{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!

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

He's 15 Today

15 years ago today I became a mom! One of the greatest (and most painful!) days of my life. I look at my now taller than myself son and am still amazed that he came out of my body. Today, 15 years later, we are so proud of the young man he is becoming. He is a hardworking, fun loving teenager and I am so glad that God picked him for us!

Here are 15 random things about Trev ~

1 - He loves to go out and shoot his airsoft gun
2 - He is doing awesome in school despite the quote "Just because I get good grades doesn't mean I like school"
3 - He loves his German class
4 - He loves to play the PS3, he likes sports games but mostly the war games (he likes to shoot, see #1)
5 - He is very creative, loves to draw, is taking an art class and wants to take photography too (of course that one makes me very happy!)
6 - He will only wear skinny jeans
7 - His favorite deserts these days are sugar cookies or Blackberry Cobbler
8 - He loves to stay up late and watch TV with his dad
9 - He loves to hang out with his friends (Cole, Austin, Kyle) and ride his bike down the trail to get a treat at Mc Donalds
10 - He's not as crazy about doing chores, although he usually does them without to much grief
11 - I'm sure that he loves his sister greatly, but has a funny way of showing (read annoying) her.
12 - He will start drivers training in August. Not sure if that scares me to death or makes me want to do a happy dance
13 - I don't have as many photos of his as I'd like because every time I try and take is photo I get the hand (and sometimes something else!!!)
14 - He is like me in so many ways, he likes stuff, he likes to collect stuff and as soon as he crosses one thing off the wish list he's off researching the next thing he can't live without
15 - Happy Birthday Trevor

High School Report Card

I wasn't really expecting it when it came in the mail last week. Yes, finals was the week before the Christmas break, but I'm still on the elementary/middle school trimester time schedule for progress reports and report cards. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to open up the envelope from Freedom High School and see this ~



I did have to ask for a little interpretation as I wasn't sure what 1st Fin was, apparently it is the 1st Semester Finals grade. He was pretty upset about the C in English, luckily his grade must have been high enough that the C didn't bring his final grade down. And luckily the forgotten Biology Final Study Guide mishap didn't effect his grade either. I'd say he's adjusting just fine to High School life. We are super proud of you Trevor! Keep up the awesome work.

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!

It finally feels like summertime!

The rain has finally gone away and the temps hit the 80's and 90's this week. Hard to believe last week it was storming! That's ok, I'll take a little sun.

I've had lots of things I've wanted to blog but I've been pre-occupied with getting my new computer up and running. The hard drive on the old computer decided to die a month ago and we decided not to invest any $$$ to fixing a 3 year old computer, which is good and bad I suppose, but we were not planning on getting a new computer but after a week of working on the old laptop decided it really wasn't an option! Let me tell you how awesome Backblaze is though. Backblaze is an offsite backup system that works behind the scenes constantly backing up your files. Daryl was very much against me doing something like this a few years ago when I signed up with Mozy, I had been bugging him for is ok when that computer had a little crash, we were lucky enough to save the hard drive on that computer and recover all my data, so needless to say, I signed up for Mozy without his ok after that. He has finally come around to it being ok!

I switched to backblaze from Mozy a few months ago due to Mozy's outrageous price increase ($5.00 to about $30.00). You never know how good or bad off-site storage is until you need it, and at that point, it's too late, right? Well I have to say I was very impressed! 90% of my data is on an external hard drive, so I knew when the computer failed even if Backblaze didn't live up to what it was supposed to do I would still have my 40,000+ photos and thousands of digital supplies and most of my documents. But the things that always worries me are the thousands of emails and things I've saved in Outlook, would I really be able to recover all of my contacts and saved emails?

I purchased a new copy of Microsoft Office from Academic Superstore. This is a great site if you or your children are in school, there are tons of programs that you can get at a very discounted rate. I downloaded what looked to be my outlook data file from Backblaze and saved it to my computer, I installed outlook and when you set it up the first time it asks you if you want to import data, so I pulled in the file that I hoped contained all my data, and like magic outlook opened with EVERYTHING, looking just like I had left it a few weeks ago. I was seriously doing the happy dance!

What I have learned or I guess reminded, because I did know that my Photoshop Elements Catalog was not being backed up, is that I need to back up the catalog separately so that I don't lose all the tagging and organizing of the photos, which I hadn't done. This was actually ok since I can also access it from the laptop, but not ok when I had a space issue on the EHD that I was backing up to and in the end couldn't get to the catalog on either computer, and had to resort a data recovery tool to find the catalog! So now I am putting a reminder on my calendar to back it up monthly along with iTunes. Silly me thought that once I downloaded iTunes on my new computer and singed into my account all of my purchases would appear. Well, no, apparently they don't. Apparently you are also supposed to be making a back up straight out of iTunes of all of your iTunes stuff. So, I'm not to sure what is going to happen the first time I plug in my iPhone and iPad . . . . how soon is icloud coming?

As of last night I finally have PSE up and running on both the computers along with a new program, adobe Lightroom. I've been hearing/reading a lot about this program and am going to give it a try, the biggest draw for me is that you can batch edit photos that need the same type of editing, that will save a ton of time. I'm having some attachment issues with my photoshop catalog though, so I will probably be keeping it up to date until I'm more comfortable in Lightroom.

So, all that to say that has been what I've been doing the last month, along with all of the end of year activities that were going on with the kids. This school year went by so quickly and I now have a 2nd grader and a high schooler! YIKES!!!! High School!!!! It really doesn't seem real. He doesn't let me take many pictures of him these days, but I twisted his arm before his 8th Grade Dance to let me take a few ~

ok, time to get on with my day, happy Saturday everyone!

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!

Will the germs please leave now?

So my last post was about my sick babies, of which one missed the entire week of school, and today asked if we could please leave the house for a little bit, I think HE is finally feeling better. Ended up taking him to the doctor yesterday when he was still feeling pretty bad, I was afraid he might have ended up with pneumonia and/or bronchial asthma, like I did. Luckily his lungs are clear and he got some antibiotics and is finally feeling better. Now if that cough would just go away! I'm feeling much better . . . amazing what 1 dose of antibiotic and a mucinex will do for you when your feeling really bad! So Trev and I have pretty much spent the week home together coughing in sync with each other, so not fun, I wouldn't recommend it at all.


So most of my photos this week looked like this



And why the 5 bottles of liquid antibiotic you ask? Well, my son, since he was a baby, has had a major gag reflex and can't get most pills down. A motrin is about all he can do. I tried to give him a mucinex yesterday morning since it had helped me so much. I gave him pudding and said to put it in a bite of pudding and then just swallow, well, I almost ended up with chocolate pudding in my face! So the doctor was concerned that the pill form would be to large for him, so she prescribed liquid, a lot of liquid. Even at the pharmacy they asked why it was for a liquid when he was 14 years old and told me that my insurance may not cover it that way. Great . . . but luckily they did cover it and my receipt shows that my insurance saved me $219.00, so I'm thinking that I basically got 5 prescriptions for my one $5.00 co-pay! And I don't have to get a pill down his throat, thank goodness!

So hoping to have Trev's birthday dinner tomorrow night, only a week late, I would have never thought he would have been sick for an entire week, I think this is a first, and hopefully the last!

Not so Happy Birthday

Today Trev turned 14 . . . unfortunately he caught the bug his sister had early this week and was stuck on the couch with a 102 degree fever and feeling terrible. I told him we would pretend that today wasn't his actual birthday and that the first day he felt better would be his birthday, hoping that will be tomorrow, but if he follows in Meg's path it won't be till Monday.


Here is Meg on Thursday


those of you that know her well know that seeing her sleep in the middle of the day is completely unheard of! She woke up from this 3 hour little snooze and I asked her if she wanted some of the soup that Mimi had made for her? She said "for breakfast"? She thought she had slept all night!

Today she is completely back to her sassy little self . . . and for that I am grateful.

Fall has arrived

I'm pretty sure anyway! It's raining today and I'm loving it, except for the part that I'm helping at the Brentwood Halloween Party later today, which is outside! I've been told I won't melt! I love the rain, when I can be in the house, reading a book or playing on the computer, nice and warm and DRY!

I can't believe that it is almost the end of October, we finally made it to Party City yesterday and got the kids Halloween Costumes, here is a sneak peek ~


Trev is going to be Charlie Brown and Meg Gabriella from her latest favorite movie High School Musical. I think I need to do a little work on that wig!

Most of my free time the last few weeks has been spent working on researching my family history, I've spent hours on-line TRYING to figure out my family tree! I have to say, I knew that there were a few stray branches, but some of the things I'm finding and hearing I had no clue about! I'm taking a class over at JS.com on Family History, something that I have always wanted to dive into but haven't because it seems to get to complicated, and it still is, but I'm going to get through it this time! I'm amazed at how much I don't know about my family going back several generations and kicking myself for not trying to get some of this information while my grandparents were still alive. I can't wait to get this big puzzle put together and am loving going through all of the old pictures and documents I have, getting them organized and doing a lot of scanning. I know it will be worth all of the time in the end.

And I know that the holidays are near because next Saturday is our Annual Baking Day, well, we don't really bake on baking day so I guess it should probably be called Mixing Day. Either way, I can't believe it's already time. I think Karen and I have been doing this for at least 10 years, and I love it although I'm sure Karen's kitchen is not the same for months with all the flour and powdered sugar flying! We have never had mixing day at my house because my husband would probably have a heart attack with all of the flour and powdered sugar flying!

Happy Saturday going to start checking a few things off of the to-do list before I waste away anymore of this rainy day.

1st Day of School

The kids went back to school yesterday, already . . . man this summer seemed to fly by. Trevor is in his last year of middle school, how does that happen, I'm pretty sure he just started middle school! And Meghan started 1st grade. It was harder than I thought leaving her without the protection of the fenced in kindergarten playground she was in last year. But in usual Meghan style she takes it all in stride running off waving good bye to me!

Had to get the usual 1st day of school pictures


They both seem to like their teachers and Meghan has a bunny that lives in her class, how perfect is that for her!! She can't wait for her week to feed the bunny. Can't wait until back to school night for Trev so that I can meet his teachers that I don't know yet, I like putting a face with his classes.

Today while were driving to Target to get more school supplies, middle school has very specific things they need, Meghan tells Trev and I that she had a time test today and that she got a 100% and that it was very easy. I asked her what it was on? Her reply . . . paper! Trev and I looked at each other and cracked up. She is a funny girl! At least were off to a good start!

A weekend of mixed emotions

We were all excited for Friday to get her because that was the day that Daryl went to pick up our new house on wheels, uuuummm, I mean trailer! I kinda don't think that I can say we are camping anymore, I have all of my luxuries of home, including a microwave and heated mattresses!
I spent Saturday morning loading up all of our stuff from the old trailer and washing all the pots & pans and trays, I always feel like I need to start the camping season fresh and clean! I made our bed with our old feather bed that we don't really need anymore since we got the new mattress and the nice warm flannel sheets. I've got sooooo much storage we won't have to pack and live out of storage boxes, which makes me crazy! We are excited to take it out this weekend and test it out!While playing in the trailer Saturday afternoon I got a call from Cole, he and Trev were over at the skate park by our house. He tells me that some guy was messing with Trev, hit him and took his iTouch and ran off ~ Daryl took off like a bat out of Haiti . . . I closed everything up and followed right behind, shaking and needing to see my boy. Trev had called 911 before Cole called us . . . so 3 cop cars were arriving at the same time I was. Daryl had Trev and they were looking for the kid in the neighborhood behind us where he ran off to.
Trev was pretty shaken up needless to say. I have to say that the Oakley PD was awesome, 3 officers showed up and didn't leave, well, except to go find a kid that they knew had just been released from prison the day prior, for doing the same thing. The officer wanted Trev to see if this was the kid, so he took his first ride in a police car ~ unfortunately it wasn't him. The officers were still at the park and talking to all the kids that were there, it's funny how the longer they stayed the more the kids remembered, soon they had figured out who this kids friend was. I figured at least it was a start, but the chances of finding him and getting Trev's iTouch back were probably slim to none. The officers were talking to Trev, they took photos of the bruising on his stomach and head, and were trying to get as much information from him as they could, wanting to know if the kid was in a line up would he be able to recognize him. I was surprised that they were on this like they were and asked them if they were really going to go looking for this kid. The officer said absolutely, that this is not tolerated and it is a personal mission of his to stop this kind of thing. Wow . . . I was a little surprised with that, but happy that hopefully they would find the kid. About this time one of the kids said, hey, there he goes, in the maroon car . . . the officers were out of there so fast . . . I'm so thankful that the kid saw him, one of the officers came back and picked up Trev do go ID him . . . and it was him . . . they brought Trev back to us and we were waiting at the park for them to come back and give us an update, the officer came back and had Trev's iTouch with him! I couldn't believe it. Not sure what will end up happening with this kid, but I hope something that will make him think twice before messing with kids younger than him.

Trev is doing good, we all stayed home on Monday, Meg said she didn't feel good and I think we all needed a little mental health day!

So after all of that drama it was also Prom Night for Kaitlyn, Meg has been looking forward to Prom since last years Prom! She spent the night with Kaitlyn and spent the day with all of her big girl girlfriends getting ready! Here are a few of the 400 I took that evening ~


I think I've made this post long enough so I think I will stop now, I have some more editing to do for Ashly's Senior Pictures that I took last week.