Horsies and pumpkins

Here are the picture from Victoria's Garden (finally). This week has been a crazy busy week, though it seems like I always am saying that! Today was Great Grandma Bloughs birthday so we spent most of the day up in Oceanside to celebrate. She turned 89, which means she was born in 1917. I can't even fathom what our world must have been like back then! It's crazy to think that someone so close to us has lived in a time so far away. One day I will be like that, too. It's scary and exciting and a little mind-boggling all at the same time.

I will be starting to teach cooking classes this Tuesday at Horizon Prep in Rancho Santa Fe. That's exciting and will be a good change to our life, though definitely a bit of an adjustment. It'll definitely be good for our whole family for me to get out of the house a little, I think.

Camille has been quite rambunctious this week, she seems to go through cycles. Usually she is so helpful and willing and curious and fun, but sometimes she goes through these phases where she is just grumpy and mean. I guess we all do. This week she has seemed to be testing the waters a lot and beating up on her sister and getting angry and lashing out more than usual, but God willing we will learn where this energy is coming from and have more success this coming week in channeling it into a more positive outcome. To her defense, I have been going crazy trying to organize the house more (we are still wrecked from the move-in) and make Baby Shower invitations for Chrissy and get prepared for my cooking class while still babysitting Riley, hosting a dinner/ bible study and hosting another dinner on Friday night for out-of-town relatives. Jeremy has had a crazy work week and not been around really at all, so it may all be from lack of attention this week. Anyhooo- tomorrow is a new day, right? :)

These pictures are great- well, the one of Estelle on the horse didn't come out so hot but I had to post it! We are really looking forward to Trick-or-Treating in another week and I'll definitely have pictures of that to put up, too!

dinner & pumpkins

Tonight we had dinner with the Holford clan, which was a lot of fun. Camille and Porter are about 6 months apart and have known each other for longer than they'll ever be able to remember. Tonight was the first night that Camille ever has cried because she didn't want me around :) What a milestone... madness! As we were winding down the night Natalie and Jason were loading up kid one into their car and Porter was saying he didn't want to leave. They soon came back to get him and wrangle him into the car and no sooner did they get out the door when Camille began to wail "I want to go to Porter's, mama, I want to go with Porter!"

"Camille," I said "I'm not gonna go with you, though. You'll have to go by yourself! Are you okay with that?"

Wide eyed Camille looked around the room. She was silent as she was contemplating and then she figured it out. "Sissy go too. Me and Sissy go." And that was that. Boy, was she upset when she realized that it wasn't her decision to be made :)

The pumpkins are another story and it was so much fun! Sabrina decided it would be fun for our playgroup to take a "field trip" to this place called Victoria's Garden to go pumpkin picking! It was really cool, it was this farm that is set up with fun stuff for kiddos during different times of the year. During the autumn it is a pumpkin patch that's got all kinds of other fun stuff for people to do. The kids got to ride their first real pony ride and a hay bale ride. The petting zoo was awesome and Camille and Estelle got to pet their first alpaca. Estelle LOVED the duck in the petting zoo and insisted on chasing her around the pen and pointing and yelling "duck, duck, duck!" Camille fell in love with some soft little bunny rabbits and a baby goat. The bouncy house was fun, as always, and all of the kids took pride in choosing their very own jack-o-lantern pumpkin to bring home (Camille was determined to find a "yittle tiny baby one" and Estelle was just so excited to pick on out to call her own and carry it all by herself. I still need to upload the pictures from that trip and search the ones that other people from playgroup post to find a couple of good ones. When I do I will definitely post them for you to see. All in all it was a ton of fun and highly recommended for any kids in the SD area.

The pictures that I posted right now are just random - I thought they were cute! They are from the last time we painted which was Wednesday. They decided it was more fun to paint themselves then the paper this time, which made for pretty bathwater afterwards ;) I swear, that easel is the best investment we have made for them thus far! They love it, and who knows - maybe one day they will both be famous artists. Or, if they get in trouble for doodling in their notebooks in high school instead of taking notes we'll know where they learned it.

Now that I put those pictures up...

Ode to the sparkly shoes, part deux. Thank you, mom, for updating Camille and Estelle's look with some new different colored sparkly shoes :) They love them and I love cleaning up red glitter from different corners of my house.

Painting was awesome and Camille has been talking about it ever since, though I haven't pulled the paint out to let her do it again. Once in a blue moon is enough for me at this point! We did get some one on one time during Estelle (and Riley's) nap time today to color, though, and that was really fun. I think today I learned the importance of coloring with my daughter. It doesn't happen enough. I once heard that working mothers spend the same amount if not more quality time with their children than mothers who stay at home. The statement made me so sad because there was a lot of truth in it. I think those of us who stay at home find that we are constantly busy with everything else in our lives that we lack the ability to step back, breath, and spend some real fun quality time with our children. Especially with two of them, I think that one on one time with each of them is almost impossible - although not really. The day seems filled with a jumbled mess of trying to pacify children, trying to get away from children to get five seconds to breath by yourself, trying to cook meals and clean house and unpack and organize and and and, well, and not really succeeding at any of it. Nothing really gets the quality that it should. I think that working parents spend all day away from their kids that by the end of the day they can't wait to see their family and they make the minutes count more. Maybe we should learn to put things on the back burner sometimes and not try ot do everything at once. Maybe we should make our minutes count more instead of trying to make them pass so fast. Maybe our children would be better pacified if real quality time was spent with them every day in the first place. Maybe a fifteen minute quality "breather" by myself would keep me going longer and stronger for the rest of the day, and maybe dishes would get done faster without two kids crawling up my legs. How do you do that, though? Maybe that's the point of parenthood - to go nuts trying to figure it all out and to become a better person because of it.

so much

It seems the days don't like to slow down! Every day that passes by, I think of all the wonderful, beautiful, insightful things that I want to blog about. The days just pass so fast that by the time it's time for me to be here again there is too much to say. I write nothing because everything won't fit. I have some beautiful pictures today, though, and maybe they will update you on what's been going on in our lives. I'll try to put them in order. I just hope that one day I'll find the time to not let it all slip past so fast, to stare at the beautiful eyes of my daughters and huband and get lost and write about it and remember it and grasp it so that I won't regret it or forget it. Here are the pictures.