Annaless.

Grammy came and took Anna home with her for an ENTIRE WEEK!  Well, we may go get her before the weekend so we can pop some firecrackers together.  We'll see.  It's amazing how much free time you have without a 2 year old running around.  And it's amazing how much time I always thought a baby took up in my day.  I feel like I'm on vacation...sort of.

Attn: Ford Modeling Agency

Here's a sneak peak at Sage's Sweet Sixteen photo shoot.  We had a blast driving around town and taking these.  I've decided to send some of the finished ones to Ford Modeling Agency.  Just KIDDING Sage, don't freak out.  I will if you want me to though!  This girl could make it BIG!  And no, I haven't even started editing/post processing  yet.  I'll go as fast as I can!

What's tha deal?

What is up with gross things shooting into my eyes?  Today I was cutting Anna's toenails and a small piece shot up into my eye.  Of course.  Many of you have heard the other gross eye stories...including the guts from a grub that I dug up in the garden.  YUCK!  And Anna's toenails were noticeably grimy.  My poor eyes.

Terrific Teri Toys.

Here is a cute one of Anna playing in the sand box...with Teri's toys of course.  I could never make this shot look like this without them.  I told her today that I should be paying her rent for the space I use on her computer.  I totally should have done the eyes on this one Teri.  Dang.  But this one's a keeper!

And the Loser of the Year award goes to....

Me.  This morning I heard Grey on the monitor, rolled over, and asked Daddy to feed him and put him back in bed.  This was a pretty rare occurrence, but since I had gotten up several times during the night (and it was the weekend) to try to get Grey back to sleep, I felt like I needed to "hit the snooze button."  He got up and fed him and put him back to bed.  After a little while I got up when Grey woke up again and began the Sunday morning ritual of getting everyone else ready then having about 10 minutes to spare for myself.  Ha!  If I'd only get up earlier...  Whatever.  During my 10 minutes of getting ready, Grey was screaming in his car seat waiting to be topped off with the left over bottle that he had earlier.  I grabbed the bottle that was by the rocking chair and fed him the rest of it...about 4 ounces.  He sucked it down and I went on to finish getting ready.  When I was done (more like out of time), I ran into Grey's room to get some extra things to take with us to church and saw another bottle sitting by the chair in his room.  I thought, "huh, did I leave that there the other day when I fed him in here?"  I usually don't feed him in his room...  I shrugged my shoulders and ran back to get the stuff together.  Later that day I was rinsing our bottles and remembered...  I asked Daddy which bottle he had fed Grey with that morning.  He said that he had fed him in his room and left the bottle in there.  Nice.  Now, I'm the kind of person that leaves bottles laying around the house all day, sometimes for a couple of days, then I go around and pick them all up when I wash them all.  I know, gross.  So WHO KNOWS how old that bottle was that I fed Grey this morning.  Probably no more than a day or so.  He never got sick or anything.  I think I'll try to keep track a little better of those kinds of things.  Or at least just take the old bottles to the sink.  Gosh!

The GLORY of CS3.

My friend Teri has great photography skills as well as some sweet photography toys that I drool over when I get to play with them.  She came over the other day and let me mess with some pictures I had taken of the kiddos.  These aren't great shots by any means, but I attempted to make the much better with some of Teri's toys.  I just have a little cheer for you...  A-C-T...I-O-N...Actions BOYS Actions!  That won't make any sense to most of you....  but it makes me happy.  :)  I am FAR from a Photoshop expert, but I'm learning.  Here are some before and afters...you'll be able to tell the difference.  Or at least I hope you can.

 

Check out those eyes.

I hardly ever get a good one of Anna...or at least one where she's not making a pirate face or a fake smile.  Who taught her that?!  Come on, fess up people.  So when I got this one of her in a split second as she turned around to look at me, I was happy.  Eventhough it was dark, grainy, and a little blurry.  

THE spoon.

For all you cool moms out there, this is the spoon to get.  It holds a good amount of baby food or cereal in the orange part and you can squeeze out a bite size amount onto the spoon from a small hole at the neck.  It's really cool.  Costs about $7 at Toys 'R' Us...made by Boon, Inc.  They are the ones that make all that cool modern stuff.

Her first real movie!

Anna, Grey, and I went to a REAL movie in a REAL theatre this morning.  We live very close to a theatre and I heard (thanks Emily!) that they were doing a kids movie every Wednesday this summer.  Emily told me about it last night and said they were showing "Curious George" this morning.  She said it was only a DOLLAR a person to go.  That's all she needed to say.  Anna thought she was a big kid and loved sitting in the stadium seats, but stayed stretched out in my lap most of the time.  She couldn't quite figure out how to keep the seat from folding up on her.  Grey was also a champ.  He hardly made a peep through the whole movie.  He slept part of the time and ate or had a plug in his mouth for the rest.  We had a stash of cheerios and "snacks", those dried fruit bars from Target, and I had a Frappaccino.  It was fun.  We got popcorn after the movie since the line was really long when we got there.  It didn't matter to Anna when she got it.  As long as she got it.  The popcorn itself was more than tickets for us to see the movie.  

Sleepy boy.

Our attempts of keeping Grey awake were, um, unsuccessful to say the least.  He slept all afternoon and when he does that, he's usually up more at night.  But why wake him up?  Especially when I'm taking a nap myself! 

Daddy took the kids around the neighborhood in the wagon this evening.  Grey didn't last long.

It was good.

But not at good as the one I had at the carnival.  Grandpa worked the stand that sold these great burgers at the carnival.  He happened to get me one that are sacred to the workers only.  Jalapenos, mushrooms, cheese, mustard, and pickles.  Yum.  I didn't get the recipe just right and that jalapeno was dang hot...but pretty good.  Can you smell the grease?

Two Firsts in One Day.

 

 

Grey has been eating like an adolescent male the past few days.  We're talking about 7 ounces sometimes every 2 hours.  So I figured it was time to start the attempts of feeding him cereal.  I went and got the coolest spoon I've EVER seen, although I probably won't use it much.  I may more than I think, especially while we are out and about or traveling.  I'll show it to you later.  

Along with his first cereal experience, he had his first haircut!  Yep, he's not even 4 months old yet and the boy needed a trim.  He really doesn't have THAT much hair, but there are some long pieces at the top that was starting to look a little Trump-like or comb-over-ish.  So Nana broke out the scissors.

 

I LOVE this one.

Parade.

There was a big parade the day after we went to the carnival. Anna had a blast waving at the floats, picking up candy, talking to everyone, and getting a little hot and sweaty and red-faced.

The stash.

A casual wave to the floats as they pass.

It pays to be cute!  Anna managed to get an older man's attention with a big bunch of balloons.  He gave her one of course.  

You can guess where Grey spent most (all) of the time during the parade.  

  

Check out this masterpiece.  This girl has been sitting still for me to fix her hair since she was about 6 months old...at least since she's been able to sit up.

This is just a cute shot of Anna walking on Grammy's rock ledge on her flowerbed.  Poor girl has my flat feet.

Carnival Continued...

Here are some pictures from this weekend.  I didn't get pictures of everything she rode.  She rode the Super Slide; the one where you ride down on a potato sack...it's really tall.  She rode this farris wheel and a really small one, a dragon roller coaster (the one she didn't care about), the carousel a couple of times, some spinning strawberries (like a tilt-a-whirl, and she acted like it was nothin'), and last she went through an obstacle course with Daddy.  It had lots of things to run through, jump around, climb on and up, and ended with a really long slide.  She liked that one and was ready to go again.

  
She's waiting to get on the farris wheel.  Notice the height limit...48 inches.  Not even close to her actual height.  They let her go with Daddy.

  

...more to come.
 

Carnival weekend!

This weekend Daddy took some time off and we drove to his parents house to spend some time with them and go to a great carnival.  I have LOTS of pictures but haven't uploaded them yet.  I'll get on it soon right after I finish cleaning up the aftermath from unloading the car last night.  Yikes!  Anna had a BLAST riding rides.  Last time we went to this she wasn't quite tall enough didn't really show much interest in riding many things.  And since we had to pay a ton for the tickets to ride the rides, we (obviously) opted to wait to ride things she'd enjoy.  This year was a complete different story.  As soon as she saw the lights at the midway, she was asking to ride everything.  Including the "Kamikaze"...which is the huge thing that looks like two hammers hooked together that spins and goes upside down.  Ummm, needless to say, she wasn't tall enough for that one.  Not even with a parent.  We did consider it.  I know...  We let her ride some things that may have been a little too big for her to handle, but she didn't even act like she cared.  She rode a little roller coaster with Daddy and, while riding it, was looking around for something better to do.  She even asked Daddy if she could scream, as if it would make the ride more fun.  I guess it didn't.  She was back to gazing up at the giant farris (sp?) wheel.  Yep, we rode that one too.  I'll post some pics soon.  

Tina.

Oh yeah, and Tina here, nibbled on Anna's fingertips a few times. Anna wasn't too cool with that. ("Tina" wasn't this one's real name...but those of you who are Napoleon Dynamite fans get it.)

A little taste...

Here's a little taste of what we did last night. We saw some scary camel teeth and drool. 

But that's not all! Our church plans different things once in a while for friends to hang out and play a little. Last night we went to a farm/zoo sort of place outside of town. They have lots of different animals. Mainly cows, goats, llamas, emus, camels, deer...those types of things. We got to feed all of them hot dog and hamburger buns, which seemed rather odd to me. Anna had lots of fun. They took us all on a hay ride (minus the hay) to see more animals. They had a cute baby camel that Anna was pretty concerned about.  She kept telling me "Mommy, that baby camel is trapped! We gotta go help her!"  The camel was just fenced in in a small area by herself so the kids could see her easily.  Nonetheless, Anna felt the need to save the day.  But she then quickly saw something huge and tall to climb on and was on her way.  Here are some more visuals. 

  

Detective.

Anna: "Mommy, where's your eye?"

Me: "It's behind the camera."

Anna: "But, where IS it?"

Me: "It hides behind the camera when I want to take a picture of you."

Anna: "Behind the camera?  Oh, (chuckling), but I see it inside there."

Oh, those dreaded questions...

Anna was sitting in her new lawn chair watching Daddy cut down our one and only tree, which is very dead, in our back yard this evening.  She was only in her panties and house shoes because she decided that after getting a few drops of water from the sprinkler on her skin and swimsuit, she was done for the night.  Another dousing of OFF, she was back outside.  As the three of us sat watching Daddy go back and forth between the very dull chain saw and the very dull ax, Anna sat up, grabbed her nipples and said, "Mommy, what are these?"  I looked over at her and thought, "Really?  Is it that time already for those types of questions?"  Obviously, she IS going on 3 years of age and should be asking many more of these questions very soon.  I just laughed at her for a minute as I stalled to think of a good answer.  Should I make up something "cute" to tell her so she may understand better?  No...I quickly decided.  I then thought that it was getting a little awkward since I had been chuckling a her for a little too long.  I just decided to tell her.  "They are nipples."  Why go into it more than I have to at this point?  She probably won't ask what they are for, right?  She replied, "Nipples?"  I said, "Yep."  She looked down at them one more time and got up and started digging in her sandbox.  Phew!  That was a close one.  I should prepare myself better for the future.