Curiosity

Curiosity is a great and terrible thing.  This statement is true for everything.  For me in the photography business, it means more work trying to accomplish learning or doing whatever I'm curious about.  This is great in the newfound knowledge, skills and offerings, but not so great for the amount of work I need/want to accomplish on a given day.  For the kids I think we all know what curiosity brings both great and terrible.

Blake is looking pretty pleased here.  For a little background, I have a desk with my computer set up in the living room.  It makes it so I can 'hop to' throughout the day constantly switching gears from work stuff to mommy stuff.  In the mornings I work while they are eating their cereal then often a little longer while they color.  Sometimes they play on the front porch that wraps around the front and side of our living room with big windows and a glass door I can keep an eye on them.  Last week they were done coloring and headed out to the porch.  I heard them and looked up to make sure their little heads went to the windows.  After about 10 minutes of them not coming back in at all, but staying in site, I happened to glance over at the table.  NO crayons....  Uh OH.  In the image here Maddie is holding a scrub brush.


Here she is scrubbing away at the porch rail {in vein} to get the crayon marking off.


Blake doing his best {also in vein} to get the crayon off.  Luckily we had three scrub brushes so I had the main muscles needed to get that stuff off.  Unfortunately my muscles weren't enough...


Here's a close up of the damage.  They got every single post facing inward to some degree with crayon along with some of the floor planks and the glass table tops.


The white is chalk which just washed off.


I finally thought of my old friend, Comet, who helped me get the boost needed to get the crayon off.  The kids actually did a fabulous job of scrubbing the entire time I was cleaning off the posts to help me.  They pretty much refuse to clean anything by themselves and demand that Guy or I help them with whatever the clean up project is.  Hopefully, they stay willing to clean for a long long time!



Yesterday in the late afternoon Guy says to me that Madison is way to quiet.  We called for her to come in the living room.  After a minute she came out with a big smile on her face.  I asked her what she was doing and she lifted her dress to happily show me her artwork.  Wondering where she could have possibly gotten a marker to make these kind of marks I headed to her room.  There was my black eye liner with its cap replaced lying next to the make up bag.  Guy suggested I take some pictures so we headed to the back porch to catch the last 5 minutes of daylight.


Blake was busy telling his Maddy that what she did was bad and then he turns to me flashing this silly grin.  The kid has so much personality.


Madison thought she was doing well flashing me all kinds of smiles since I was taking pictures of her artwork {hence why I don't do it most of the time}.  We had to have a serious discussion about why she cannot draw on anything but paper and only with her crayons.  Such a sweet remorseful face with the black eye liner mark by her mouth.


She's starting to think it's funny again here transitioning from serious to smiley.


Back to the grumpy face thinking of how she did a bad thing.


The designs were rather interesting.  She's starting to use a teeny tiny bit of control when coloring.


Then they were off to play on the slide.


Happy as can be


Until she remembered to check out her artwork.  She really wanted to take a bath to clean up though not enough to cry about it.   I made her wait until normally scheduled bath time.  


Love this shot through the tent at the setting sun.


Since I was laying down taking that shot it made it easy to take a picture of me too.


And another.  Not that you can tell in this image, but I got about 4 inches cut off my hair.  It's awesome.  The cut works absolutely perfectly with the perm remnants for a nice wavy body.  It dries nice with very little product needed {only a bit of leave in conditioner to keep the frizz away}.


Blake and Madison wanted to get in on the action taking pictures with mommy.  It was a bit harder to get a focus and two of in the frame holding the heavy camera at arms length with a 50mm lens on it.  A 50 mm isn't very wide so it takes only a small view from arms length away.  This shot is another example of not good focus, but an image I love.  He was so serious about getting in an image with me smooshing his sweaty head against mine.  He didn't get the whole lay down next to me part.


His happy look as he looked back at me before going into the house.


I have not idea what he was saying.  This kid constantly talks.  OK, maybe he only talks about half they day, but it feels like a lot.  Sometimes he has so much to say he starts stuttering trying to get it all out at once.


I'm pretty curious to see what is going to happen next in our life.  Hope it's a lot of great things!  One great thing that has happened the last couple weeks is the loss of 2 more pounds.  I'm officially only 1 pound away from the weight we got married at {and spent my high school years weighing}.  Though my muscle mass is no where near as impressive so about 5 more pounds can come off to be the most comfortable skinny weight with no funny lumps anywhere.  Happy to stay here and happy to lose a few more to see what it feels like.  

Buh Bye!!