Camy kneading bread

Or as she likes to call it "squishing" the bread:

A day with dad

Last Tuesday, Edna went to her sisters wedding in UT. I stayed home with the girls and these are a few of the pictures that resulted.

One of the first things we did was feed the blue jays. My grandpa had trained jays to eat peanuts out of his hand. Right now we are lucky enough if the girls don't bang on the glass window and scare the jay away. But they enjoy throwing peanuts out the back door, and have a surprising amount of patience to wait and see the bird come by.

As we got ready to go to the park, we ended up pulling out hats while we searched for coats.

First we headed to the bank. Over hundreds of years of experience the banks have learned that children have no tolerance for waiting in line, but if they provide suckers, the kids might manage 10 minutes or so. The blue mouths are just a side effect.

Once at the park, Macy had a great time sliding down the slide - head first, which I thought was rather bold. She seemed pretty pleased with herself.

Camy was also willing to take a try at the two-story slide, but was a little less headstrong than her sister. She was more content to walk along the structures.

I tried in various shots to try to capture Macy's perpetual forward momentum. This is the closest I got.

The girls have also enjoy playing "simon says". We haven't added the simon says part yet. The video is a little bigger than our site allows, so you will have to travel over to YouTube.

Hugs

Prancer

Macy got some tap shoes from her cousin Hailey. She was pretty tickled with them...

Statute of Limitations

I have watched this video many times. Its short. Its a blooper. I probably shouldn't admit to laughing about it as much as I have, but it has been long enough since taken, maybe I will be ok.

Its a quick snap shot of life. Cam is fishing for a wooden spoon. She's pinned down her one leg by sitting on it and is precariously perched on the other, but a steadying hand makes the position feasible. Then just as she conquers the wooden spoon, she lets her want to share with Macy distract her steadying hand. Its not until she is about a third of the way down does she realize that her leg is pinned. You can see it try to kick out for balance, but no dice. No where to go but down. Thud. I wonder how much kids cry because they are hurt, and how much is just frustration with all the different things you have to keep track of just to stay on your feet. It doesn't seem fair sometimes.

Picture dump

Every once in a while I get this crazy idea that if I were to go through and just delete all the 25MB photos that are blury, I would get half my hard drive back. But then I run across pictures like this, and the blur just seems to work.

And then you get to looking and you get stuck looking at a few pictures a little longer than the 1 second you can spend on each one to cover all you pictures in something rediculous - like 4 hours. And you realize you will never be done.

And then you give up and are happy that at least if you go looking, you can find some pictures worth looking at again.

But lots of time has been put into organizing and classfying photos automatically, but if camera makers really want a killer app that will help improve their customers lives, they need to create cameras that will either keep you from taking photos you will never want to look at again or offer to delete the blurry, overexposed, bad photos. Then I wouldn't be in this position in the first place.

New Nickname

The girls hair is finally starting to grow in. This has led to one of Camy's new nicknames: Captain Crazy Hair.

Turning 2

Camy and Macy turned two on Wednesday this past week. Given that we are close to family now, we celebrated three times: once on Tuesday, once on Wednesday, and once on Saturday. Below are the cakes and purses that Edna made for the girls and each cousin who was in attendance. Below is a picture of all the cousins on my side of the family. Camy and Macy are warming up to headbands and bows, but hats are still pretty hit and miss, so no party hats for them. As part of the set up, we used our recently unpacked moving boxes to create cardboard castle and paper pit. Below is one video. When our internet gets hooked up, I will post more videos.

My favorite blog

I don't actually know Whitney Johnson (I think John does), but I love her blog. She frequently has guest bloggers including many of the most amazing women I know. They are all brilliant, strong, happy, good women that I love hearing from. I think they are mostly women that have been much more brave in their careers than I was/am and they have such a great perspective. As I've debated whether the housewife life makes sense for me, I love that these women share how they have found the right balance for them- and how they've learned to be better moms, better professionals, and better people. Once we get settled in California, finding my ideal balance is the next big project.

Leopard cat

The girls and I met this beautiful kitty on our way out of our apartment on Friday. I only had my phone camera so it isn't the best picture- he is the size of a domestic cat but is spotted like a leopard. We recently learned about Bengal cats on Animal Planet, and I suspect that is what he is.