B lost his first tooth tonight!

Help, please!

We had pictures taken of the kids by this local photographer. I think she did a fabulous job! Now we're trying to figure out which ones to order prints of. The next three posts have all the pictures. Please tell me which are your favorites! Family, feel free to place your order in the comments.

Both my adorable kids

Here are all of the ones of them together. You can tell in some cases that B was being obnoxious -- I'm not sure if that wrecks the picture or makes it. I think I'd like to get the three that are horizontal (#1,2,3) and hang them together in a frame with three windows. There are a couple of the others that I'm partial to also though...

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

Sweet Z

And these are the two of just Miss Z. She wasn't totally happy about having her picture taken by a stranger, so it was tough getting good ones. I've asked the photographer if she can crop any of the pictures she's got to come up with at least one more of Z, preferably a vertical one. Of these two, I like the one with the real smile better.

UPDATE: She created two verticals for me! See #3 and #4.

#1

#2

#3

#4 (same as #1, but vertical to go with the vertical shots of B)

Handsome-o-saurus

These are the three of just B. I think I want to order all three! I love how you can see all his freckles in the third one, and I love the devilish grin in the first one.

#1

#2

#3

*$@&*(!^

A couple pictures

Facebook dilemma

So this girl I used to know growing up has tried to friend me on Facebook. Let's call her S. We lived in the same neighborhood & were friends in elementary school & junior high. Then in high school, S turned mean. It's a long story & I'll spare you the details, but she and another girl did something really really awful to me once that I have never forgotten. It hurt my feelings very badly, and was horribly embarrassing too. Only a handful of people knew about it, mainly the adults in the neighborhood that discovered it, told my parents, then took care of it. But still. The other girl offered a lame apology ("I'm sorry for whatever it is you think I've done") when her parents forced her, but S never apologized. I really never spoke to her again after that. She moved away after high school, and for 23 years, I never heard a peep from her. Until now.

So I have a dilemma. My initial reaction when I saw the email from Facebook was "No way!" Why would I want to allow someone who was so incredibly mean back into my life, even in that tiny, insignificant way? Part of me thinks that if she could do something so despicable back then, there's something fundamentally wrong with her, something that has to still be there in the adult S. But then another part of me says, "Oh, grow up J." After all, it happened 23 years ago, and she was a teenager then. Teenaged girls are notoriously mean. It's time to get over it. Forgive & forget. Then the really vindictive part of me, the little tiny bit of teenaged girl that remains, thinks it would be AWESOME to ignore this girl who was so sure she was so much better than me back then. A little rejection would do her good. Revenge is sweet.

Obviously, this is not a big deal. It's just Facebook; it's not like she wants to get together or is moving in next door. Even if I let her into my Facebook world, it's unlikely it'll ever go any further than a tiny version of her snotty face appearing on my Facebook homepage every now & then. But it's actually been a week or two now (I've ignored her request so far), and I can't get it out of my head. Am I being petty in holding a grudge against this girl? Does that say something deeper about who I am? Do I need to let go? Or am I justified in still feeling hurt over something that happened 23 years ago when we were kids? And if so, is it justifiable to continue to shut someone out of my life over an incident like that?

So what would you do? Reject, ignore, or friend? And am I being a baby?

Extreme cuteness

If you have a heart condition, you might not want to look. I can't responsible for what happens if you do. Consider yourself warned!

We're free!

I dug us out this morning & we headed up to my parents' house this morning. The roads were very wet, but not at all icy. It was still snowing hard, but the temperature was so high that it was melting faster than it was piling up.



Yesterday B went out with Kenai in the afternoon.



I think Kenai got a little rough with him (he does outweigh B by about 50 pounds), and B sent him back in after a few minutes. He then moved on to plastering the bricks on the back of the house with snow, and stopped to admire his handiwork.



Apparently it was exhausting work, because the next time I looked out the window, he was crashed on his belly in the snow.



Kenai is loving the snow:

5 minutes

That's all it took for the evil genius to accomplish this. I went to take a shower, and came downstairs to this:





Is it just me, or does he look a little smug about it?



Z was perfectly happy to be taped to her booster seat though. She seemed to think it was fun. In fact, in that first picture, she's trying to smile and say "cheese."

Holy schmoly

It snowed all night. It's still snowing. If this snow wasn't so wet, I think there'd be about five feet of it by now. I'm a little worried about losing power -- the lines are sagging pretty badly. Nooooooo! Don't leave me trapped alone in the house with these two kids and no contact with the outside world!

Same shot I posted yesterday, only with about 75 more tons of snow:

Springtime in Colorado, Chapter 2: Snowbound

The kids and I are snowed in (M is out of town). We've been getting incredibly wet, heavy, slushy snow all day. The roads are a mess. We went out to Safeway late this morning to stock up for a couple days, and there were cars stuck all over the parking lot. Luckily, ours wasn't one of them.

I am SICK of winter. Spring fever is killing me (has anyone ever died of spring fever before? I may be the first). I'm visualizing myself watering my vegetable garden, deadheading the flowers, splashing in the kiddie pool with the monkeys, but what do I get? Two freakin' feet of snow. Hey, at least somebody likes it:

FOR SHAME.

I've been hearing about these "TEA Parties" all day today, and I am disgusted and frankly rather pissed off. TEA is supposed to stand for "Taxed Enough Already." Whatever. This is pure-t greed. Thanks to Shrub, the idiots these people worship haven't been paying their fair share for the past eight years. I'm talking about the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O'Reillys. [Most of the yahoos who are participating in a TEA Party today don't realize that their own taxes didn't get cut by Bush, and may have even gone up. But they don't know that, because they don't bother to scrape off the propaganda to get at the reality underneath.] 

Those days are over. Thankfully we finally have a leader who understands what fundamental American values are, and has the guts to stand up and demand change. Part of that change is demanding that everyone help pay for it. 

What are you people protesting anyway? Do you oppose affordable health care? Do you oppose education? Do you prefer our roads and bridges crumbling as opposed to safe? I imagine you think all the people who've lost their homes and jobs thanks to the Bush administration's refusal to exercise appropriate oversight on the financial industry DESERVED IT. Right?

Know what I think? I think these TEA Parties and demands for "revolution" are un-American, unpatriotic and undemocratic. That's right, I said undemocratic.  We are a nation of laws, and we have a democratic process that you can utilize if you disagree with the policy choices our leaders are making.  I think the right-wingnuts are sore losers. For eight years you told us "Elections have consequences." Well, it doesn't feel so good when those consequences don't go the way you want, does it?

Go home you crybabies. Pay your damn taxes. Oh, and when you get a tax cut from Obama (because almost all of you will), send it back. Don't take the improved health care that will be available soon, and make sure you keep paying too much for it like you do now while the rest of us pay less. Make your kids enlist & look forward to their emails home from Iraq. THAT is how you stand on your beliefs, not by standing in a park and holding a stupid sign saying "Revolution." Ass****s.

I am MAD as hell again.

Actually, they're both pitty coot if you ask me

B with his wolverine claw. He came home from preschool with those notched popsicle sticks, then disappeared downstairs with a roll of tape and some scissors. A few minutes later he came back upstairs proudly sporting the claw.



Z is supposed to wear glasses. We tried it last summer, and it was a disaster. She broke prescription glasses three times in two weeks. We ended up deciding that they were more of a danger than a benefit at that point, and gave up until she was a little older. Then a couple weeks ago, M had a brilliant idea: why not buy her some cheapo glasses at Claire's and let her play with them? Maybe she'll break them, but at least it's only $5 down the drain instead of $100+. Or maybe she'll like them & will actually wear them for fun, which would make it easier to get her to wear "real" glasses eventually. It worked! She loves them. She rarely gets them on right (usually they're upside-down, which is extra-coot), but who cares? At least they're on her face and she's not secretly trying to snap the stems off while we're not looking.

"I pitty coot" Z says

I'm just dying to put cute little things in Z's hair, but the poor child just doesn't have much hair. What she does have is so very fine and drier than the Sahara. I have to keep hacking it off in the back or it's just a big rat's nest. OK, I don't actually "hack" it, but I do cut it myself every few weeks. We call her 'do the Mommy Special.

At B's behest, we tried a ponytail in spite of the lack of hair. B also picked out the bling she's got around her neck. Every now & then, he really enjoys getting out all her play jewelry & hair pretties & dressing her up. Then he generally knocks her down, makes her cry, and laughs maniacally as he runs off. Sigh.

Colorado spring

Pictures from March 27, the day we got more snow than we'd previously gotten the whole entire winter added up: