Dreaming

I really want one of these.

It doesn't necessarily have to be this big, but you get the idea.
And if it wouldn't be too much to ask, I'd really like to have a couple of these on the outside.

And these on the inside.


I want a house and I love bay windows. And the window seat that sometimes comes with it.
A girl can dream, can't she?

Hiya Papaya

One of my friends is a photographer and is doing this fun giveaway for a photo shoot. And she is amazing, so of course I'm going to enter the contest. And you should to. Just go here.

9 Months

My little girl is growing up so fast, I can't believe she is already 9 months old, and only 3 months short of a year. Yeah, that's gonna go fast and be over before I know it. Celeste is a very social, happy, and active baby. She is crawling and pulling herself up on furniture, cruising like crazy and can stand on her own pretty confidently. She hasn't tried walking so much yet. If you leave her standing in the middle of a room, she will lower herself to the ground pretty fast. She has tried to step a couple of times and fallen, so I think she is happy just to crawl for now. Which is perfectly fine with me. She is completely obsessed with her brother, anywhere he goes, she has to be. She almost follows him around more than she follows me. She loves to take baths, so one day I finally put her in the bath with her brother. I was a little nervous, cause he is a bit crazy in there, but he actually was pretty gentle while she was in. She loved it. I had to take a picture cause who doesn't have a picture in the bathtub with their sibling? Oh wait, I don't. But that's okay, it was fun anyway.

They were both in this box right before I took this picture, but of course she got out before I could get the camera.
Beautiful girl. I just love her eyes and cheeks and chin. Okay, I love everything about her.

Had to include this one of his cheesy grin. He turned 3 1/2 almost exactly the same time as she turned 9 months.

Brother hogging the camera, but I love the devoted look on her face.

Completely covering her up. This is pretty normal for him. He's a total camera hog.

Life from a 3 year old's point of view

I've really wanted to post some of the pictures Taylor has taken on the camera he got from my parents for Christmas. He got it because he loves nothing more than to run around taking pictures with our camera, and it was a little scary sometimes. The camera he got is very child proof. And the pictures even turned out pretty good. So here they are. Enjoy.

Aunt Melinda

Mommy, of course

This is rotated. He likes to turn the camera upside-down and take pictures of himself.

A cousin, I'm not sure which one.

The Batman car he got from Aunt Shannon.

Cousin Jaiden.

Grandpa

Up the nose shot

One of his favorite subjects, besides himself, of course

That one was a little too close

This is a view up at our light fixture from the floor. There a several of these.

I believe this is the top of our friend, Davin's head

Inside the refrigerator. We have a lot of these too.

The wreath outside our front door during Christmas.

A blurry wall

Celeste trying very hard to get the camera from him.

We have a ton of pictures of Taylor's feet. These are just a couple.

When Justin downloaded these, there were over 400 pictures. I think, after deleting all the ones that were of nothing, we got just over a hundred. I wouldn't call him a photographer yet, but he's getting there. Right now, his photography consists of running all over the house and clicking the camera at whatever he can, usually he's way too close. But he'll get the hang of it, I'm sure.

Celeste loves her Daddy.

She did not want to cooperate for a picture with Taylor. I was trying to get a pic of her cute dress for my sister cause she bought it for her.

We decided she might cooperate more for her mommy. But she was still pretty ornery. Taylor, on the other hand, loves getting his picture taken. He is a ham.

Under the table is Celeste's favorite place to be. She loves Taylor's booster and especially loves it when he is sitting in it, or when he is under the table with her. They are a couple of kooky kids.

Disaster

I'm playing catch up right now. I've been meaning to sit down and do this for awhile now, but every time I do, I end up just reading other blogs and then when I remember, the kids are demanding my attention. Yeah, I have a lot of excuses, but mainly, I'm just lazy and usually want to go to bed when I have a minute at the end of the day. Anyway, over a month ago, we had a bit of a problem with our main water line to the house. Well, I guess you could say it burst. The house we live in is almost a hundred years old, and the water line was about 50. It had had enough, I guess, and decided it was done. Thankfully, we are renting and it was the owner's responsibility to fix, so all we had to do was find a place to stay for several days. At first, I thought it would be fixed by the next day, so I figured we'd just stay here and suffer through not having any water. Apparently, I don't know anything about plumbing, though, and it took all weekend, plus a day. Justin's sister read about it on Facebook and immediately called me to invite us to stay at her house. They have a son on a mission, so his bedroom of course is free. I'm still so grateful for her offer, considering I had grossly misjudged the amount of time the water would be out. The plumber did say that we could probably have gotten a water key from the city to turn the water on whenever we needed it, but umm, no thanks. Walking outside to turn it on and having more water go down into the cellar was not too exciting a prospect. So, we stayed with family for 4 nights and got back into our house on Monday. I am happy it's fixed, but now we have a mud pit for a driveway because it was only gravel before and now the gravel is gone. But once again, happy that we are renting and didn't have to pay for the new pipeline.

This is when I realized there was a problem. I went outside to throw something away and found the driveway spouting water and running down my sidewalk.

The water pooling outside the cellar and then flowing down the stairs.

The city had to come and dig in the snow and ice to find the water shut off valve, and then they left the rest up to us. It took several hours to finally get a hold of our landlord, and he couldn't get a plumber out till the next day. Fun experience. Glad it's over.