nutcracker

airborne #2

Attack of the Stuffed Dog

Lulu's been playing with the photo booth feature on mom's "new" MacBook ... I watched her the other day as she took a series of photos -- I didn't know what she was doing until she showed me the succession of photos she had taken when she was done. Basically, she had the makings of a stop-motion movie & now all we had to do was figure out how to get the photos into iMovie & string 'em all together ...

shhhh .....

do not disturb lulu

as she sleeps

in her mom and dads bed.

the gazelle and the lion

our oldest came home from his first day of high school today and gave me a pile of class lists, syllabi's, materials to buy, checks to write and papers to sign.

my favorite is the paper from his ap human geography class - a college level class. upon handing me the pile of papers, he was freaking out over the fact that all the other class syllabi (syllabuses? syllabi's?) were only one page; whereas this one was four pages long and even requires a parent meeting next week.

evidently, this class has a mantra:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle,

When the sun comes up, you'd better start running.

yep. i've heard that one henry.

welcome to high school. start running kid. it's go time.

"i'm gonna make wings"

i woke up this morning to a computer that was completely out of memory. and by completely, i mean the little bar showing how much space i had left was all red. i had nothing left. zip. zilch.

i made a quick call to my tech guy who was having coffee right next to me to come and assess the situation and maybe just drive to the apple store with me to get an iPad.

no new iPad later, it took him all of about a nano-second to find the culprit: the girls get a kick out of using our flip video camera and it would seem that storing nearly six hundred videos which varied in length from snippets to multiple documentaries of a behind the scenes look at an american girl doll fashion show was sucking up massive amounts of memory.

i needed to start culling through the videos to see which had to go.

but it's hard just by glancing at the screen shot to know which videos need to be kept & which can get tossed out. i have to look at every one. which is good, cause then i would have missed this one. as you can see in the background of the video, our son is doing a stellar job of babysitting while lulu tries to fly.

airborne

annabel, in a massive and determined hunt for a camera to bring to camp (mostly because her mom didn't really want to buy a disposable camera knowing it would never get sent off to get developed - that's so old school); found an old digital camera that i was pretty sure had seen better days; but i popped some new batteries in and sent her off to camp hoping for the best & thinking maybe she'll get at least a couple of pictures.

annabel has been home and fairly camp-weary comatose on the couch now for a couple of hours. i found our old school card reader and just downloaded all her camp pictures - the camera did indeed work, she got 95 shots. sadly, i have not even looked at them yet, cause these caught my eye:

the right music and fancy monopoly

i spent a good chunk of the afternoon going through all the papers and books the kids had emptied out of their backpacks that had been tossed in the front hall since the last day of school 3 days ago. this was part of lulu's writing portfolio.

My family likes to go camping. We have a motor home that is silver with one brown stripe on the sides of it. Last year we went to Lincoln Lake. We stopped when I was asleep. My sister woke me up and we played sword fights with sticks.

After a while we went swimming. Me and Annabel made up routines and built sand castles. I loved the cool water it made me feel like a mermaid.

At Lincoln Lake there was 1 shop, 2 playgrounds and lots of motor homes.

I would ride my bike to a horse camp but they would not let you in unless you had a horse so I would stare at horses. When my mom called me for dinner I rode my bike back. My dad would cook over a fire while my mom tried to find the right music.

I would eat 1/2 of my dinner so game time would happen faster.

We played monopoly fancy style.

After that it was night time so we set out the beds and fell asleep and I dreamed of the next fun camping trip ever at Lincoln Lake.

happy easter

we're not exactly regular church-goers. i'm a bit of reluctant catholic. but that good ol' catholic guilt always makes an appearance around the holidays and i feel a need to drag everyone off to church.

so i start making arbitrary "we're going to go to church" announcements. sometimes weeks in advance. sometimes days. sometimes i just spring it on the kids on the actual day of the most holy holiday of the year just as they dig into their baskets. my husband says i should work on my timining.

so annabel goes downstairs and announces to lulu

mom says we're going to church.

to which lulu responds

what! that's gonna ruin the whole day.

and then annabel says

lulu! it's a big day. it's the day jesus rose from the dead.

but, it's not like he's a zombie or anything.

hey lulu. i'll give you 5 cents for every pair of socks you match up

fancy stuff

you guys know that mom & dad are having some friends over tonight, right?

yeah. i can tell by all the fancy stuff in the refrigerator.

never give up

coming out of the closet

the other day, i watched lulu wrestle with a big stool and then finally wrangle it into the front hall closet. but between the wrestle and the wrangle, i asked her what she was doing.

she paused a minute and said, i want to see what it's like to spend some time in the closet.

and

maybe

try some things on.

a little while later i had actually forgotten she was even in there until i heard a muffled,

i'm ready to come out of the closet now.

this much she knows is true

i'm driving the girls home from school, and we're going down a nice street with lots of big, pretty houses.

and lulu says "i'm looking at all these houses" ...

and i think she's gonna say something about how big they are or how pretty they are. but she doesn't.

... "i think we must be the only family with a big silver airstream parked next to their house."

yep.

we must be.