Can you make it out? Because I can’t really.

I can’t remember if I’ve talkeda bout this yet, so if I have, I’m sorry.

Jocelyn is huge. Late December we realized that she’s outgrown all her 3T shirts. The shirts I had to buy her in late sept/early oct because she’d outgrown all the fall 2T stuff I’d gotten her in early August.

She is now wearing a 4T.

FOUR TEE!

HER BROTHER WEARS A 4T!

…

SHE IS ONLY TWO! YEARS! OLD!

…

I’M FREAKING OUT HERE! AND I’VE HAD A MONTH TO GET USED TO IT!

So this does mean that my mom and I got to buy all sorts of darling cute clothes for her around Christmas, while she was visiting.

And the whole point of this post is to show you my very very favoritest item of them all.

Picked it up at Target. I love love love this fabric. I would buy bolts and bolts of it and paper our house with it, inside and outside, if i could.

However, whoever dressed her on the day this picture was taken, needed to be hit with the fashion stick.

Can you guess which parent it was?

PARENT DADDY????

Or PARENT MOMMY!?

Post YOUR guess in the comments!

Regardless. Aren’t we lucky to have such a sweet girl? 🙂

On Saturday, Ethan and I went to Target for a prescription, and groceries.

And when my eyes lit on this, it was very easy for Ethan to convince me to get it.

“Let’s get it, momm–”
“OK!!”

It was $15, and has 4 games in it. Ms. Pacman, Galaga, Pole Position, and 2 others that I can’t remember.

The little joystick box has a cord going out of it that plugs right into your tv for video and audio. We have some of those on the front of our tv, so it’s very easy to just plug it in, change the video to video 2, and start playing. It also takes 4 AA batteries.

A friend of ours built a whole console that looks exactly like the video games I used to play at Pizza Hut when I was 8. The kind where the game is set in a glass top table, and there’s controls on either side, so 2 players can face each other. He built it and put a computer inside and the last time we were there and I played, I was amazed when James came up, said it was time to go, and I’d spent 2 hours playing Ms. Pacman.

This game is not NEARLY as good as his. I’ve died numerous times on this little $15 version because the controller wasn’t really doing what I said (I know, I know, it’s always easy to blame the controller, but this time, it’s TRUE.)

But it’s still damned fun.

When it’s my turn, and I’m playing Ms. Pacman, Ethan and Jocelyn sit and watch and root for the ghosts. I only know the name of the red one, Blinky, which is also the fastest and most wiley of the ghosts. James informed me that the pink one is Sue. I should look up the other ones. Ethan likes to gloat and say, “I GOTCHA!” when I die, and then says, “That was me. I’M BLINKY! I GOT YOU!!”

Guess who played for an hour after the kids were in bed.

-amy could only get to the pretzel screen.

James took the kids out one December weekend, and took these cute running-around-crazy-in-a-field pictures.

I couldn’t come up with any witty captions.

And once again, I didn’t get new photos off the camera last night. And since I dug up cute baby Ethan pictures, I can’t leave Jocelyn out of it, can I?

Here she is, just over 1 year old.

Oh my goodness. Shoes! That I can put on! I don’t think this will ever not be fun!

Your shoes are so much more fun than mine, Mom.

I think I’ll sit still for a second, so they have at least one photo of me that isn’t blurry. But I won’t look at you. I REFUSE.

And I’m off! There’s some fuzz over there that I definitely need to eat!

Aren’t my little robeez shoes cute? If I wiggle them just so, I can make folks go, “awwwwww!”

I kind of like the power.

This is my daddy. He’ll pretty much do whatever I want him to. Especially when I grin at him.

See? POWER! I WILL RUUUUUULE THE WORLD!!! Or at least, my daddy.

Since I haven’t gotten any pictures OFF the camera and UP to flickr, here are some older photos.

Ethan at age 1, at grandma and grandpa’s house in Park City, UT.

Mom, Dad, I think I’d like to look into careers which involve long hoses and plugging things in and out. Also. Socks? Who needs em? That’s next on my list. First things first though.

I mean seriously. Who thought of this? PURE GENIUS.

I just can’t get enough of this Grandpa person. He has so many things in his shirt pocket. Plus, he doesn’t get tired of my endless curiosity.

You don’t know it yet, but this? This love of all things gadgety? It just grows as I get older.

I could play with this hose ALL DAY LONG. In fact, I did. Oooh, hey, what is THAT THING?

OH MY GOD! I can PULL IT.. I think I am in heaven.

Look. Exposed brick. If I time falling down JUST RIGHT.. I could give my mother an anneurism. One sock down, one to go.

Gotta go. I got things to pull, both of the xylophone, and sock variety.

SECRETS SECRETS

We love to have something to whisper in our household. Ethan is always deciding to tell us a secret, and usually when that little mouth gets up to my ear, he blanks out and whispers, “I love you mommy.” Not a bad secret 🙂 Jocelyn’s secret usually consists of silence, or “I have a SECRET!” whispered way too loud, so that when she approaches your ear, the parent is half listening and half trying to stay ready to pull back so as to protect the eardrums.

This morning (or maybe it was last night?) however, I heard her shout over to daddy, “I need to tell you a SECRET about how I SLEPT IN MY BED!”

So. Some concepts of “secret” still being worked out 🙂

BEDTIME

After jammies and stories and tucking in and everything is done and I’m standing at the door and say to Ethan, “Have a good sleep,” he is sooooo tickled pink to reply, “SLEEP TIGHT! DON’T LET THE BED BUGS BITE!” *(cackle cackle cackle)*

Another game we play is he lays in bed with all the covers down at his feet. He puts his arms up over his head, and his pookie bear is carefully laid down right next to him. I proceed to pull up the sheet and blankies one by one, up to the headboard and over his face and arms. After each one, he says, “Now??” and I say, “Not yet!!” until all the blankies are cover him up and only little fingers at the very top are showing. Then I say, “NOW!” and he puts his arms down, which then tucks all the blankies around him nice and snug under his armpits, and usually his pookie bear is poking out just right as well. Then we say, “Now you’re ALL SNUGGLED IN!”

I’ve done it a few times for Jocelyn, but she’s not that into it. However, after the story has been read, which takes place in the rocking glider chair in her room, I usually say, “Shall I toss/throw you into bed?” she says, “NO! THROW/TOSS me into bed!” (whichever one I DIDN’T say, is however she corrects me.) The I snuggle her up in my arms, and as I rock, I say, “1…” (chair goes back,) “2…” (chair goes back..) “THREE!” (stand up with the girl). Then I walk her over to the light switch and turn off the light with her foot which is sticking out of my bundled up girl-in-the-arms. If I miss this step, she usually corrects me, “TURN OFF THE LIGHT! WITH MY FOOT!” And then as I approach the bed, she says, “Do, ‘a-one! a-two! a-three!” and then I swing her in an exagerated baby-rocking motion and count, and then on three, and faux-toss her into the bed while she giggles with glee. Then a series of questions and answers goes on about which dolly/bear she would like to accompany her, whether or not sheets and covers are required, or which one, “Sheets?” “NOOOO!” “Blankey?” “The PINK one!” and then after she is all tucked in, kisses are administered (to girl and dolly/bear) and I can take my departure.

THE THINGS YOU LEARN

I decided that while digital photos are wonderful, I do miss the actual PHOTOS lying around the house in an organized fashion, say, a photo album. In the worst case scenario, if hard drives crash irreparably in the house and flickr HQ is hit by photo-backup-targetting missiles, we would have no record of .. well, a lot of shit. So, my project for the last few days have been to go through the photos for 2006 to pick which ones I like a ton, and get them ready for printing.

Doing this on flickr is pretty much futile, because often, I do a massive convert from RAW, shove up to flickr with no type of processing. So I would tag the ones I liked there, only to have to find them on my computer and fiddle with them, so might as well ignore flickr. I have a program called Breezebrowser that I quite like for simple browsing and conversion, but it doesn’t do any photo fiddling or any advanced type of tagging/album type stuff, so that was out. I’ve been meaning to try out Google’s picasa software, which now, I have done, and I must say, I quite like it. I can look through the photos easily from thumbnails, then I can look at each one specifically and it has a good bit of fiddling tools, such as crop, STRAIGHTEN (omg i love this one), fill light, and a very handy “i’m feeling lucky!” which does an auto correction of a lot of stuff (contrast, saturation, etc.) I can do these changes, and then undo them later if I want, as it doesn’t actually change the original files. Since I work in the RAW format, it is also very handy in that it does it all in raw also. I can add photos to my “2006 photoalbum” album, and it doesn’t move any files or try to reorganize my photos, which I like. When I have all the pictures selected in the album and properly fiddled with for the best looking results, I can go to that folder and tell it to export, and it will export all the RAW photos (which are physically located all over the place on my hard drive, mind you and would take me FOREVER to track them down manually) to JPG to a folder I specify. Then they’ll all be right there for me to upload to costco.com/snapfish’s website to print, and I’ll be able to go pick them up at costco on my way home the next day. Along with a couple of photo albums. 🙂

So, while now the software is all handled, the hard drive space is NOT… I had to grab the photos from 3 different locations in our collective computer consciousness in our household.. some were on my laptop (my primary machine) some were on our file server, where I stashed them because my machine was running out of space, and some were on my husband’s 2nd drive in his desktop, again, where i stashed because i was running out of space. BTW.. I had to delete a bunch of stuff in order to HAVE the space to move back to my laptop to work on… hope none of it was important!

Space is a big issue in our house. Grrr. So I have my eye on this 500 gig Western Digital “my book” which will solve ALL my problems for only $240 (at costco. the warehouse, not the website). Drool. I covet your bytes. And your bits.

The only problem is now James has this fancy mac laptop and he’s digging the Aperture photo software and wants to use THAT, and what the hell? how are we supposed to do this? AHHHHH?!!

So I think that separate flickr accounts will be in our future, with us just handling our own photos separately.

So, finally, I’m getting to the part where the title of this section actually stems from (it’s been so long, let me remind you, it’s “the things you learn”…) If only I had learned this lesson EARLIER… like in february of last year…

Perhaps you can take heed from my observations. I’ve now spent a good 6-8 hours going through old photos, and at the time, I must have thought it was CUTE to take pictures of dirty kids faces, now I just wish I could read through time with a wet warm soapy washcloth and WIPE OFF ALL THE SNOTTY SPAGHETTI-Y CAKE-Y DIRT-Y GROSSNESS BECAUSE IT’S SO NOT CUTE. IT’S JUST GROSS.

Practically all the photos of the kids look like this:

Do yourself a favor.

Wipe those kids’ faces. THEN break out the camera.

OK i’m done now. Happy monday.

-amy

Ethan 2007:

Ethan 2002
Jocelyn 2006	Jocelyn 2005

… is now up.

I am trying not to be wishy washy. i am NOT pondering about taking it down. i spent a lot of time on this sucker (back in november) and dammit, it’s staying up.

SO THERE.

Plus, it’s such a relief to get that december banner down. I don’t know about you, but it’s way too depressing to see christmasy stuff/decorations after the holiday is over. Last year the tree came down the day after. This year, Christmas was on monday, and my mom and I waited until wednesday to take down the tree. Which was TOO LONG.

Buh-bye december banner! hello new year!

If you live in the northern va area and have little kids that love trains, I can’t recommend the Santa Train enough. For $4 a ticket, proceeds going to Operation Lifesaver, an organization dedicated on train safety education, you get a train ride, train safety coloring books, a glimpse of Santa on the train, and very excited and happy kids. The only problem is they sell out so quickly, usually within 4-5 days after going on sale.

Since the event is already over, the pages on the various websites regarding this event have been taken down, but next November, you can vist the VRE website and I’m sure they will have it again. They have several different stops along the western rail (Manassas, Burke, etc) and eastern rail (Woodbridge, Springfield, etc.) This year, once again the train was a big hit. Learning from last year, the kids do get bored in the middle, so we brought snacks.

Most ironic moment.. standing at the station, the train easing up, to see some dumbass parents ignore the flashing lights and lowered gates to RUN ACROSS THE TRACKS with their kids in tow, to get on the station side of the tracks before the train comes up. Exactly what the Operation Lifesaver program later instructs our kids circle in the coloring book they hand out as “unsafe behaviour.”

Anyway. On to the cuteness. You can view the entire flickr set as well.

trying to get a glimpse of Santa

These kids grow up so quickly in a year. Last year’s Santa train: