point and shoot

Our new camera came today! Hooray Nikon Coolpix P60. I am super excited to have a camera to call my own, and especially one with so many great features to figure out. The auto point-and-shoot mode is really good, but it also has a manual setting so you can do your own photography stuff. I don’t know a whole lot about cameras, but I am excited to learn now. And then when we have a little more money and a little more photography know-how, we’ll upgrade to a digital SLR.

So I’ve been experimenting already!

The first picture I took with our new camera. Crystal clear. I was very impressed.

This picture I took to experiment with the high ISO setting. Perfect. I love it. This camera takes VERY good low-light pictures.

Above: Pictures of a little blue bird who likes to dig in the dirt around (thankfully not IN) my vegetable garden. I think he’s looking for worms. So far I haven’t seen him steal any of my plants, but we’ll have to see if he keeps his beak to himself.

Below: Trying to capture my backyard with the right lighting. The first picture is with the auto setting, and it turned out too dark. So I put it on manual and messed with the shutter speed (I have a LOT to learn) – went too dark, too light, then just right!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another attempt to capture actual lighting. The rose on the right is what it really looked like to me. The left was with the auto setting, and was too dark.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mrs. Peixe, our female Betta Splenden

 

 

 

 

 

Trying to get a perfect picture of Mr. Peixe (Mr. Fish) our male Betta Splenden

my new normal v 3.0

Today was an amazing day...

watered the garden

studied the scriptures

watered the lawn

went to aerobics

watched baby Ethan for a friend

went to the bank

dropped off Russ' soldier hat on post

grocery shopping!

went to the farmers' market with the fam

did a few loads of laundry and one load of dishes

... and there are still 100 things to do.

I usually feel okay about going to bed with things left undone when I've been able to do so much in one day. Life is good.

My new normal rocks.

I wear my feet

Vincente’s declaration as he takes off his shoes.

assorted vincente

I’ve snapped a few miscellaneous pictures of Vince in the past few days. He is growing up a LOT. He is much more little boy and less baby, which is sad, but he still is a little bit baby… I think in my heart he will always be a little bit baby.

He loves to take showers now instead of baths. Which is actually better because he gets SO dirty playing outside that his bath water becomes muddy when he gets in it. Yes. It is that bad. But what do you expect from a two year old who LOVES the dirt. Russ says he gets it from me. (see my posts about my gardening). Vince and I love to play in the dirt, what can I say?

He used to eat beans all the time when he was younger. Black beans, kidney beans – you name it, if beans were served, he was eating them. Then suddenly he stopped eating beans. I think the stress of moving and having Russ gone and all that nonsense didn’t help. Anyway, he ate beans the other night for dinner. I mean ATE BEANS. We couldn’t stop him! When he wants some more food he’ll say “More beans and rice. Put it right there,” and points to his plate. It’s hilarious. Then he keeps saying “Put it right there,” until we fill up his plate again. My kids love their food.    

We also like to do video calls to Avô (Grandpa) and Avó (Grandma) Werner on Skype. We talked to them on Sunday and Vince had a blast showing them his cars, his drawings, his Lightening McQueen underwear, and he loved singing songs with them.

We love having Vince around. We have to keep reminding ourselves that he is still very much a baby. He’s grown up so fast that sometimes we think he should be 4 or 5!! Before we know it we’ll be sending him to school!

Splits (not the banana kind)

 

She Likes to Eat

 

Joseline has been discovering the joys of solid foods. We’ve been sitting her up with us at the table for a while, and she has been staring intently at us shoveling our food into our mouths, so she wanted to give it a go. Mostly she only like rice cereal mixed up with breast milk, but she has tried broccoli and she likes bananas. We’re just letting her try solids, it’s not like we’re trying to get her to eat or trying to wean her or anything. In fact, she nurses just as much as always… she’s always been a nurser. She’ll always nurse. Always. And apparently, she’ll always eat anything. Always.

Simple Pleasures

Rise and Shout!

On Saturday, we returned to the Hobson Student Center on post to watch the BYU game. I took Joseline and Vince and they both napped while Russ lifted weights at the gym next door. It was a fun game to watch. BYU seems like they’re doing much better this season. We snapped a few pictures while we were there. After the game Vince was still sleeping so Russ and I played ping pong for a little while. We decided that we should do date night up at the Hobson one of these weekends. We love hanging out together.

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Joseline right after Russ stepped on her foot. She was pretty mad for a while. It’s surprisingly easy to step on babies who lay on the floor all the time.

Green Thumbs

  I hadn’t looked at the garden for a few days (other than to water it) and went out on Saturday and THERE WERE LITTLE PLANTS GROWING IN MY GARDEN! I went out today after church to show Vince all the little plants, and there were even MORE little plants! So far the only plants that haven’t germinated are the lettuce and the bell peppers. I took pictures of all the little plantlings. I am SO excited.

I took pictures of the green beans, peas, sugar snap peas, spinach, lettuce and broccoli here. I had two broccoli plants, but one of them got eaten by something (I think a raccoon… odd, I know). This week’s project (aside from fixing up the backyard) is going to be animal-proofing the garden. I know it was a little digging animal, because it had been digging around in the dirt as well. And I found little paw prints on the front porch. 

The pictures of the really watery plants below are of my basil and my tomato plant. I accidentally watered them too much. They look much better today. I’ve started putting them out on the front porch (more sun) and hopefully they will start growing faster. The backyard is pretty shady, unfortunately. Anyway, I have two tomato plants (no bell peppers are peeping through, yet, but hopefully I’ll see some this week!)

The weather has been very warm and sunny, which I’m sure is helping my little garden! It was also sprinkling a little yesterday evening and this morning, so the extra moisture (without water) is always nice. The backyard lawn is growing in pretty well. My goal is to have the backyard looking nice (and hopefully fenced!) by our birthday BBQ on the 26th. We’ll see. It will only be fenced if we can get our dislocation allowance this week or next. I’m going to go in this week to harp on them to pay us. I’m hoping it will work out.   

(P.S. The picture at the top is me pointing to a little sprout coming out of one of the bulbs my friend gave me. They were all pretty dead looking when I got them from her, but I’m trying to nurse them back to life in my front garden. On Saturday I found a little leaf pushing its way to the sun!! Hooray plants! – I’ve decided that I really love gardening. Some people love crafts… I love plants. And the outdoors. Love outdoors.)

The Good Ole Days

I’ve been scanning in all of my old pictures that once upon a time I was going to scrapbook. I have since become a fan of blogging and digital scrapbooking, so I decided to scan in all of the old pictures so I can scrapbook them on my computer. That is going to take forever (not to mention the fact that I have to figure out how to scan in my already completed 12x12 paper scrapbook pages… I want to include them in my digital scrapbook).

Anyway, as I was going through, I decided to post a few pictures on my blog that I thought were way cool.

So here goes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Senior Pictures – taken by Araly Bowen

  

The group of Seniors at Arkansas All State Orchestra – outside the Belle Arti, a fancy Italian place our conductor always takes the seniors.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at Arkansas Governor’s School 2003

Me and my daddy at a father-daughter dance back in my girl scouts days!

Senior banquet with Jannae

I can’t wait to get started scrapbooking again! I love blogging, too, but blogging is more wordy that my scrapbook will be. I think of a scrapbook as a good balance between a photo album and a journal. Blogging is more of a journal with pictures. Scrapbooking is more of a photo album with words. :)

Camera-less No More

I'm still trying to win an auction on eBay. I was winning, then someone outbid me, and now I'm going to go take a shower and come try to outbid him in the last seconds of the auction. We'll see how it works.

On another note - I was looking at how many blog posts I've had in the past few months and I realized that in 2 days I have almost posted half as many posts as I posted in the last 2 months! See what being camera-less will do to a person's soul?

Well, right now I've got a loaner camera that is working until I can win a stupid eBay auction. Have I mentioned how much I hate waiting?

Reblooming a Poinsettia

I got this poinsettia from a Christmas party in 2007 and decided to try my hand at reblooming a poinsettia. I didn't do so hot last year because I was gone a lot traveling in the fall. Well, my mother in law took pretty good care of it and it did grow some little red bracts. They were kind of dinky looking, but it was good for our first try!

Anyway, then we moved, and it survived, but looked kind of damaged. Then Vince ripped a bunch of the brances and leaves off back in January/February after we had moved. I wish I had a picture of what it looked like back then. Poor little plant.

So I've been taking very good care of it recently, and it is very full and bushy. I'm hoping that I will be able to rebloom it this year. I'm fully prepared to do what it takes, and living in California we have pretty much just the right conditions. It needs lots of sunlight, and we're getting lots of sunlight.

It's really not that hard to keep a poinsettia alive. You just treat it like any other houseplant. And contrary to popular belief, poinsettias are most definitely not poisonous. The white milky substance that comes out when the leaves are broken off will cause an allergic reaction in people who are allergic to latex.

After I rebloom my poinsettia this year, I'll start posting a "how-to" guide for reblooming your poinsettia, based on what I have done. There are a lot of good websites, as well. Just google "reblooming a poinsettia" or something similar.

Hopefully I'll be posting pictures of my rebloomed poinsettia in a few months!

Sweet Joseline

A few videos of my gorgeous girl.

She is figuring out the hands and knees part of crawling. She's been pushing herself around backward for a while, but only in the past few days has she finally gotten up on her hands and knees.

And learning to sit up! This is really nice, because it's a relief not to have to hold her up so much all the time. She's pretty stable on her own. Well... mostly stable. She sits up better if she has something in front of her to play with.

How Does Your Garden Grow

Very very slowly... okay, it's been less than a week... I'm just super impatient.

Here are some shots of what we've been doing around the house lately. The big boxes in the ground are our garden.

The backyard looks a little torn up, and I was going to finish fixing it this week, but things got busy, and I felt like taking a break from yardwork (since we worked outside Friday, Saturday, Monday, AND Tuesday. I just want to be CLEAN for one day!).

Over the labor day weekend we planted a garden, dug up the entire flower bed on the front walk, and hauled wood chips from the backyard to landscape the front yard. It looks a lot better. And the grass is getting really thick and green. Maybe in a month or so I'll get brave and try to kill some of the crab grass in hopes that "real" grass will grow. I'd just rather have crab grass than no grass...

The backyard still needs work, and I've been watering it hoping that a lawn will grow. We also plan on fencing it soon. We decided just to use lattice board and some 2x4s, since we'll only be here 8 more months, we don't want to spend a lot of money putting up a fence. We don't have any dogs or anything, just a little Vince, so it should be sturdy enough. Then when we leave we'll just take the lattice with us and use it at our new house, wherever that may be!

I'll post more pictures of the backyard once it starts looking pretty (probably around December).

Camera Happy

My AMAZING visiting teacher (and new-found friend) heard about my hunt for a new camera, and offered to lend us one of her cameras while we shop around. So... PICTURES!!! I love love love love taking pictures of my babies. Unfortunately, by the time the camera had charged up, the babies were all sleeping. So here are pictures of my sweet sweet children sleeping.

This is an upper body shot of Vince because when I got in there to take his picture, he had already wet the bed. Figured I probably shouldn't take a pictures of that. He's still working on nap-time dryness. He does pretty well as long as he hasn't had a lot to drink just before nap and he goes potty. Unfortunately for him (and me, since I'll be doing a load of laundry...) he drank to water bottles full and then fell asleep in the car on our way home from running errands. Oh well...

My sweet baby Joss sleeping in her new crib. We got the crib and mattress for $50 at the Post-Wide Yardsale back in August. She loves it and sleeps REALLY well in it. We have been blessed with wonderful children who put themselves to sleep and stay put in their beds. I'll have to post a picture of the crib. It is really a nice crib.

Another shot of sweet baby Joss. She is so beautiful. And she loves her shoosha. We actually had to buy new shooshas because I lost both of her old ones in one week. So along with the new shooshas, we bought the little keeper things. No more lost shooshas!

When I said they were all asleep I lied. Here is Joss just before I fed her and put her down for her nap. She was actually really ornery and kept fussing, but the camera has a green light that comes on every time you hold down the shutter button to focus the shot. Every time the green light came on she would stop fussing and look at the camera.

I promise to post more pictures of the babies soon. I have soo missed taking pictures of them! The next few days will probably yield LOTS of pictures, especially since our RS is playing volleyball tonight and I plan on taking pictures. Then this weekend in the ward campout and another BYU game... so even MORE pictures!! Hooray!

the prophet said to plant a garden

and so we did! We planted our very first garden today! It was a LOT of work, but we’re done, and now we’re just waiting for the little plants to grow. Most of them are supposed to start sprouting in 1-2 weeks, but I’m sooo anxious! I’m like a little kid at Christmas.

I was going to take pictures of all the events – going to the dump to find bookcases and compost, digging and filling and planting. But then I remembered that our stupid little camera is out of batteries, and I don’t have any more AAA’s. Some day we will have picture-taking abilities again. *sigh*

We planted tomatoes, four colors of bell peppers (green, red, orange, and yellow!!), cherry tomatoes, beans, peas, sugar snap peas, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, green onions, onions, carrots, and chives, basil, and cilantro (pretty much the only fresh herbs we ever use).

Everything was planted from seed, so we’re hoping to have our first harvest here in 2-3 months (that’s what the backs of all the packets say).

We also weed-whacked our entire backyard (the landscaping folks don’t do backyards). It looks pretty good. Now that it’s short-ish, I’m going to just mow it once every two weeks or so. I’m also going to start watering so hopefully, in a few months we’ll have a nice green lawn in the backyard (and hopefully before then, we’ll have a nice fence to border our lush green grass!)

It makes our little dump of a house feel a little more like home. These places are so depressing, if I don’t do SOMETHING with the yard, etc I would be really ready to leave. Now I’m cool with staying here as long as needed. Besides – I do really like the year-round growing season.

Speaking of which – folks may be wondering why on earth I am plating a garden in SEPTEMBER. Yes, that is because you can pretty much plant at any time all year round. We’ve actually just begun the “summer” months here, so my plants will have plenty of sunshine.