Spring Break

Last week was our Spring Break.  We tried to stay busy and have some fun.

We went to Carowinds, the library (which I love that my kids love), park, and Discovery Place, followed by meeting up with Josh for lunch.  That was a special treat!  I also started potty training Sidney.  She's doing great so far.  I hope she keeps it up.  Friday we decided to have a little overnighter in Asheville.  We went to a nature center and an arboretum.  Both were really fun.  I was feeling lazy about taking pictures so I didn't get too many.

Easter

The kids woke up to an Easter egg hunt on Sunday morning.  They had so much fun we did it two more times outside.  It was a fun Easter this year, but somehow I forgot about the whole egg dying thing.

He was hitting eggs out of the tree with the bat.

 Jayden was really sweet to give Sidney all the pink eggs.

 Sidney likes to wear my t-shirt to bed if her Minnie jammies are dirty.

Easter Photos

Last week I dressed the kids up and drove to a beautiful garden to take Easter pictures of the kids.  When I was transferring them to my computer later I accidentally deleted 270 of the pictures.  (That was almost all of them.  But me, my camera, my kids, and 2 hours equals hundreds of pictures.  I love digital.)  Needless to say, I panicked.  I've never done that before.  I called my dad to see if he knew what to do.  He sent me a link to this software. 

http://www.amazon.com/Sandisk-RescuePro-Recovery-Software-V3-3/dp/B0013HIT0C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303761991&sr=8-1

I ordered it and miraculously, I recovered all of my photos!  It only cost $2.48 plus about $5 for shipping, much cheaper than the $40 software I had found elsewhere.  So, if this happens to you, buy this, it works wonders and was really easy to use.  When I first started to run it, the screen popped up that says how many minutes it will be.  The number was huge, and when I converted it to hours it was over 1.1 million hours.  I thought it wasn't going to work, but it actually only took about 20 minutes.  Phew!  Another little tidbit if you ever have this problem:  If you lose pictures from your card, stop taking pictures with your card.  If you take more pictures you might overwrite the old ones.  Don't do anything until you recover them.  I hope you don't lose your pictures, but I hope this helps someone if you lose your pictures down the road.

On with the pictures.

This is Why I Send Jayden to Preschool

On a normal Monday morning I drop off Jayden at preschool, maybe run a couple of errands, come home, exercise, and shower.  And while I shower Sidney plays in the playroom.  On the days Jayden doesn't have school, they play together in the playroom.  But it's Spring Break, so things were thrown off a little.  We had some fun plans for the day, so I hurried to take a shower.  They stayed downstairs for some reason.  They do that occasionally, but they always seem to migrate upstairs anyway.  After my shower I called to them to come upstairs to get dressed.  They came.  I looked at Sidney and wondered how all her hair got tucked into her shirt.  A couple minutes later she looked at me and said in an innocent voice, "Jayden cut my hair."  I realized then that her hair wasn't tucked into her shirt.  It had in fact, been chopped off by her big brother.  I was horrified.  HORRIFIED!  I cried.

When I asked Jayden where the hair was he showed me.  Notice the toy vacuum sitting nearby.  It was sitting on top of the hair.  He had tried to vacuum it up.  I don't know if he was trying to clean it up or hide it.

I am still horrifed.  I can't tell you how sad I am. She had such pretty hair with these awesome natural layers and a cute little flip.  Josh loved to brush her hair after her bath.  It has taken forever to grow out and I'm just so so so sad.  He hacked it up bad.  I almost tried to fix it on my own, but looked at the 18 different layers and decided against it.

We made an unplanned trip to the salon.  Sidney did great.  Better than me.  I almost cried when a little girl showed up for her first ever haircut and she was about 8 years old.  Her hair was long, down to her waist.  I wasn't planning on growing her hair that long, but I just wasn't prepared for her to lose it so soon. 

She was so funny, looking at herself in the mirror.  She keeps telling me, "I like my haircut.  I look so pretty!"  At least she likes it.  I don't.  I'm trying, but I really don't like it.  I feel terrible saying that, but that's how I feel.  It's still uneven.  Jayden cut it so short the stylist said this was the best bet.  So in a few months she'll have to get it cut again.  Sad.

Here's a better view.  Still so uneven, maybe cutting it myself would have been just as bad.  I know it's just hair and it will grow back, and it could have been worse.  I keep telling myself that.  It took Jayden until the next day to tell me why he did it.  He said he was cutting paper, then decided to cut her hair because he thought it would look pretty.  When I asked him if he thinks it looks pretty now he said no.  And Sidney keeps saying every once in a while, "Jayden cut my hair," and, "Jayden, you cut my hair!"

I Heart Faces

At the beginning of the year I told myself I would get better at photography.  I think I might be about 1% better than I was when I started.  I have been looking at this website for the longest time, I Heart Faces.  They have tutorials and weekly challenges.  I love it.  I love looking at all the entries and imagining I'm good, which I know I'm not.  I get decent photos sometimes and a little editing doesn't hurt.  Anyway, I decided to start entering challenges to stretch myself a little and it gives me ideas of what to take pictures of.  There is a different judge each week that picks their favorite top 10 out of hundreds of entries.  So the chances of winning are slim to none.  But I came in 10th this week!  And I feel pretty cool because a lot of pros enter these contests.  The theme was shadows.  There were only 300 entries this week, normally there are anywhere from 500-800, so my chances increased, but go me!  So now that I've won, I am sharing with you.  I made another blog just for photography (since this one is private) and have entered a few other photo contests, one of which I was in the top 5, but in that one there were less than 30 entries.  But hey, I'll take it. It has also been fun getting feedback from other people, which I was not expecting, and even some followers.  Anyway, here's the link.  I've put a lot of these on my blog already, so you've seen most of them. 

Photos by Shyann

Creative name, right?  And what did I win? 

Bragging rights.

Here's my shadows picture.  Thank you Jayden, for being such a (non)willing model. I will make you dinner.

Dress

I finished a dress for Sidney.  She wuvs it.  She picked out the fabric.  She picked out two fabrics that didn't match, but when I pointed out that the polka dots were like Minnie Mouse, she decided that was ok.  I think the dress turned out ok.  It's never exactly like the picture, and this was the biggest pain of a sewing project.  I was ready to throw it out a few times, but seeing Sidney twirling around in it made it all worth it.

Jaydenism & Sidneyism

Jayden-

Last night's question that was so important Jayden had to get out of bed to ask:

"When can I get my own cell phone?"

From a 5 year old?  Really??

Sidney-

She's really sweet.  Like, really sweet.  She melts our hearts on a daily basis when she gives us big hugs, puts her head on our shoulders, and says, "I wuv you."  Over and over and over.  She's even so sweet when we read books she hugs it and says things like, "I wuv dinosaurs," or, "I wuv Minnie."  And so on.  She says she loves all kinds of strange things.  But the best was when we were driving home from church and she started saying, "I wuv my poop!"  And when that got a laugh out of me she laughed and started shouting it the entire way home.  Then this morning at the store she started shouting it again.  Lovely.

I was trying to get her into the car and said, "Come here, my little girl."  I put her in the carseat and she smiled at me and said, "My little mommy."

Hail-tastic!

Saturday night we were finishing up dinner when it started to hail.  Normal hail.  It wasn't a big deal so we opened up our front door to watch.  Within a couple of minutes it was getting bigger.  And it just kept getting bigger and bigger.  It was insane.  The hail stones were smashing into the ground and breaking into pieces and flying all over the place.  Later when we watched the news they said it was falling at 120 mph!  The hail we got was golf ball size, but other places nearby got up to baseball size.  It was nuts.  It looked like there were snowballs covering the ground.  When it started to die down the kids gathered them up and they're now sitting in our freezer, for what purpose, I'm not sure.

Normal size hail:

Craziness.  It came down in probably under 10 minutes.

She wasn't scared.

They filled up 2 or 3 of these bowls.  The kids thought it was the coolest thing that has ever happened.  Jayden kept yelling, "Oh my GOSH!  Oh my GOSH!"  And, "This is HAIL-TASTIC!"

 Josh lived up to this shirt by running out in the hail to gather it for the kids.

As you can tell, this is one of the most exciting things that has happened around here in a while.