My Little Girl

For Nora’s third Gotcha Day (celebrating the day we adopted her) we asked a friend to take a photo shoot of our sweet little girl.  We met in a gated community just before sundown and Nora could not figure out why we wanted her to sit in the weeds!  Hahahaha!  On a blustery Wednesday a week later we met in Target parking lot to exchange the goods.  When the CD went into the home computer and we admired each scene… each smile… each dimple… I realized my little girl isn’t going to be little for much longer.  Seriously, it was the first time I thought those thoughts.  Her face is thinning out.  Her big teeth have almost all shown up for the party.  And she does her own hair now.  Our time with our kids is so short!  And when they arrive at your heart’s door at seven years old, it is entirely too swift of a time until they leave home!

This picture is my favorite of all of them because she is laughing, truly laughing and it shows in her eyes.  It’s so sweet.  Then I took a long swallow and realized that she looks at her Daddy with these loving eyes and that cheery smile, but only for a little while longer.  My stomach did a flip flop and sank as I realized this smile and adoring look will be aimed at her next Knight in Shining Armor in as little as TEN YEARS!  WHAT!  Stop the bus!

Well, she did tell us that she’s not getting married until she’s 35, so we have a few more years than most.  :o)

Hug and kiss your kids!  And make them sit in the weeds!

W.O.W. (Wildflowers of Washington)

A photo tribute to the beautiful flora and fauna of the most northwestern State of the contiguous 48.  Never have I had the opportunity to capture so many of God’s creations… every color, well almost.  My favorite colors were all covered… and that’s all that really matters, right? I don’t pretend to know what all of these flowers are named, but I do know some of them…. having lived in the great Northwest.  Please help me out if you know any missing names. 

Yarrow:

Daisies, duh:  (and grass seed)

Foxgloves:

???:

Roses:

Different Roses:

Different Roses #3:

Bachelor Buttons:  (these were our wedding flowers!)

Columbine:

Not sure, but could be the flowers of blackberries??:

???:

Unknown to me, but the blue ones look similar to Lobelia, the white similar to Star Jasmine, and the little yellow ones are shaped like Violas.

Lilies:

There you have it.  See?!  I need to do a W.O.W. scrapbook album and give it to Rick so that he will have fond memories of our hiking in Washington.  Please, take time to smell the roses!

Vacation Saga #27

While soaking up the cool breezes at Lake Tahoe, I happened to go to mapquest to see how far away my sister’s house was from the Lake….. I was surprised to find that it was closer than my own home by more than 100 miles.  Yes, this is my sister of My Sister’s Jar fame.  My mind started scheming.  I mentioned to my vacationing, beard-growing husband that it would be cool to “run up to Washington” to see my sister’s family.  We figured out that if Rick took off two more days we could vacation for another WEEK!  (Gotta love the four-day work week!)

Long story short, Rick called in and they were able to get another pilot to cover his flights… so we drove to Vancouver, WA on Monday.  YEAH!  All of the people in the Northwest should be thanking us for coming and bringing the nice Phoenix weather with us!  Seriously, yesterday was their first day of summer!  They are all scorching at 82 degrees, but we are loving it.  It was 25 degrees hotter today at home. Makes me want to stay here until October.

(scrap-lifted photo)

To get the most of this non-Arizona weather, we attempted a hike to the Camas Lily Fields above Lakamas Lake yesterday.  I say attempted because among our two families, there was not one successful map reading soul.  A picture was even taken of the trail map so that I could eventually show the routes that we hiked and re-hiked to find the lily fields.  No one told us that they only bloom the week of Mother’s Day.  Sheesh.  I did capture a photo of every little blinkin’ bloom on the entire trail (partly to make my necessary heart-rate-in-the-danger-zone stops seem of the photo taking nature… and not the totally out-of-shape nature)… much to my speedy marching husband’s dismay.  He kept saying, “You know we’re not going to develop all these pictures, right?” Whatever.  I decided, while kneeling on the wet path getting the perfect picture of a purple and orange wildflower, that a Wildflowers of Washington (WOW) scrapbook was indeed in my future.  I might even give it to Rick for Christmas.  Plus, I have 75 free prints on snapfish right now.

I would be showing you some of the photos, but I did not bring the cord for my camera… and my techy brother-in-law doesn’t have the photo card capability on his treasured macs.   I didn’t even have the photo card in the camera when we started this adventure on June 9th. I bought a card at Walmart in Nevada… but it didn’t work.  I don’t really understand all the little letters printed on those tiny cards.  Eventually, I purchased the correct card and it is FULL of pictures that I wish I could share.  But no.

Photo-shop, wonder of the gods

My book Learning to Laugh in the Midst of Mothering is coming out the first week of April, and the publisher asked for a family photo for the back cover.  We did get one decent picture, but what in the world is up with 11 year old boys?  In the top picture, Austin looks like he’s half Klingon with his brow forced into a series of wrinkles.  He has beautiful Caribbean-Sea-blue eyes…. but the only picture he opened them for (out of 32) was the fooling around orange peel picture.  Sheesh.  We can’t even photoshop his eye-wide-open face into one of the 29 pictures that the rest of us look fine in because of his citrus rind smile.

And the wind.  What to do when the wind blows?  Keeve’s hair did the Squiggy deal in the front…. oh, for the love of photo-shop.  I don’t know who invented it, but they were a godsend.

I’m pretty happy with the one good picture, but when I sat back later and realized what we went through to get it, the rigmarole deserves a blog spot.  Rick needed a quick haircut, so I obliged him and located my scissors. To my surprise, Larisa does not own a white shirt, so she borrowed one from our neighbors.  We asked my niece to come and take the pictures.  She’s a budding, young photographer that did a great job on her first gig.  The sun was bright, so we needed to create some shade.  We ended up using the top of the bench swing with a woven blue blanket from Mexico draped over the top to cut the glare.  We also used a piece of plywood 3’x8′, balanced on top of the swing shade and the fence.  A large rock was put atop for security reasons.  We brought out a large upholstered stool for Keeve and I to sit on, but the legs would sink in the lawn, so another piece of plywood was uncovered to save the grass.  The lawn was also a bit wet (rare for Phoenix) requiring Rick, Larisa and Austin to find flip-flops and small pieces of wood to kneel on. And we wanted the top-down view, so we grabbed a somewhat-flimsy plastic chair for Whitney to stand on while being Miss Photographer Extraordinaire.

What?  You want to see the only good picture?  Sorry, you’ll just have to wait for the book like everyone else.  :oP