School Portraits: The Legacy Continues

So, we got Erin's school pictures back the other day.

AWESOME.

I see she inherited my super powers! So this post is the sequel to this one.

We didn't bother with re-takes; we mostly wanted her class picture, and that one was OK. Re-takes would've cost $10! That's crazy. Not a gamble I care to take, either. I don't like the odds.

Running with the Devil

We spent Saturday at ASU! It was homecoming, so there was a lot of stuff going on. Lots of booths & things to look at. We went to the parade. The kids had never been to a parade, so it was a new experience. Erin was pretty happy about all the candy they threw! (check out the knees of her jeans from her clamoring to get it)

We walked down Mill Avenue for a little bit, and Erin got to see lots of hippies.

After lunch, we walked over to the stadium for the game. The shade crept over our seats just before the game started, and the weather was perfect! We beat Washington State 31-0, so the game was a lot of fun.

I was sick all weekend, so that probably wasn't the smartest way to spend Saturday, but I'm glad we did!

Robbie has been singing "Fight, Devils, down the field" over and over since Saturday. That boy needs to learn the other lines to the song.

Only one more home game left this season!

Wild Kingdom

OK, I think I'm a pretty good sport with all the creatures that live around our house - lizards, cicadas, worms...

But do they seriously need to come INSIDE the house?

This lizard has been living under our oven for the last two weeks. In the afternoon, when the patch of sun reaches the oven, he comes out to sun himself. What is this, a resort? Does he brag to his lizard friends?

Granted, I haven't seen any crickets in the kitchen recently, so he's earning his keep. And I like lizards. I just don't think I need one in my kitchen. The kids are pleased.

The little stinker never comes out very far, so I can't quite get my hand behind him before he scurries back under the oven. I try several times a day. At what point do we just decide to consider him a pet?

Speaking of pets, the poor cat. If she gets a peek of the lizard, she'll hang out in the kitchen for hours, staring at bottom of the oven. A while back, we had another lizard in the house, and I don't think she has ever forgiven me for relocating it outside. She just doesn't see that much action in here, you know? She tries, but I think our lizard is pretty safe.

So in the meantime, I'll have to be OK with a creature under my oven. But every afternoon when the sun patch gets closer to the oven, you know either the cat or I will be in there, ready to pounce.

Behind the Scenes

Bear with me, because who knows how this will turn out! I think one of my favorite things about old pictures is looking at all the stuff in the background & piecing together all the memories. (i.e. "I remember that Michael Jackson poster!" "Look at our huge console TV!")

I took a picture of Robbie cleaning up after lunch today. When he eats something especially messy (mashed potatoes today) I'll take his shirt off, and I'll let him play in the leftover bubbles from doing the dishes (makes cleaning him up easier).

So when I uploaded the photo, I was looking at the details. I think I'll ramble about some of them! In no particular order...

1. Window open, partially dressed kid, November 12! Arizona is awesome.

2. I like my purple kitchen. It looks dark in this picture, but it's pretty bright. I painted it before Erin was one. Above the window, I have vinyl lettering that says "Many have eaten here, few have died".

3. By Robbie's head are some glass vegetables. The tomato's stem is the perfect home for my wedding ring when I'm washing dishes or doing messy kitchen stuff. There is a bell pepper, a carrot, and a chili in a copper bowl behind the tomato. When I was working for Phelps Dodge (now Freeport MacMoRan) in their old Tempe office, I would meet my parents for lunch pretty often at Casa Reynoso on Mill Ave & Southern. Sometimes my mom and I would look around in a dollar store that used to be in the same strip mall - that's where the glass vegetables came from. I just liked the bright colors.

Casa Reynoso! For my Arizonan friends, if you like the Mexican food in Globe-Miami, this is it. It's the same family that runs Chalo's in Globe. For anyone else heading to Tempe, you can't go wrong with the red chili or bean burros, and the gollo burro is my favorite (green chili, whole beans, pork... mmmmm) It's also a good place to run into people from home.

Back to the kitchen.

4. I see Robbie's underwear band peeking out from his shorts. Completely potty trained for a month. Yay!

5. He's standing on one of our dining room chairs. My parents bought the table and chairs for us when we got married. From Smitty's, even! Before they were all Fry's. We furnished our first apartment pretty well from family. Our living room furniture and our bed all came from members of Rob's family, and I still have the dresser I used since I was a little kid.

6. The phone (sticking up behind Robbie's head) was a wedding gift from my friend Brian. My EAC friends will remember him! Unfortunately, we've been out of touch except for occasional e-mails or running in to each other. He's the drummer for The Cremains - although I haven't seen them play for almost 10 years! Nice guy, super smart.

7. The copper bowl holding the glass vegetables... I have two of them. The other one is always full of M&M's on the counter. One year my mom and my friend Cyndi from work both got me the same exact bowl for my birthday. They both knew I love copper stuff, and I was glad to have two! It was great. I always kind of keep my eye out for stuff to add to the copper collection in my kitchen.

8. The day we moved into our house, our cat got stuck in the corner of the cabinets just behind where Robbie's standing. I opened the lower cabinets to let her check everything out (you know how weird cats are in new environments). Well, she disappeared. We thought she got outside somehow, and I felt terrible because we hadn't updated the tag on her collar with our new phone number yet. I was imagining this poor kitty wandering an unfamiliar neighborhood & being eaten by dogs or run over or just being scared. It stunk! Later that night when Rob and I came home from one of many trips to Home Depot, we finally heard her meowing & after about a half hour, Rob figured out where she was. There was a gap in the side of the cabinet's interior that led to a no-man's land between the two banks of cabinets. She's not the sharpest crayon in the box.

And now I think I've exhausted every detail I can possibly talk about in the picture. :) Maybe one of you will post a mundane picture & ramble on about what's going on behind the scenes!

Fourth picture in the fourth folder...

I saw this on Summer's blog & thought I'd see what I came up with. Post the fourth picture from your fourth folder!

This was after I painted our cardboard haunted house for the Trunk or Treat, and I had just taken some pictures of the kids I babysit so they could make a little Halloween craft with their photos. Robbie needed to have his picture taken, too.

With his car. Notice how he carefully placed it facing the camera. Good shot of the birthmark on his leg, huh? He thinks it looks like a football.

Happy Halloween!

We went to our ward's Trunk-or-Treat last night. (I think everyone knows about these. But if not... everyone in the parking lot decorates their trunks and the kids go trick-or-treating to the cars.) It was a lot of fun, as usual! They had hot dogs, popcorn, homemade root beer & cotton candy, and of course lots of games.

Erin got to run around with her friends for a little bit, and Robbie got really good at saying "Trick or Treat" and "Thank You"!

I am currently typing very slowly as I eat the chocolate off a little tiny Milky Way.

The kids were chickens for Halloween. I guess Robbie was actually a rooster.

I duct taped pom poms along their belts and on some old shirts. They wore orange pants, I spray painted some old shoes orange, and I made chicken feet out of foam paper. Erin's face paint stayed on really well, but Robbie's was pretty spread around by the time we got around to taking pictures!

Here's a closer look.


Thank you to Rob for getting all the pom poms! The kids and I didn't go to the ASU/Georgia game with him a few weeks ago, but I told him to get a whole bunch of pom poms if they were giving them away. He ended up with 52 of them! We picked him up after the game, about a mile and a half from the stadium. He walked all that way with pom poms stuffed in all his pockets... people honking at him & stuff. Hard to look cool when you've turned your shorts into a hula skirt.

And here's our trunk. Of course the lighting doesn't show up, but we had some black lights & strobe lights to make our cardboard haunted house extra spooky. Our dangling bats didn't show up in the photo. Erin was making quick work of her cotton candy, and Robbie had been freed from his costume and was happily munching on a Dum-Dum. What more do you need?


The kids had a great time! We had a hair-washing-and-bath marathon, and we all went to bed tired.