh, I mean family room.



I also went to parent's night at Freedom High School. I guess that is what happens when you have a boy turn 14, but I still can't believe we are already registering for High School! I have to say that I walked away feeling it would be ok! The Principal and Counselors that spoke all seemed genuinely interested in the students and it felt like a very nurturing environment. But seriously . . . High School! Trev is actually really excited, and High School has changed so much since I was there 25 years ago. There was a whole course catalog with so many elective options it's crazy, so much more than what we had, so many options to help them prepare for College, it is kind of exciting.

I'm knee deep in 2 different on-line classes right now, what was I thinking? I'm loving Karen Russell's Photographers Workshop, she is an awesome teacher. I feel like these first few weeks have been sort of a review of many things I already know and hoping that as we progress she will hit the areas I'm still weak in, such as low light family room shooting! And we've all been waiting for probably a year or more for Jessica to come out with her final advanced digital scrapbooking class, and of course it started the week after the photography class did! I'm very behind but that's ok, got through the first lesson today and am loving digging into photoshop again and I plan on spending much of this rainy 3-day weekend at the computer, catching up!



Oh, and I almost forgot the other big news of our newest addition ~ meet Oreo our hamster.


We got this for Meghan, our pet lover. She had begged me to go to the pet store on Saturday, which we did, just to look. She really really really wanted a hamster, but I told her that she would have to convince her Dad. She had gotten him to agree to go to the pet store on Sunday, but then Meg ended going home with Kaitlyn so that they could go shopping and to see the new Justin Bieber movie! So Daryl, Trev and I went by to take a look on our way home. Somehow we got him to let us bring one home!!!



We surprised Meg on Sunday night after dinner. We were at the Tidwells house and decided to play a round of "telephone", one of her favorite games. I clued Kaitlyn in that she need to say "what should Meghan name her new hamster?"

Can you tell she was surprised? Here she is watching the video Daryl took on his iPhone.

And her first look when we got home.


She's in love, she sleeps in her room and so far hasn't woke her up a night spinning on the wheel, or me either for that matter!

oh and mom, take a look at these ~


yep, the heels that we both told her NO to. She went shopping with Kaitlyn and she took her purse, which had her VISA gift card in it. And what is the first thing she does, goes and buys something I told her I wouldn't buy for her. Oh the teenage years are going to be such fun, I can tell already.

Ok, well this ended up being a long post!