Lone Survivor

I found this little flower growing in my pot of dead pansies. Here it is early November and this flower's "internal clock" is all messed up! I just had to grab my camera and take a picture because it brightened my day. And I love playing with Photoshop.

Catching Up

It has been a while since I have posted a picture of the girls. This is from Halloween and is a true reflection of how mini photo shoots work out for me. I did not get one good picture on Halloween of these two. Either one girl is crawling away or crying. This happens without fail. My hopes for getting a cute photo to send off in our Christmas cards have pretty much disappeared.

I have ordered the papers I wanted to make Christmas cards this year but have yet to start them. I need to get a move on it though. Time is just flying by! I also have the album I will be using for my December Daily album this year. This is an idea that Ali Edwards has started on her blog. The whole idea of the album is that you assemble it before December rolls around so that way you only have to add in your daily photo and journaling as you progress through the month. Take a look at Ali's blog for lots of inspiration! She has set up a Flicker gallery where other talented ladies can post their pages too. I am looking forward to getting my album assembled and adding in our photos each day. I hope this becomes a long standing tradition for my family.

It has been pretty gloomy here lately. A lot of fog and clouds that just linger all day long. I don't mind so much as it reminds of Olympia, WA. I really loved living in the Pacific Northwest. Hands down my most favorite part of the entire United States.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Just Wasting Time

I should be cleaning up because I have a friend coming over on Thursday. I need to get laundry done and put some things away. I need to put my sewing machine and fabric away. Just things that require a few minutes each but add up to a fair amount of work when I have the girls to look after. I can not leave the room without them messing up something I just cleaned up.

Here is yet another card that I have made recently. Making cards for James has certainly taken over most of my craft time and I don't mind. It is forcing me to think of new designs and to use up my large stash of supplies. This card is made using Jenni Bowlin papers and mini Bingo card. The base of the card is Stampin' Up cardstock. The ric rac is from Maya Road and the twine that is wrapped around it came off the hang tag of the girls new jeans. I am glad I saved it and I like the look it gave the card. That would probably be my favorite feature. I used a Fiskars border punch again and then stitched around the edges and across the ribbon with my sewing maching.

I am working on completing an album all about me! I was so excited to start this class but find that it is much harder writing about me or people and things that are important to me. This is something I hope my daughters want to read about when they are older and that has put alot of pressure on me to make sure this book is a true relection of me, right now. So I keep typing away and remain very grateful for the message boards over at Big Picture Scrapbooking that keep me inspired to complete this project.

Pigeon Love?

Yesterday I was so excited to have a decent steak and baked potato for dinner. I went out to start my grill and I saw the back end of a bird under there. It scared the crap right out of me. We have had several dead birds in our yard this past year and I was so upset that I was going to have to deal with the third one since James left last month. Much to my surprise this pigeon was alive! Alive I say! I was filled with relief and dread at the same time. I was relieved because this one was sucking air, dread because I knew I had to do something because there is no way this little guy was going to survive a night on the ground. My solution was putting him in a box and setting it where mommy and daddy could get in to take care of him. Not a great solution, by any means, but the best I could think of under such stress.

I say stressed because I dislike birds...really, I am afraid of birds. Yeah, I said it. I. Am. Afraid. Of. Birds. Long story about a silly traumatic event back when I was a child. I have a hard time going into aviaries at zoos. Birds that can't fly are ok...penguins, ostriches, emus but not chickens. I am afraid of chickens too. Even though they don't fly I still don't like 'em.

I worried about that baby pigeon all night! Every time I rolled over to look at the clock I hoped the bird was ok. The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was check on the baby and was so happy to see he was ok and a few minutes later his momma (maybe it was daddy) swooped down to feed it. I knew I couldn't leave him so low on the ground for another night so I thought about it for a bit and decided to use one of my hanging flower pots. It is deep enough the bird shouldn't fall out again and I can hang it about 5 feet off the ground. Then I had to slide the little bird from the box he was hiding in into the basket. Not easy. And I was afraid I was going to lose an eye from an upset momma pigeon.

I am happy to report I put that baby into the basket and hung it up. I tied a piece of rope around the pole and around part of the basket to help cut down on the sway because it is fairly breezy today. I think the baby is pretty happy too! He hasn't stopped chirping since his momma (maybe daddy) found him and is now chilling with him in his new make shift home. I guess we won't be using the patio door for the next couple of weeks until this baby flies the coup (or basket ).

*On a side note I took the pictures through my window so they are not super clear but I felt safer behind the glass!

A Little Bit of This and That

It has been awhile since my last blog and that is just plain laziness on my part so this entry will probably be a little random. Here we go...Lolo is quite the walker now and along with that has come an intense independent streak! She had a melt down last weekend while we were at Ramstein because I wanted to hold her hand while she walked to help steer her out of the way of others. It was embarassing for me! But she never crawls anymore and loves being able to get around so much better than before. I am so proud of her!

When we returned from Salzburg I wanted to take some pictures of the girls all dressed up since we haven't had any really nice pictures taken since we left the states last year. I should have learned from the Christmas card photo attempts last year that we just can't get good photos of the girls together. Either way, they were both cute but just wouldn't work with me or James on this. We only got 1 really good picture of Lorelei and 1 not too bad picture of Aubrey and Lolo together.

We went to Ramstein last Friday so James could get a couple of things signed off for his deployment and then went to Spangdalhem Air Force Base for the weekend. The bases are close together and Spang has really nice TLF rooms. We have stayed there before. Anyways, we took a drive into Luxembourg so James could check out a castle he wanted to see and then drove back into Germany and spent the afternoon in Trier. There was a music festival of sorts going on and there were alot of people but we took our time and walked to the important sites. The highlight of the city for us was St. Peter's Cathedral which is the oldest Christian church in Germany. The interior was amazingly beautiful. By far the most beautiful church we have seen here. The photos we took do not do this magnificent place any justice!

I hope everyone has a very fun and safe 4th of July weekend...eat a big piece of fresh, sweet watermelon for me!

I should be sleeping...

Instead of sitting at the computer. We have to be up earlier than normal tomorrow morning because we have plans and it seriously takes us forever to get out of this house. We are all very slow in the mornings with or without coffee. I still haven't downloaded the program to reduce the size of our photos. I really need to do that. I will do that, next week! I hope to have alot of new pictures to share next week, too.

I am adding just one picture because it takes soooooooo long to upload them at their size. I could make the pixels smaller but I just hate thinking about doing that. I get super paranoid that I might need that full size photo and I won't have it if I take a lower pixel shot. I am still trying to figure out all the things that my camera can do. It is such an amazing thing! The girls LOVE the camera. If only they loved to sit still so I could take a couple pictures of them then I would be happy momma. Anyways, this is a photo taken last weekend of Lolo and me in a little town James wanted to visit on our way back from Munich. I realized that I need to make sure that James and I end up in more pictures as we seem to be absent in most of them. I want to make sure that we have alot of photos that show interactions with the girls...not just posed shots. If I could only figure out photo editing in Photoshop Elements.

So this has proven to be a very random post, but hey, this is what happens when I am blogging at midnight. I hope you all have a great weekend!