Movie Memories: Florida 2012

I tried out putting my favorites from the Florida trip into a mini-movie for us. Just before I left for the trip one of my favorite bloggers posted a tutorial on how to do it and gave tips on lengths of video clips etc that make a good movie. You can find that post and tutorial by clicking here.  (the movie on the post of her daughters first ballet class is so sweet, worth watching!) This was fun and will be easier now that I gave the hang of it, looking forward to recording more of our memories this way. 

Back from the Beach.

Well we are back from our week at the beach and this face pretty much sums up how we feel about that...

.... okay not really, we had a wonderful time but we are enjoying getting settled back into our normal around here. Since there are 373 pictures (you think I'm kidding but that's the actual count in the picture folder after fuzzy ones were deleted) and that's not counting videos we took, expect more posts to recap our trip to come. But for now there's laundry and other chores to attend too as we settle back in today. Hope your enjoying your holiday weekend. We are glad to have an extra day together tomorrow before the real world fully returns. 

A great day.

I had a pretty great day today. Here's our Mom's Day fun in Instagrams.

After my morning run someone greeted with a big smiling saying "I put stickers on!". I got a sweet card that had the Agenda for the day listed inside, which was basically do whatever I want day. 

We enjoyed lunch at the Louie's on the lake and then spent some time playing at the lake after, watching sailboats and kayakers on the calm waters, blowing bubbles and kicking her ball. 

This isn't from today but it's making the cut as one of my favorite mom moments these days. She often says "Mama will you hold my hand", when Ryan is driving and I'm riding in the beside her. 

Part of the agenda included some "mommy time" which I interpreted as a pedi and shopping at the mall time. 

Here's the two that made my day special. 

Another recent pic that I love. Being her mom is a blessing I don't even have words for. It was fun to celebrate that today. It is also a tremendous blessing to have the mom I do, I learned so much about how to nurture and love from her. Happy mom's day!

A weekend in the country.

We don't have to go to far, just our the front door to enjoy our weekends in the country. And this weekend sure had a lot of country living to offer. 

Ryan worked hard getting the rest of the landscaping completed and Ava worked hard playing in her new sprinkler:

Living out in the country area now, I do think the sunrise and sunsets are easier to behold. I ran again this morning for the first time since the half. It was an enjoyable two miles despite the humidity, got to take in great sun rise views. Here's our Saturday night sunset, view from our front yard:

Also In the last 24 hours here we have seen a turtle, geese, 4 deer, and 4-ft bull snake that caused quiet a stir. Saturday night, Ryan was working on the anchoring the tree you see pictured below, Ava and I were playing in the front yard. Ryan starts to make a commotion as he notices a 4-ft snake slithering past him he has an ax in hand and tries to get it with but it is fast and crawls right up into the engine of the neighbors van! From here this turns into a two hour ordeal, at one point a neighbor calls the sheriff's office, 3 different officers end up responding (guess its a good sign we live in an area where these 3 officers had nothing better to do than watch all this play out). This all ends after trying a number of tactics to lure out with Ryan finally able to get it out and kill it with the neighbors machete. He stretched it out and took its measurements and pictures to figure out what kind of snake it really was. Doesn't appear it was poisonous from our research thus far.

Less eventful but most memorable to Ava a turtle appeared in the yard today. The rest of the evening out of the blue she would say things like. "Do you think she will come back?" ,"I like the tur-dd-ul" , "Mom do you like the tur-dd-ul"? "Did the tur-dd-ul go back?". I have a feeling we will be hearing about the "tur-dd-ul" for some time to come.

Hope your weekend was great too, whether its the country or the city or somewhere in between...

Pre-Party Fun

A video of Ava figuring out the party blower for the first time...

Party Time!

Also last weekend we had a family party again for Ava this year. We were lucky to get to have some out of town friends join us well and a few other family friends besides our immediate families. We did a purple Elephant theme, it did all come together but was a bit stressful the 24 hours before finishing the cake and other details. (Thanks so much AM and Alicia for your help!) This month was so packed I didn't get to do the prep I had wanted to. So I felt like I was running around like crazy the 24 hours before party time. 

AM helped me make these elephant cookies, we decided to tackle working with Royal icing, which neither of us had done. I tried a homemade batch of cookie dough I made from scratch that didn't bake up well, I had picked up a back up roll of sugar cookie dough at the store just in case. If it was just me I would of cried in frustration and defeat and have just given up at different points but AM helped me continue to re-group and stay the course, each step held a debacle of its own. So I am super proud of these little guys, they turned out pretty good! We learned a lot about royal icing and sugar cookies, but don't think either of us are ready to try again anytime soon!

There is something great about being in a room filled with all the people that dearly love your child and are all big parts of their life. Its my favorite of a birthday party, just taking in all that love. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of her actual day of birth, all the family and dear friends flooding the room, when she was just brand new to the world.

She loved her bubble stuff, they were some of the biggest hits at the party!