Piper’s Fashion

Unfortunately, Piper is only carrying her glittery pink sunglasses in this shot, but trust me, she’s mildly cute wearing them.  And Baby always enjoys riding in her carrier. 

Happy Mother’s Day…to ME!

Most of you know that every May, I drag my family into a studio and get our annual family portraits.  This is really all I want for Mother’s Day.  This year, we tried a new studio, Portrait Innovations.  I will give it mixed reviews as I think they did great work (and had two or three staff with us at all times to help the kids smile and look the right direction!) but buying the pictures was very unsatisfactory.  I had to buy three sheets of any pose I wanted, so I have lots of extra pictures I will end up tossing.  Into the garbage, since photo paper can’t really be recycled.  The other option would be to set up another two or three shrines to my children, but even I find that ridiculous.

This is a sneak peak of the girl’s flower girl dresses for next weekend, when Brian and Sandi get married.  (Yahoo!)  These are their Easter dresses that I have reworked over the last few weeks.

This might be my favorite picture ever of Kyla.

 

It’s nearly impossible to take a bad picture of Piper.

 

And look!  Wesley’s fingers…aren’t in his mouth!

 

 

We always get shots of the kids against Daddy’s knees so we can watch them grow year to year.

 

And a few candids.

Truth be told, I have a dozen or more shots I could post, but really, you should be calling your mother instead of browsing blogs!

Happy Mother’s Day, moms.

May Day

The memory of last Sunday keeps most of us Washingtonians going through the showers-changing-to-rain week we’ve had since.   The housework slid as we played outside.

 

Kyla was helping move dirt when she actually fell in the hole.  She (and I) thought it was pretty funny so she started making dirt angels.  Kyla was uniquely dirty that afternoon.

 

Dwayne is digging up the old railroad ties to build new retaining walls.

We all enjoy watching Daddy work.

 

I could watch him all day….

 

We love our “new” horsy! 

 

My family!

Mother’s Day Tea

Kyla’s preschool hosted a tea for mother’s today.  Kyla was very excited because she escorted me to the table, served me my banana bread and strawberries, and gave me special presents she had made me.
It was a sweet hour with my firstborn.

 

The Cleanest Spot in Our House

This is a picture of the cleanest spot in my house.  Somebody (um, me) thought that the kids would get into the just-opened gallon-sized bubbles if I left them on the front deck where they were playing.  So I brought them inside.  And after they went to bed, Dwayne found a wet spot about a foot in diameter.  Almost half of the bottle had spilled/been poured onto the carpet. 

After about 1.5 hours over two days of shampooing the same spot with just hot water, I finally got out most of the bubble solution. 

Like you, I wouldn’t be shocked if Piper, in another effort to do something completely independently and unsupervised, was behind this little to-do list detour. 

 

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In other news today, Wesley learned how to climb out of his crib for the first time.  Well, first time with the side fully up.  He hasn’t yet learned to land the dismount.  In fact, I was just in Piper’s room when I heard a thud.  I almost made it into his room before the crying started.  He landed a full 3 feet away from his crib, which suggests, to me, an attempt at flight.

I haven’t decided if I should just leave the side down so he won’t fall as far and he can learn to get out more gracefully, or if I should go on as if this was a fluke.  As if a child of Dwayne’s wouldn’t really try to climb out of his crib at 15 months.  Hmm, we did have to move Kyla to a big girl bed by 17 months.  Piper just learned how to get in and out pretty well on her own.

Easter Day

Dwayne and I love our parties.  This Easter, 22 people came over to play, eat, and fight over eggs (that’s the grown-ups—the kids did great). I love organizing the egg hunt for our young crowd (the oldest was 5) and Dwayne hid the eggs for the grown ups.  In technically visible spots.  Dwayne brings his evil genius status to egg hunts, as well. 

And thanks to Julie for taking the official photographs of the day.  Here’s a “few” of them.

Even better than the egg hunt, at least for Kyla, was the dessert….