The Strawberry Farm

Okay, so I'm still VERY behind in my blogging and it might be silly that I'm still trying to catch up, but there are some things that I want to remember... like our trip to the strawberry farm back in June, especially since it won't be there anymore next year.

We got to ride on the train around the farm.  Our playgroup filled up the entire thing!

There's the nice farmer man who reminded us continually to keep all of our limbs inside the train car.

More of the play groupies.

Everyone enjoying the landscape.

Preston took it all in...

The pirates cove...

The grasslike fields...

and the big machinery.

After the train ride we all made our way over to MacDonald's farm.

Where the kids fed the goats grass.

Preston wasn't quite sure about it.

He kept "woof woofing" at the goats (he thinks anything that's black with fur is a dog)

and tried to pet them.

He was so excited when he finally touched one.

After we washed his hands thouroughly we took a ride on this baby

To the long awaited strawberry fields!

Preston always knows what to do with food.

He even picked a few of the berries himself.

Before he dug right in.

Yum!

What's this stuff all over my hands?

Oh well, it's still yummy!

Even with the dirt mixed in.

Hmmm... I don't see anymore around here...

Darn it mom, I don't want to clean up and go home... and quit taking my picture!

We definately had so much fun that we didn't want to go home, but we were tired... and I was ready to clean up my pants that Preston had painted with strawberry juice.  I'm glad we got to go, I just wish we could do it again. :(

A Day at the Playground

Yesterday some friends in our ward met up at a community playground. The kids had a lot of fun playing on the equipment. See for yourself!

Tessa loved to pose for the camera.

Derek liked to growl at the camera.

Sawyer hung out on the swings

and looked off into the distance.

Fia loved the camera too!

But Derek wasn't sure how he felt about it.

Crazy Tessa

Oh so cute!

Sweet Fia.

Jackson liked hanging around.

The moms and babies hung out

and laughed and cried.

Don't hate me for this Amy, you look BEAUTIFUL! Plus we couldn't leave Rigdon out.

Preston sure had a good time even though it doesn't look like it here.

Sawyer was faster than lightning.

Alisi was sleepy

and Jackson kept climbing

While Tessa twirled.

Chloe charmed us all.

Kaho is the one climbing now...

that Jackson has taken over the slide.

As you can tell we all had a great time! Well, most of us at least. :)

P.S. The colors show up darker here than in photoshop, darn it. Maybe if you click on the picture to enlarge it they'll look better.

Boys Will Be Boys

Silly Boys playing at the playground.

Even with all that fun play equipment they decided to sit and pile wood chips on top of themselves.

Of course after thse two pictures Sawyer was done with this silliness and Preston was all alone with his wood chips.  I guess boys will be boys and get nice and dirty no matter how old they are.  I'm pretty sure I found some wood chips in Preston's diaper too.  I'm not exactly sure how those got there. :)

My Little Man is 14 months Old

*photo was taken today after church, on his actual 14-month birthday

New accomplishments in the last month:
- Giving mommy and daddy kisses! He gets really excited when he sees us kiss and wants one too! (Sorry if you didn't want to hear that)
-Throwing any kind of ball as far as he can and "yelling" bao bao (ball ball) every time he sees anything round. He can also put a basketball into a little hoop.
-Holding the remote up to the TV and going uh uh because he wants to watch baby einstein. Then he cries because he wants to play with the toys and kids he sees on TV. He always waves at the kids and says hi hi. For some reason he repeats every word twice. I think it's because he always says woof woof when he sees a dog.
-He'll tell me the animal noises if I ask him what a dog, monkey, lion, sheep, cow, or cat says.
-He'll show me his head, nose, and belly button.
-He's become obsessed with sitting on everything like it's a chair. These things include the edge of the fireplace, stairs, toys, stuffed animals, and daddy's head. We finally got him a little chair of his own that he likes to jump on.
-Putting everything in compartments and putting the lid on. He uses my pots and pans and the garbage can most often. He now has his own set of toy pots and pans.
-Throwing up real food for the first time in his life. Three times in one week, it was pretty gross.
-Building towers and knocking them over.
-Going up and down and up and down the stairs.
-Climbing and playing on playgrounds! Just in time for the rain to start. :(
-Getting his shoes and trying to put them on while crying at the door to go outside.
-High fives!
-Walking up to me saying hi hi and when he's almost reached me turning around saying buh bye buh bye while waving.
-Saying a duh (all done) when he's finished eating.
-Saying der do (there you go) when he gives me things.
-Saying de dow (thankyou) when I give him things.
-I'm sure there's a lot more that I can't think of right now, he's learned a lot this past month!

What he’s doing right this very second:
-Sleeping in his crib with his blanket, dog, and two horses while wearing his full tux tie and all because he fell asleep on the way home from church.

Teeth Count:
-He has fourteen. One for each month of his life! Four top, Four bottom, Four molars, and top Eye Teeth or Canines whatever you want to call them.

What he’s wearing:
-18 month onesies
-12-24 mos. tops and bottoms - I put him in clothes when they're too big and keep him in them until they're a little bit too small. That way he has more variety.
-24 mos. socks
-size 5 shoes
-size 4 diapers, at night he has to wear overnight diapers because he'll wet through otherwise.

How he’s sleeping:
-Around 12 hours at night - sometimes waking up once though, so I hold him for a few seconds and let him touch my hair then I put him back down. I can't complain though because a few weeks when he was sick he was getting up screaming every night and refused to let me put him down. This is a HUGE improvement.
-2 one and a half hour naps during the day or 1 close to three hour nap a day.
-Preston is turning into such a big boy, he's always suprising us! :)

Do you ever...

Look at people in nearby cars as you drive down the highway? As an addicted people watcher (is that possible?) I find myself doing this constantly whenever we're going somewhere as a family and I don't have to drive.

I remember as a teenager driving places in my dear friend Krysta's car (she was one of my bridesmaids by the way) and constantly watching people, trying not to draw attention to myself. Unfortunately with teenage boys on the loose we would sometimes find a car full of them and smile and flirt through the windows. Weird I know. These are the kinds of things I really should keep to myself. We would also look at people and try to guess where they were going, what their names were, what they did for a living etc. Of course this is standard procedure in all people watching situations. County fairs in Indiana are probably one of the best places I've ever found for finding interesting people to watch, but that's another story.

Anyway, today as I was driving down the road enjoying watching how other people work I saw a BIG man in a LITTLE car. Do you ever wonder how people decide what kind of car they are going to drive, and why some people really look like they fit in their cars, and others like this poor fellow look utterly ridiculous? Do you think he was driving his dream car but it just didn't quite fit him? Or was it more likely that it was a gift from his Grandma who can no longer drive. Maybe I'm the only one that thinks about weird things like this. That's about it, the end of my thought... I just thought I'd share.

Crazy Hair and Crazy Pics

One day Preston woke up with his hair looking exactly like this. He MUST be related to me and my super hair.

I got some really cut pictures of him, but the lighting wasn't all they great and he had really red eyes so I decided to try out my brand new photoshop elements to see what I could come up with. I cropped this one and did it in black and white to accentuate the sticky-upiness of his hair.

I love his mischevious grin in this one! Too bad the red eyes make him a little too mischevious.

I decided to get rid of those and brighten up the color a little bit. I also softened his skin and darkened the edges too to help focus the attention on him. It kind of looks like something that could have come out of the 80's actually. Too bad his hair is spike instead of a mullet.

This one is my absolute favorite! Pictures of Preston smiling at all, let alone so naturally are hard to come by, but I didn't like the red fire truck in the back.

I didn't get rid of the truck completely because obviously I have no idea what I'm really doing in photoshop so I just unsaturated the color in that area to make it much less noticeable and darkened the edges again. The only bad part is that it's harder to see his crazy hair.

I also tried to do this picture in sepia but I'm not sure if there is an actual setting for that in photoshop elements since I don't read manuals and just play around with it. I just manually changed the hue and saturation until I got this. Does is look anywhere close to the way it should? Does anybody know if there is a setting for this? It sure would make things a lot easier. Do you like this picture better in color or sepia? I just like how his eyes pop out in the color version.

He looks so serene and calm here in his too small baby pajamas, I just love it.

I tried to soften the look of the picture to go with the expression (a little extreme I know) but I'm not sure if it quite works with such a dark background. I still think his eyes and lips look super pretty.

Here is another one of those sweet calm expressions that we don't get to see all the time, he just looks so peaceful. I thought the bright toys distracted from his mood though.

So once again I tried to lighten up the color saturation and create more of a mellow mood. At first it made his face look too sallow so I bumped up the color in his eyes and lips a little bit. Does he look like he's wearing lipstick now though? Oh well, I still think it's cute.

One last sweet look.

I decided not to go all extreme on this one and just fixed his red eyes and bumped up the color a little.

Now for the opposite extreme. Here is a pouty lipped grumpy face.

I bumped up the contrast on this one, once again going along with his mood.

On this last one I think he was getting tired of me taking pictures of him if you couldn't tell.

I bumped up the contrast again to make it darker as well.

These definately aren't the best pictures in the world because it was totally unplanned but I loved that I got to capture some of Preston's emotion. Maybe I'll have to start dressing him cute every day in case I need to do anymore improv photo shoots. So what do you think? Should I have just left them alone? I think I went a little crazy trying new things. Maybe I'll calm down eventually. Personally I think I liked the subtle edits the most.

Not really sure if I should be saying any of this...

at all, let alone on the internet. First off I must say that I'm pretty mad at blogger right now for deleting my entire rant I just wrote, grrr... I guess I'll have to do it all over again, maybe THAT will help me feel better. First of all I have to apologize in advance for this post, and if you decide to skip it, that's even better.

I've decided in the last few days that I'm going to start posting more of the random things that happen to me throughout the day, whether funny or tragic so I can remember those moments someday, and maybe even help my small audience be a little bit more interested in what I have to post about (the exception would be today of course).

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I perceive myself vs. how others perceive me. When I think I'm acting perfectly normal and being myself (which could be scary at times) and am perfectly comfortable could I be making others nervous, or annoyed? Would it make a difference if I changed who I am. No. I won't change who I am in order to have people like me. They're going to have to deal with me and all my quirkiness and laziness. ;) Yes, I did just say laziness. Sometimes I feel like the laziest person in the world. Sometimes quite the opposite. The whole problem is I have no idea what to think of myself. I mean, I know I'm a daughter of God and that my family loves me (and I love them of course), and I love being a mother, but what else? What am I good at? What are my hobbies? This is where I'm kind of stuck. I know there are a lot of things I"m good at. But what am I great at? Nothing. I start doing a lot of the things that I enjoy doing and think I'm pretty good at, then I start to feel like I'm just a step or two below everyone else that's doing that same thing. You know there are people when you think of them, "Oh, she's the great organizer and multi-tasker, she's the great piano player, she's the scrapbooker, she's the singer..." and if any one else dares to try doing what the other person is did first and is known for they are thought of as a wannabe or a copycat. "Oh, she's pretty good at walking dog's, but she's not THE walking dog lady."

Maybe I'm being selfish, or childish about this... probably both actually, but I feel like I need my THING just like everybody else. But is it so wrong for more than one person to have the same THING even though somebody else discovered it later? Wow, I'm making less and less sense as I keep continuing, remember I am on a rant. Where was I, oh yea, so my problem is finding that thing. My problem is I get embarrassed easily I think, maybe I don't have the confidence to find one thing and claim it as my own. Could that be possible. It just seems like every time I find something I enjoy doing it happens to be every one's thing at the time. For example, I started going to a dance aerobic class called Zumba that a couple of women in our ward go to and they told me I would enjoy it and I really do, but I still don't think it's MY thing. A zillion other people go though and apparently all of them, okay maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, a great deal of them have decided to become instructors themselves because what else can you do when you're good at something like that. It's not like you can go on tour performing Zumba in every city in the U.S. and nine different countries. My instructor from a different aerobic class I go to approached me and told me about the training saying I should try it. My question is, how can there be over 100 Zumba instructors in one small town? Nope not happening. Of course at the time I was approached I was flattered but at the same time embarrassed, mostly because I know a lot of people are doing it and I don't want to feel like I'm doing it just because everybody else is and it's cool, I'm doing it because I like it.

Maybe I have a complex about this because at one point in my short life (namely middle school and my early years of high school) I wanted to do everything "cool" so I could hang out with the cool people and be popular and I hated it! But now I think that maybe I'm trying to be too much on the opposite end and that's making me miserable too (okay not really miserable, I'm actually very happy, but I'm trying to make a point here) I just need to find a good middle ground. Maybe I will start my own photography business even though other people have done it first, who knows maybe I'll actually end up being really good at it. Maybe I'll end up being really horrible. You never know until you try right? To tell you the truth I think I lack the confidence and zing to do something like that. Oh well, I guess I'll just keep trying new things until I find my niche even if it does drive my husband crazy sometimes... and I'll keep finishing my school along the way, that way I'll have at least someTHING solid in my life in addition to my supportive family and friends. Or maybe I'm just meant to be a mother/wife and nothing else. It could be possible right?

Okay, the rant is officially over. I apologize and promise it won't happen again... for now... probably... at least not for a while. Oh, and sorry if it made no sense whatsoever. It made me feel better at least. :)