I don't have much to say about today, as I'm not feeling too well, so this will be a photo show of Stephanie's pictures and mine from yesterday.
Bunny Love
Silly Spitting Siblings
Outdoor Escapades
A Little Face Time
Return to the Great Outdoors
The ol' car doesn't look bad for six years, does it?
That's my show for tonight! I do have a video to upload on dropshots as well. I'll do that in a minute.
Fin.
Here are more of the photos from Chloë's Brooklyn photo shoot with Lenka Drstakova:
Okay, yes, you've seen this one already. But this is slightly different coloring - and I just enjoy looking at it so much, I thought you might, too!
I love the expression and toughness of this one. It's something I didn't expect at all.
What can I say about this picture that you're not probably already thinking yourself? Those eyes!! Amazing.
What strikes me about this one is her beautiful, sweet, soft-looking pink skin. (Sophie is yellow-toned; Chlo and Jack are my pinkies.)
I love this one. Very cute, without being too twee.
The off-centered placement of this one bothers me, but otherwise, she looks great, very little-girl-next-door.
There are about, oh, 75 other shots on my disc from this shoot, but I don't think you want to see them all! Unless you want me to do a post of outtakes? Nah, I didn't think so.
So, what do you think? Have we been blessed with gorgeous kids, or what?! Okay, I may be biased. :D
Fin.
[Note: If you missed it, there was another post last night before the Works-For-Me Wednesday post - a rather unfortunately-titled one for guests to find!]
Today, I am pitiful. I didn't go to the doctor, but I should have. It was my only day this week when I didn't have something going on, but... I was too sick to go! Chloë and Jack stayed home from school today, too, but they're doing so much better that I'll probably send them back tomorrow. We didn't go out today while Barbara cleaned, though; I just wasn't up to it. We stayed up when she was down and we went down when she came up.
As she was finishing up, gathering her things, I was trying to make a video of Chloë, who wanted me to tape her doing her new monologue. Let's see how that came out with Soapus Interruptus underfoot:
Yeah. No.
Anyway, Babs wanted to hear Chlo do her monologue, and Chlo wanted to hear Babs do the monologue! Poor Barbara kept trying to get out of it, saying, "Oh, I don't think I'd read it as well as you..." but Chloë kept begging. Finally Barbara just stood up and said she had to go be somewhere else! Kids! They are so persistent!
After that, I was fiddling around with the camera some more and trying to use the manual focus and stuff. Here are a few pictures from today's photo shoot:
The mail came shortly after that, so I asked who wanted to go across the street with me to the mailboxes, and they all piped up. Great! More picture time. Only I didn't know it was freezing out. We raced across the street, I took a dozen horrible pictures of freezing and underdressed children, and then we raced back - but not before a lady in her car stopped to tell us how cute Sophie looked in her "ballet"! Here's the "best" one, if you can call it that:
I'm finally getting a small amount of blur. Not much, but better.
Today's mail brought some more packages!
Ruby in California and her friend made and sent these items for CARE Package, with more on the way. Thank you so much, Roob!! I'm so excited y'all are doing this - and tonight I had to send Rob out to buy another bin! We're a six-bin charity now, folks.
And this is my prize from the Bloggy Giveaways! Originally, Shannon (the link to whose blog I cannot find right now, sorry Shannon!) was supposed to just send me the "no soliciting" vinyl lettering, but she sent me a ton of other vinyl signs, too! Wow. If/when we move, I am going to have lots of fun things to play with for the walls!
Welp, I have finally cast on a new knitting project (I only knitted 7 rows before I fell asleep earlier, so I'll show something when I have something to show), and I'm gonna go work on it.
Fin.
Well. Today wasn't the greatest of days. I feel more like shit than I did yesterday, just the hacking and gagging and general blah-i-ness. I haven't showered, my hair is greasy and nasty, and I darn near didn't even bother to put on a bra before taking Chloë to Brownies.
If you know what I look like, you know I can ill afford to leave the house without a brassiere. I mean, I take Chloë to the bus stop in whatever the hell I have on and no bra, but that's different. Before 0800, no one should be able to see you anyway. I pretend I'm invisible.
But evening bralessness is no good for me, unless maybe I were wearing two or three thick layers - which I would never do. I don't wear socks, I don't wear anything but whatever the hell kind of shoes I wear (they're not really sandals, not really flip-flops and no, Rob, they're not freakin' slippers), I don't wear turtle necks and I can't stand it when I have to wear my coat. I just hate the constrainment. Is that a word? Constrainment. No, that's not what I mean. Confinement, that's it. I hate to be confined. My movement is restricted, it presses on my skin, it's just ilck. Beyond ick - it's ilck.
So I wore the bra. I've been liking this past sickly week of not wearing it, though. Pshaw on the bra. The ladies are comfy in there, all free to bounce around or flash at my husband whenever they feel like it. But the Brownie moms don't need to see my nursed-three-babies-and-that's-a-lame-excuse-because-they-looked-like-that-before-pretty-much nipples pointing down to my slippersandalflipflops. And it's cold, you know, so nothing to hide there.
Dude. This is totally not the direction I planned for this post to go. But that's how I roll, take it as it comes into the brain, no filter, just typey-type. All for you. I do it for you.
Anyway.
Here's cute little baby Vivian again. Isn't she just precious? Little Miss Bright Eyes, with her older brother Donovan. She's just so tiny, and if I weren't all nasty and unshowered and coughing and gross, I would have eaten her up. Seriously, chewed her right to bits. I just want to SQUEEZE her. Babies, babies, everywhere, and not a drop for me.
My little lion. Sort of. It looked cuter before the camera was grabbed.
I still can't figure out my damn camera and the depth of field issues. I've done every frigging thing to that aperture setting that I can think of, and everything else, but I just can't get the job done. The camera is, like, compensating and always focusing everything in the picture. I don't want that! I want blur!
Nobody cares. I know. So g'night.
Fin.
Well. I've barely gotten off the couch for the past several days, let alone showered, and I'm not looking forward to Rob going back to work tomorrow. Of course, he worked yesterday and I managed, but he got off much earlier than usual. Tomorrow will be a late one, and I still feel like she-ite.
Although, Rob woke me up at 11 this morning with some of the most glorious words you can hear when you feel like crud: "Go back to sleep, the kids and I are going out..." and that's all I really cared to hear. I did go back to sleep, and I did have some crazeh crazeh dreams, and I did accidentally wake up and call Rob about them, thinking they were real, and I was very confused. As was he. "You're walking Larry's pig...what?" But anyway.
Where did they go, you wonder. Welp, Rob's best friend Larry is in town from Washington, and they haven't seen each other in years. Like, twelve of them. So they had to do some catching up, and the kids went along because... my husband is wonderful and knew I needed that. So they went exploring Norfolk's Naval Base (NOB), and Rob took a bunch of fun pictures with the kids and the planes. More of those in the end-of-the-month reel.
I finally woke up for good, and then I sat here for quite some time doing nothing before the boneless skinless chicken breast wasting away in the fridge started occupying entirely too much of my brain, and I had to get up to do something about it. My plan was to marinate it all day in my Pampered Chef stone baker and then shove it in the oven around dinnertime. So I decided on a lemon pepper marinade, which called for fresh coarse ground pepper and fresh squeezed lemon juice and minced onions and minced garlic and EVOO and fresh rosemary. I had the olive oil. I had some decidedly not fresh lemon juice in the little lemon-shaped plastic thingy, and far less than was needed, so I added more olive oil to make up the liquid difference. No onions, so I threw in some onion powder. No garlic, well, none that wasn't limper than overcooked asparagus, so I threw in some garlic powder. No rosemary. And we had a big can of pepper that we bought at Sam's Club in, oh, 2002. I opened the lid, went to shake a little in, and whooosh! Out dumped approximately 100 times the mass of pepper that I was expecting. Oh, shit. I had already dumped in all the other ingredients and had no more lemon juice. Well, now what? So I did what any chef worth their salt (heh) would do (not) and added a ton more olive oil to soak it up. This was not a pretty mixture, folks. But I proceeded, congratulating myself on not getting upset, and washed my chicken, cut out the fatty bits, and then doused it with my do-you-want-some-lemon-with-that-pepper marinade.
It was not pretty. But I figured, hey, it'll just be that much more flavorful and besides, Rob will eat pretty much anything.
Um.
No.
After it came out of the oven, it was so moist and flavorful and hot and delicious - and then a second later, my eyes were screaming and my taste buds were wailing and holy cow, was it spicy. I do not do spicy. To me, "hot" is a Cajun's bland. Maybe less spicy than that. And Sophia took a bite, and maybe the other kids. We were all hollering at daddy to get us a drink now, now, now!!! Rob laughed and shrugged, "So what do you want from Taco Bell?" Here is the offending party:
I know, it looks pretty innocuous sitting right there in the pan, but believe-you-me, it is evil. But like I said, Rob ate it. One breast for him, the other three in the freezer for... him.
This is why he does the cooking, and I do the baking. It's a safety thing.
So during that brouhaha, the Bigs were busily crafting and coloring and otherwise plunging in and out of the craft box (as opposed to the craft drawer, whose overloaded self bit the dust two days ago, argh). I posted a video here. Sorry for the heavy breathing; I'm way congested. Chloë used a cup for a rolling pin for her play clay, which Jack then stole and filled with clay, and eyeballs, and water. Then he couldn't figure out how to get the eyeballs and clay out again. See, Ma? Can you help?:
And all the while, I was busily studying my online photography course and messing around with the aperture and shutter settings on my camera, and fiddling with the other doohickeys on there, too. I've had it, what? Two years now? And there are still tons of things on there I don't know what to do. With. Mainly because I can't find the manual. Here are a couple cool pictures I liked from tonight:
I've always wanted to take a water droplet picture! Never mind the dirty sink.
I love the motion in this picture. Note the white spot on the table is where Rob's labtop burned it, and not something else actually moving...
Now if someone who knows anything about photography could help me, I'm having an f-stop/depth of field crisis. Thanks!
That is all. Back to the daily grind. So don't just stand there, Bust a Move!
Fin.
decided to have a little photo shoot today while Daddy was at work and there was some sunlight, for once. Here are some favorites.
Sophia in a rare quiet moment.
I actually don't know how it got all blurry in a circle around her like that, but I like it.
Say wha...?!
Please ignore the horrible hair on the blondies. We're in a state of indecision as to what to do with it next. His hair grows like bamboo!
Hates having his picture taken.
Not the most attractive feet in the world!
A half-second before she licked the camera...
We Sophia, in her favorite sleepy-time pose.
My favorite. It just works for me.
If you want to take my picture, this is what you'll get!
Enough pictures. Time for some sun.
And now for a few things we've made this weekend...
Chloë wanted to make something with her play clay, so we decided to make this cup to hold all the marbles that we seem to keep losing. The eyeballs were a fun addition. The kids love it!
And what, pray tell, is this fuzzy brown creature??
I got sick of having two fistfuls of crochet hooks to sort through every time I needed to use one, so I decided to make an organizer for them today.
It may not be a real thing of beauty, but it's highly functional and stores all of my aluminum hooks plus a few extras.
That is all.
Fin.
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