Matthew has always loved tomatoes. Even when he was really little (like 2), when we would go to Olive Garden, we’d order a bowl of just plain tomato slices like they put in the salads, and Matthew would scarf them down like candy. Now that love has expanded to include salads. He was thrilled when he came to the dinner table and saw this one that Mark had put together. Mark and I each had a small helping. Matthew ate the entire rest of the salad, in addition to the rest of his meal.
The KCA’s really amplified Kaylee’s interest in Selena Gomez. She worked very hard on writing her this fan letter. In case you can’t read it, it says (her spelling/grammar)… “Dear Selena Gomez, I love your music and wizards of waverly place! I drawed a picture of you on the back! P.S. I’m glad you won favorite Tv actress on the 2010 kids choice awards. And I voted you alot of times. One of your fans, Kaylee”
And here’s the back…
“I have a qustion? When is your birthday? Mine is April 29th, 2002. Please Remeber me!” And then she labeled the girls “me” (note the I ♥ Selena Gomez shirt) and “you”. The note with the arrow pointing to Kaylee’s eye says “My eye is a little brown here!”. LOL She has some heterochromia in her right iris. I love that not only did she include that detail, but that she offered the labeled explanation. :)
Remember how enthusiastic Kaylee was about voting (and voting and voting) for the Kids’ Choice Awards? Well, the big night finally arrived, so we just had to watch. The kids, Kaylee especially, are just starting to get that the actors aren’t their characters (especially hard to absorb when so many of the characters on these kids’ shows have the same first name as the actor portraying them), and they think it’s really cool when they see them somewhere outside of their usual roles.
This was their first time watching an awards show like this, and for the first half of the show, every time the presenters or entertainers came on, the kids thought they had won something. LOL It doesn’t help that they tend to talk so much that they can’t hear what’s happening. ;) Kaylee was just thrilled when her favorites won, especially Selena Gomez. I love that Selena actually got genuinely choked up accepting her award. :)
The best moment of the show though was when Katy Perry got blasted with slime when she went to pull out the name of the winner of the award she was presenting. LOL
She handled the whole thing really well. I’d love to know what she was really thinking. LOL If you want to see the full context and more of her reaction, you can go see it at Nick here. (I would have embedded this one here instead of the abridged version, but it starts playing immediately, which I couldn’t figure out how to change, and I find that annoying. LOL)
Matthew got his report card on Friday and was pleased to find that he made Honor Roll! He got all A’s in the graded subjects and Excellent or Satisfactory in the non-graded ones. Last quarter he got mostly B’s and struggled with some citizenship issues, so he was very proud and excited that he had pulled things up. :D
I asked him if he wanted that to be the photo of the day. I let him pose how he wanted, and also choose which picture he wanted featured. He picked the one above. The one below was also a favorite of mine. LOL
(Kaylee doesn’t get official report cards yet; that will start next year with 3rd grade.)
The kids often have breakfast-type food as after school snacks. Kaylee requested waffles. While I was waiting for them to toast, I opened a new bottle of syrup, and was surprised to be greeted by this happy little guy in their new “No Drip Cap”. :D
Matthew had a few minutes to kill before leaving for karate, so he entertained himself by tap dancing on the hearth. I have no idea where he picked it up, but he wasn’t bad!
Meanwhile Kaylee paced around the room having an extensive conversation on her “hand phone”. I love the look on her face in this shot.
When we asked her who she was talking to, she answered with an emphatic “none of your business” and went back to ignoring us in favor of whoever was on the other end of the imaginary line. Oh, yeah. Really looking forward to those teenage years. LOL
Back to the usual grind, day 2. I did very little laundry over spring break, so I had an even larger mountain than usual to tackle. I spent a good chunk of the day sorting, washing, drying, folding, and putting away. I expect a few more of these days before I’m caught up. Too bad “caught up” never means “done”. LOL
Spring break is over; the kids went back to school today. So after a nice lazy week, we’re back to the usual grind.
Normally Matthew and Kaylee distract the heck out of each other while they are doing their homework, so I try to keep them separated as much as possible. Today they decided that they wanted to work together in Matthew’s room, so I told them they could if they stayed focused, no goofing off. Surprisingly, for the most part they actually did stay on task.
I snuck in to take a few pictures. They complained about the flash, so I took this higher-ISO long exposure. I love that the kids are basically still, but those pencils are a blur. What hard workers! :D
Enough already. This is Texas. It’s supposed to be warm. Snow accumulation is a once every five years thing here… not three times in one winter. Oh, wait, it’s not winter… it’s SPRING!!!!
Waking up to this was quite a surprise. It had been in the 70’s and sunny on Friday. It was much colder and rainy on Saturday, but somehow I still didn’t expect snow. We didn’t even go out in it this time... you can’t tell very well in the pic, but the snow was still coming down, and there was a nasty wicked cold wind blowing. Mark had a magic lecture to go to, and I had cleaning to finish since the lecturer was going to be staying with us, so the kids and I stayed cozy inside. By mid-afternoon that wind was still howling, but the temps had come up enough that the snow was half-melted.
It was a weird wet snow that even stuck to our window screens in lacey clumps.
I hope that’s the last we see of this for a good long while. The novelty has worn off; I’m ready for warmth and sunshine!
Another episode of “When Kids Are Bored”. Kaylee entertained herself by doing side roll flips over the back of the couch… over and over…
And then Matthew had to try it too…
They were disappointed that I wouldn’t let them do it at the same time. :-b
We took the afternoon to let the kids go to mall and do some shopping, and then stopped by Target to finish up and also grab a few groceries. The kids were in an exceptionally silly mood.
I love the way Matthew’s face scrunches up when he laughs. :)
Matthew tries to restrain Kaylee from attacking the frozen pie case. (We went home with that chocolate one – yum!)
This shot was horribly out of focus, but it makes me smile. I had to make it smaller though – it made my eyes go buggy to look at it full-size. LOL
This whole shopping excursion was actually a surprising display of the kids’ gaining some understanding of spending their money wisely.
Matthew has always been pretty good about saving his money when he has a specific item that he’s saving up for, but he doesn’t do as well without a clear goal. Right now he has a couple of things in mind that he wants, but hasn’t really decided yet, so lately he’s been frittering away a lot of his cash on small random purchases. On this trip, he only bought one t-shirt he found on sale at the mall, and passed up more shirts and toys.
Kaylee somehow always seems to have more accumulated cash (I have no idea how that happens, since they get about the same allowance, birthday money, etc.), and it’s always burning a hole in her pocket. She went looking at shirts at the sale JCPenney’s first, and I helped her narrow down her choices from eight to five to three, and then she decided to eliminate one more all on her own, because she thought she was spending too much. She wanted to save some money to shop at Justice, a store we had never heard of until she got a gift card for Christmas (which she had an agonizing time using, because there was so much she wanted). This time she couldn’t find anything at Justice that she really loved and couldn’t do without. She was disappointed, but actually finally left without getting anything “just to get it”. She did then buy two iCarly toys at Target, along with a box of Peeps for us to have as a treat for movie night. When we got back home and Mark added up the total that she owed us, it came as bit of a shock to her. She wasn’t happy about the dent it made in her savings, so that was a good lesson for her about how things add up. We’re not ready to let her walk around with all her cash, but maybe next time she can bring a calculator. ;)
If this had been a shot to represent what my day looked like, it would have been one of the inside of my eyelids. The time change caught up to me, and as a result of that, mixed in with Kaylee getting me up extra early and me then not being able to get back to sleep, I was a complete zombie all morning and then gave in and slept all afternoon. So it was a very mellow day.
These are shots of Matthew relaxing at the end of the day, watching a stop-motion animation version of “Peter and the Wolf”. He was not impressed and proclaimed it to be really bad. At least it was only a 30-minute short. LOL
We don’t really do much to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (the kids’ milk at lunch and the pears at dinner did turn mysteriously green), but Kaylee made sure she had on at least some little bit of green throughout all of her many costume changes today. Thus the very old, very oversized t-shirt of mine she’s wearing here.
The family room had exploded into even more chaos than usual over the last several days, and the time had come to get it taken care of. Here Kaylee is VERY reluctantly working on her portion of the mess… after Matthew had already gone through and cleaned up his. It really wouldn’t have taken her more than 5-10 minutes if she had just jumped in, but the whining and procrastinating stretched it out much, much longer.
This has gotten to be a regular thing with her lately… the major dragging her feet on anything and everything that she doesn’t want to do. It’s driving me absolutely bananas. I don’t know why she doesn’t seem to get that she’s just making it much worse than it needs to be. She never gets out of anything by acting this way, and she just wastes time that she could be spending doing other things. Sigh. Maybe when she turns 8 the logic will magically kick in? LOL
Kaylee’s been pestering us to let her use her allowance to buy donuts for all of us. Mark finally agreed to take her up to the corner grocery store and let her pick some out. She prefers the ones with the thick chocolate frosting and filling or sprinkles. She found out when she got there that her money wouldn’t go nearly as far buying those as it would getting plain glazed. So Mark suggested they buy the plain ones and add chocolate syrup and sprinkles at home. She liked that idea and the kids said they were delicious, so it seems to have been a great solution. :)
And, as one who has all too much experience with the agonizing process of Kaylee trying to make a difficult decision, Mommy was very impressed with Daddy’s creativity and quick thinking on his feet. :)
Kaylee decided to put on a series of three princess plays for Mark on Monday afternoon. (The kids are on spring break.) This was during the first one, entitled “Princess Runaway”. (Mark had “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” on TV in the background… it’s not relevant to the action in the play. LOL) Her costume involved pinning a butterfly wall decoration (which my mom had made as part of her whole room decor) to the back of her shirt. Since I was otherwise occupied, I never caught the significance.
The second show was “The Princess Magician”, where she wore the top half of her Jasmine costume with a pink satin skirt. And the final show was “Kung-Fu Princess”, in which she wore one of Matthew’s old karate uniform tops with a pink belt with a rhinestone butterfly buckle. This one may have been strongly influenced by the fact that we had watched “Kung-Fu Panda” the night before. LOL
I am a bad reporter and didn’t get any shots of those last two productions, and have no idea what the plots of any of them were. I hope they don’t dock my pay. ;)
Kaylee is just a wee bit obsessed with her birthday. She talks about it pretty much year-round, especially during those excruciatingly long four months between Christmas and the big day. Now that it’s only one calendar page away, the preparations have gotten serious. She spent a good chunk of the day working on this list, researching online for specific ideas. The document has at least a dozen pages (she writes big) on four different types of paper, listing not only gift suggestions (which fall mostly into the “iCarly” and “Wizards of Waverly Place” genres), but also suggested party favors and venues. LOL
I love that the byline has her full name… just in case we didn’t know which Kaylee it was. ;)
It never ceases to amaze me… the ways my kids will entertain themselves when they’re “bored”. LOL Who knew that plastic hangers made good mustaches?
Or horns?
We watched “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure” Friday night. Kaylee made it through the movie itself, but dozed off during the bonus features. It’s easy to get sleepy sitting in the semi-dark (the long exposure on the photo makes it look lighter in the room than it actually was), but she must have been really tired to zonk out in this chair. Maybe she wore herself out stubbornly and loudly and whiningly protesting that she didn’t feel like watching the movie… until she finally gave in and ended up enjoying it. ;)
And in the interest of balance, and just because I like this shot, here’s Matthew at about the same time, his face illuminated by the TV. :)
Sibling extreme close-up. Depending on the size/resolution of your monitor, this might be life-size or larger. LOL I cropped this a little bit for composition, but mostly they were just really close to me. They don’t quite get that I need a little more room to shoot. ;) I love that you can just see Matthew peeking in and looking at her. :)
This was yet another shot taken outside waiting for the bus in the morning. I’ve been so enjoying the fact that it’s actually been light out while we’ve been waiting this week. Unfortunately, once daylight-saving time kicks in this weekend, we’ll probably be standing in the dark again for a month or so until the sun catches back up. [Don’t get me started on how much I hate daylight-saving time. :-b ]
The kids’ school frequently has theme weeks with dress-up days. Kaylee LOVES these; the more elaborate or “out there”, the better. (Some of the themes are so abstract or unusual that Mark and I really end up scratching our heads as to what they must have been thinking when they came up with them. LOL)
This week is a reading themed week in conjunction with their book fair. Today was a “Camping Out” theme… “hike into a good book”. Kaylee’s outfit was thrown together this morning… one of my old flannel shirts (with the sleeves rolled up about eight times), my bandana tied in her hair, and Matthew’s canteen slung across her shoulder.
This pose she struck while we were out waiting for the bus this morning cracks me up. I’d say she’d make a good model, but she doesn’t take direction well. In fact, if I suggest anything, she usually does the opposite just to be stubborn. ;)
The kids’ library books were due on Tuesday, so I headed over while the kids were at school to return the books we had and pick out a new batch. (No time in the evenings to let the kids go along.) Those darn shelves in the children’s picture book section are all so low! LOL I ended up sitting on the floor to save my poor knees. ;)
On this particular day, the library was unusually overrun with toddlers. Seems like a lifetime ago that my two were that small!
Matthew had a school project similar to Kaylee’s rock star doll, except that he had to do a doll of someone he admires. He chose Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II. He and I worked on it most of the day Sunday, with me resizing medals to be printed out, providing material suggestions, and, of course, exercising my awesome gluing skills. LOL Matthew did most of the rest. He traced a photo for the face using a little light table I had as a kid, and then shaded it in with colored pencil. I was really impressed with how it turned out.
The kids had a lot of fun playing with the figure while we were waiting for the bus. (That’s Kaylee in the background, looking down the block to see if the bus is coming yet.) Here’s another shot of Mini-Murphy, stepping on Matthew’s foot. ;)
Kaylee was watching TV and saw an ad for the upcoming Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. She sadly commented to me afterwards that it was too bad she wasn’t old enough to vote. She was super excited when I explained to her that, actually, in this case, she could. :) She kept watching until the ad came on again so that she could get the URL (which she then wrote on her Doodle Board) and asked me to set up the laptop for her.
In a lot of the categories, she’d never even heard of any of the nominees, but in some others she had a tough time making up her mind between her favorites. So she was very happy when at the end she found out that she could come back and vote every day! LOL
Kaylee really likes watching Nick/Disney music videos (Hannah Montana, Selena Gomez, Miranda Cosgrove, etc.) on the laptop. Saturday, after her computer time was up, she suddenly retreated to her room. Matthew joined her shortly afterwards, and they soon emerged to proudly perform their creation, “Listen to Our Harmonies”. They sang it for me over and over… and over. :)
I love that they wrote it on the back of Kaylee’s “Super Singer Award” from music class at school. LOL I’ll come back and post the lyrics if I get permission from the artists. ;)
[This would have been the perfect opportunity for video, but Mark had our little camera that does video out with him (helping a friend with a charity magic show), and I have no clue where the regular camcorder is or how to operate it. LOL Maybe we can get an encore performance later. :) ]
[And, in case you were wondering… yes, Matthew’s tongue is blue; he’d eaten a fruit roll-up shortly before this. ;) ]
My secondary monitor up and died on me Wednesday night. It came quite suddenly, with no warning. One moment she was happily displaying email and photos, and then there was a click, and she was gone; her brightly glowing screen and cheerful green power indicator light were no more. Resuscitation attempts involving swapping out power supplies and signal cables failed, and her warranty time had passed. She has been set aside for now while we consider whether to pay someone to try to repair her. If not, RIP my beloved PL2010M. You will be dearly missed… by me, and also by your younger brother, PL2011M, who is carrying on bravely in your absence .
After much researching, and a spreadsheet involving brain-melting math on different monitor specs, I determined that a replacement probably isn’t in the budget right now. I don’t want to spend money on a monitor that has less than 12” in vertical viewable screen area. It seems that in recent years, the 4:3 format in large sizes has become relatively obsolete in favor of the 16:9 and other widescreen formats. Since I have dual monitors, I don’t need width as much as I need height! And in order to get the height I want in a widescreen, I would have to go to at least a 25” monitor. I don’t know if that would even fit on my desk next to the other monitor, and it’s definitely out of my price range.
So, for now, our old ginormous Dell CRT has been dragged out of the closet and pressed into service. There is no such thing as white on its display; at full brightness, light gray is as close as you get. And the text at my normal working resolution has a headache-inducing fuzziness. I’m hoping I can find a slightly lower resolution that won’t hurt my eyes.
Possibly the worst part though is that, due to the physical depth of the old CRT monitor, I’ve had to pull the flat screen monitor forward several inches. I feel like the monitors are too “in my face”, kind of like sitting in the front row at the movie theater. Not to mention that there’s now not nearly as much room for me to make a mess on my desk! LOL And before you’re impressed that it’s actually clear right now, all the stuff that was there was just transferred to a box and a card table to make room for me to set everything up. :-b
This shot gives a better idea of just how much bigger the CRT monitor is…
At least there’s a window there to give me a couple of extra inches to work with. :-b
This was one of those “I need to go to bed but haven’t taken a photo” shots, but it was actually on my mental list of things to shoot anyway, since this little area says a lot. :) Working sort of left to right, we have …
See… I told you it had a lot to say. ;)
Mark had a Red Lobster gift card that was about to expire, so we decide to run out for lunch. I still feel weird pulling the camera out in “unusual” locations, so I just snapped a few quick shots on our way back to the car… in between hiding from the people who were walking by. LOL And look, there’s my reflection in Mark’s glasses… and it’s more than my hand! :-b
Tonight Kaylee got her first lesson in “Magic The Gathering” (another one of those games that is too complicated for my taste LOL). She’s been showing interest for a few months. Matthew put together a fire deck for her and made her a special custom Barbie card of her own for Christmas. He and Mark helped her through the game tonight, explaining each step and what the cards meant, and advising her on strategy. She seemed to enjoy it, and she ended up winning! :)
I can’t stand cough drops, and I’m not a fan of warm/hot beverages, so I keep a bag of these Werther’s hard candies on hand to help soothe a sore throat. I learned the hard way that {regular candy + major sore throat = lots of cavities for me} so now I always make sure to get sugar free. I’ve had this particular package tucked in my desk drawer for quite a long time, but I finally had to dig them out Sunday night, and I’ve gone through a lot of them since.
(The mess in the background is the sea of papers and such on my desk… sort of a mini version of Kaylee’s floor. But I don’t have to walk on it to get to stuff, so it’s easier to ignore. LOL)
