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I'm not really blogging (because I'm taking the week off from blogging)...I'm just posting one shot which hardly constitutes 'blogging'.
I think it's my favorite shot ever though.
Then again, it's a long-running joke between me & Josh that every photo (and every song that comes on the radio) just happens to be my favorite one of all time.
That's Coley.
We spent the weekend over at Willow Lake. Got back yesterday and am packing back up again to take the kids to Bonneville Dam since Josh is working on an engineering project up there this week.
Lots going on this week so I'm not planning on blogging again until next week.
I know that my threats to not blog for a week usually end with me blogging more than usual...but I mean it this time.
When I get back...lots to blog about:
1. Willow Lake
2. Bonneville Dam
3. Hiking at Multnomah Falls (Yes, I was victorious...we are indeed hiking those treacherous trails again.)
4. My cousin's bridal pictures
5. My Aunt and all her kiddos who are coming to town
6. A trip to the beach
Back on Tuesday of next week!
If I didn't melt in 100+ degree weather, I might actually enjoy summertime.
Ross & Cali took the kids to the movies last night so when Josh got home (he'd been out of town) I asked him if he wanted to go the The Brick. The Brick is a cool place (I think it's the oldest building in Central Point) and it's walking distance from our house which makes it even cooler.
We split a pear salad and some deep fried raviolis.
And then we talked for a couple of hours over beer (four for him) and mojitos (two for me) which is one more reason I'm glad it's walking distance.
We talked about how close he is to finishing up the project he's working on and how tired we both are of him being out of town so much.
We talked about spending this coming weekend up at Willow Lake and me and the kids going with him while he works on a project up at Bonneville Dam next week.
We talked about how the last time we were at the Brick, I had three mojitos (which was one too many).
We talked about how crazy it was that we met the way we met.
Those are the tickets from the flight we met on.
And how he tried to email me later that night after we met but my inbox was so full that it rejected the email so I sat there frantically deleting messages from my inbox, hoping that he'd resend.
And he did. He also attached a picture of him and Courtney feeding some ducks at the park to that email. (I can't find that picture for some reason.) You couldn't see his face in it though so I asked him to send another picture with the intention of showing Jill (my best friend in the whole-wide-world) what he looked like.
That is the one he sent. (Him and Courtney Lee celebrating Christmas at his parents.)
And that's actually the same shirt he wore on our first date to the Black Sheep...which is the same place we had our wedding reception.
And we laughed about the time when I was teaching in Brazil, just 3 weeks after we met and as we were getting off the phone with eachother one night, he mistakenly thought I had said "I love you." and after an awkward silence on his end of the line, he replied, "Cool."
For the record...I don't remember what I said...but it was definitely not "I love you."
That's me in Brazil reading an email from him.
And we talked about the night, 3 months later when he did tell me he loved me for the first time but how I was the one who inserted the awkward silence that time around.
I didn't tell him that I loved him for the first time until the following day.
When it was still too premature to say "I love you.", we used to say, "I adore you." instead. (That's a note Josh left me on Courtney Lee's Fisher Price Doodle Pro when we were dating...he calls me Valentine.)
And then we talked about the Jack Johnson concert where we almost broke up. (I need to blog about that sometime.)
I don't think Josh is ready for me to blog about it though.
Josh swears he's never even seen Jack Johnson in concert.
And then we talked about how lucky we are that things turned out the way they turned did (especially after the Jack Johnson concert).
And then we talked about the rental applications we have to decide between. One of the applicants served in the military so we wanted to rent to her but then Josh saw a John McCain bumper sticker on the other applicants car so now he's torn.
Perhaps we'll let rental/personal references be the deciding factor rather than bumper stickers.
And then we talked about the girl Coley has a crush on. She told him that she 'liked' him the other day, so he asked if she meant that she 'liked' him or 'like, liked' him and when she said that she 'like, liked' him, he told her that he 'like, liked' her too.
And then I used the word 'narcissistic' in a sentence and he told me to quit making up words to sound cool. (He thinks I make up words all the time.)
And then we talked about whether or not we wanted to hike to the top of Multnomah Falls with the kids since we'd be up that way next week.
Josh (who has huge, irrational issues with kids and heights) said he didn't think he wanted to do it again because the paths are too unsafe and it stressed him out last year .
I told him that his issues are ridiculous and reminded him that we didn't lose a single kid last year on those 'treacherous' paths.
That's us at the falls last year.
And then I went on to say that I didn't want to raise a bunch of weeny kids who were afraid of taking risks.
And that led us into a conversation about how he doesn't want the girls to run downhill because he thinks they aren't sure-footed enough. (The exact same conversation we had last year while hiking Multnomah falls which ended in Courntey Lee running downhill against Josh's wishes...and of course falling and banging herself all up which just furthered Josh's point.)
Which sent me off talking about how they were never going to become sure-footed if we didn't let them run downhill and that every kid is supposed to bang themselves all up and how we needed to show them that they were capable of doing things and that if we didn't, they were going to grow up to be unsure of themselves and if they grew up to be unsure of themselves that they would have low self-esteem and that if they had low self-esteem that they wouldn't be able to stand up for themselves and that they might someday end up in a situation where they needed to stand up for themselves but they wouldn't be able to stand up for themselves and that...
Which was precisely the point when Josh Downs said, "Now, lets see how you're going to connect all this together..."
To which I replied that,"Someday, they might be in an unhealthy friendship or relationship or even a marriage in which they would need to feel empowered enough to make changes or to leave the relationship but they might not feel like they had the power to do it because.........................they were never allowed to run downhill.
It totally 'connects'.
We ran out of things to talk about shortly after that so we walked home and hung out on the front porch until the kids got home.
My kids all know that #1 on Mom's list of commandments is "Thou shalt not lie" (or your mother will loose her ever-loving marbles).
Because much like the huge, irrational issues I have with my sausage legs...I have huge, irrational issues with any sort of lying.
And my kids are all acutely aware of that issue.
Coley has been caught in his fair share of lies in the past and has suffered the consequence of my wrath.
About a year ago though, he took on a strict, self-imposed, 'no lying' policy, sharing past truths with me that I never really wanted or needed to know.
Like detailing, one by one every bad word that's ever crossed his lips.
And telling me every PG-13 movie his uncle or brother or grandma ever let him watch (which is probably where the bad words came from).
And telling me about the year he took a bunch of Courtney's birthday cupcakes and hid them all in his room so he could eat them later.
And telling me that one time back in preschool he sat under a bench with a little girl who told him that if he closed his eyes, she'd kiss him...but when he closed his eyes, she stuck a piece of bark in his mouth instead.
In fact, he insists that he is incapable of lying now.
And when I ask, "Are you sure that's really what happened Coley?", he says "Ya, I'm sure mom...remember?...I can't tell a lie."
I'm still a little skeptical.
Ross was out of town and Coley was staying the night with his Grandma Friday night so we decided to take the girls out to dinner at Bella Union in Jacksonville.
And then we walked to the water park (hence the swimsuit cover-ups).
That looks like a happy scream but it wasn't.
In retaliation, she stole the walnut Courtney Lee was playing with and refused to give it back. (That's my favorite shot I've taken in a long time.)
Turns out they shut the water off at 7pm so we had to settle for the swings instead.
Josh twisted the swing all up and then let her loose.
Josh & Courtney Lee were talking to me & Annie through one of those sound tunnel thingies.
We picked a couple apples on our walk back.
Courtney Lee's apple made her tooth loose (and there's nothing that grosses Josh out more than wiggly teeth).
And on the way home, we played Annie's new, favorite song (We Will Rock You from Queen), three times in a row.
Annie's moved on from glasses.
Hats are her new thing.
She wore that polkadot hat yesterday. A bunny hat the day before. And today she's sporting an orange & black (OSU Beavers colors) striped, knit hat that looks quite fashionable with the purple and pink floral skirt she's got on.
She's exhausting but quite lovely.
Just a few shots from the other day.
Ross had been bugging me for weeks, asking when we could celebrate 'Ross Day' so I finally decided to celebrate it last week.
I don't think we had celebrated Ross Day since he was 8 or 9 years old.
Ross day actually originated from guilt.
Ross was in kindergarten and I blew a gasket one morning over something (which I can't remember now) that sent me into a hysterical, Mommy Dearest moment.
I spent 8 hours at work that day, scraping plaque of of peoples teeth, replaying my rant over an over and over again in my head until the concept of Ross day was born.
I picked him up from school with a cake that said "Happy Ross Day!", took him to dinner and then to the toy store where he got to pick out something under 20 bucks. (I was a single-mom so 20 bucks was 20 bucks.)
Ross doesn't even remember me yelling at him that morning...he just remembers Ross day.
I think the next time we celebrated Ross day was a few years later after my ex-husband did something that made him my ex-husband...Ross and I left the house way past his bedtime that night to celebrate an impromptu Ross Day over burgers and milkshakes and a trip to Toys-R-Us.
So I've pretty much just instituted Ross Day whenever I thought it might prevent emotional scarring.
I must not have done anything too emotionally damaging to him in the last 8 years to warrant another Ross Day.
But he wouldn't quite bugging me about it so on Thursday, Ross and Cali and I celebrated Ross day by going to Starbucks, then school clothes shopping at Old Navy and Fred Meyer, then Red Robin for lunch and the mall for some more school clothes shopping.
And it was fun.
He's 17 now but he still insists that I go into the dressing room with him so that I can check the waist on all his pants to make sure they're not too tight. And he let me and Cali pressure him into buying some shirts that he wouldn't normally wear (he rarely wears anything other than band t-shirts) by telling him how 'hot' he looked in them. He put his foot down when we tried to talk him into this really cute pastel green t-shirt though.
And he high-fived me when the cashier at Kohl's told me that I'd saved $60.52 which made all the people in line behind us laugh.
And while we were standing at the register at Pacific Sunwear, it struck me that he's going to be a Senior and I may never take him school clothes shopping again. So I grabbed him and I hugged him and I told him that I loved him and he kissed me on the forehead just like he always does and told me that he loved me too.
The teenage salesperson who was helping us rolled his eyes and said "Ah, how cute...are you two having a moment?"
Yep, we were.
And a couple of things...
I don't do my own B&W conversion, I typically just use 'Boring Old B&W' from Totally Rad Actions 1, followed up by 'Antique Tone' at about 20% opacity. The key is having a well exposed shot before you run the actions on them though otherwise the conversion doesn't look all that hot.
And the albums from yesterdays post were from Target.
ETA: I have no specific system for doing this. I just upload all of the photos that I've posted on my blog (so they're typically all my favorite shots) to www.scrapbookpictures.com and print all of them once a year so all the photos they put in these albums where from 2008.
The kids get to pick whatever they want for their album and they put them in whatever order they want them in. Chronilogical order is highly overrated so I don't mess with it.
Cole and Annie both got regular albums (because I knew Cole would want a regular album and because I knew Annie was too young for anything more complicated than a regular album). Courtney's album was a regular album but it had some pages with premade decorative mats, so it was kind of like a scrapbook too which was totally up her alley.
I put together some albums like these for the grandparents each year too.
For the last couple of years I've bought new photo albums and printed up well over 1000 photos for the kids to fill them with.
My goal was to give these to the kids to work on around New Years every year.
Didn't get around to it until last week though.
It was so cool hearing the girls squeal when the saw the albums and to hear them all saying "Remember when we did this?", "Remember how much fun that was?", "Look at how little Annie was!", while they sorted through all the photos.
For whatever reason, I just found it fascinating to see which photos they picked for their own albums and to hear them talking about the things they remember from their own perspective.
The best part was that it kept them busy, happy, and getting along for almost 2 hours.
And 1000+ memories found a little home somewhere other than on the hard drive of my computer.
