The Children’s Museum

Lisa and I took our four girls to The Children’s Museum last week – sort of a “last hurrah” before our big girls start Kindergarten!

I talked my mother into taking James for the day.  He was so excited he demanded to be buckled in the car seat while it was still in the driveway.  :)

My mom said he was delightful and didn’t fuss a bit for her!

They met up with Kathryn (who is in town for a few days) for lunch.  My mom sent me these pictures with the title “Busboy Nightmare.” 

Those eyelashes!

Cutest boy in the universe?  Yes, I think so!

So that’s what James was up to while we were having our girls day at the museum.

I shot everything on Manual at the museum, and boy was that an exercise!  It was pretty dark, but the lighting changed with every room and nook we went into.  Because I’m so behind on blogging and I don’t think any of these pictures are particularly terrific, I’m not bothering to edit anything.  I’m just using the pictures as is to tell the story.  Enjoy!

Emma is using her skirt to hold all the golf balls.  :)

Natalie threw a fit when she couldn’t get her vest zipped up all the way (it only zipped part-way up by design).  Lisa patiently explained to her how it worked.  :)

Emma appears to be the engineer of the bunch; Natalie is just in it for the dress-up.

They all enjoyed the little phone center.

Anna is really strong.  I pulled Natalie up on this thing, and it was tough.  I can’t imagine pulling up your own body weight.

Joanna “helped” one time, but I saw Anna do it all herself as well.

Driving an old Mustang!

The kids had a great time playing together and discovering things.

It was madness keeping up with them, and I only had two!  There were just so many people there, and it’s too easy to get separated in that kind of environment.

There was a craft room set up with all kinds of projects you could make.  They weren’t geared for Natalie’s age, but she was perfectly happy cutting paper while I constructed a pinwheel for her.  :)

All the girls with their pinwheels!

We ate our sack lunch next to where they were playing with the parachute, and soon a couple of ours were lured over to play.

{The sticker on the back of Natalie says “If lost please call” and then lists my phone number.}

They have this giant climbing structure that spans three floors I think.  You have to be five, so Anna and Joanna did some climbing.

It was pretty massive!

The last place we stopped before heading out was this giant main street type place with all kinds of shops.  It was crammed with people, but still very fun!

The girls all loved investigating the ambulance.

Dr. Joanna!

We stopped outside on our way to the car to eat a quick snack before heading home.  I took a picture, but unfortunately didn’t pay any attention to my settings.  I still had the ISO set waaaaay high from being inside the museum.  So the picture pretty much looks like a white piece of paper.  :)

Oh well!

We had a great time – that was a great idea Lisa!

Kindergarten is Coming!

We walked up to the school again this afternoon to drop off the filled-out packet.

The girls wore hats, though it was actually pretty cloudy.  Yay for good walking conditions!

Before we left I got a shot of Joanna in front of the school.

Only one week left!

I know this is ridiculous, but I’m feeling a lot of pressure surrounding that “first day of school” shot.  Soooo… I’ve decided to alleviate some of that tension by taking nine million pictures of Joanna everyday until school starts.  That way, even if my camera breaks or we wake up late or she gets a huge scrape on her face or all her cute clothes are dirty at the same time or she simply won’t cooperate or she’s sick or I’m sick… I’ll still have some great shots from August 2012.  And that’s probably all I’ll care about a few years from now.  :)

Some of these are edited {but only a little}; others are strait out of camera (sooc) shots.  Because they were taken outside in pretty good conditions, I didn’t have a lot I wanted to do to them.  I did take them all on the Manual setting though!!!!

Jumping…

Favorite shot I think.  {SOOC}

It’s a speech bubble, though I think I should have done a thought bubble.  Next time!

This is the face she made when a car turned down the street.

This also gives me the chance to “feel out” different spots for the real back to school picture next Monday.  It’s the wrong time of day though.  Probably not going to find me outside at 7:30am this week.  Gotta draw the line somewhere.

Have I mentioned I LOVE my camera?

Mostly Good Things

This morning James and Joanna slept past 8:00.  It was incredibly glorious!  It was just the most wonderful feeling to have Natalie snuggling at my side, roll over, and realize it was 7:57.  I needed that.  James really needed it.  He’s been having short naps and earlyish mornings.  Yesterday he had a longer nap (1 1/2 hours or so) and he slept in this morning.  He is a NEW MAN!!!!

It’s amazing the things I can get done when he is playing sweetly, instead of crying, screaming, clinging, or a little of each.  :)

It is laundry day for sure around here.  The sun is out so I’m hanging up plenty of things outside.  I washed the kiddos linens, and they dried so quickly outside!  The diapers are out there now, and I couldn’t resist snapping a shot of the sun shining on them.

This morning when I woke up I’m pretty sure some squirrels were playing racquetball on the roof, which made me wander over to the window.  I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but this sure caught me off guard!

I don’t think anybody actually ran into it

9although I did call Matt and ask if he’d done it!).  I’m pretty sure it was just ready to fall.  It’s all rotted out at the ground so the rain probably just pushed it right over last night.

Mainly I’m bummed that it happened on a Monday morning.  Usually, this is the kind of chore we’d take care of on the weekend, but I don’t think it can wait until then!  For now, I have the girls stationed at the window waiting for our mail carrier.  :)

Someday I will drag out the tripod, and we will be a family of five.

I didn’t purposefully leave just Matt out of this picture. 

It was supposed to be a pink girly picture.

But James didn’t know that.  :)

I love it.

Gluten-Free Cookies

This recipe is from my friend Martha, who, not coincidentally, eats a gluten-free diet.

She made them at something I went to at her house, and then sent along the recipe because they were yummy!

Pardon the blurred recipe, my aperture wasn’t quite open enough I think.

The major reason I made them was because I was craving chocolate chip cookies, but I was out of flour.

Gluten-free cookies are a good fix for that kind of situation.  :)

Look at that cute baby leg! {He is covered in baking soda, which he spilled – whoops!}

They have a very interesting texture.

They’re very light and very sweet.  Mine tasted different than I remember Martha’s tasting {still good though}, but I’m sure that has to do with my subbing sucanat for white sugar.  It’s pretty powerful stuff. :)

They were also very crumbly, which I don’t mind.  I just ate them with a napkin under my mouth.  And I made the kids stay in one place when they ate them.