Scatter.brained

Watch out, I'm warning you...this shall be a scatter brained post. I decided to download some of my Instagrams from FB and share over here.

We spend 5 days out of the week a few afternoons during the summer hanging out at Deedee/Brew/and Aunt Shannon's house trying to stay out of the ridiculously, absurd heat. This is what we resorted to the other day...

Yep, that's a baby pool in the big pool...don't be jealous. Emery was pumped to be out of her little raft and have that all to herself!

Last night, we promised Trey that he and Emery could have a 'slumber party' in his room. We got the trundle all pulled out and set them free to have their fun at about 8:00. So, at 10:30 the room finally got quiet. Before I crashed, I did a quick walk thru to find them like this...

My heart melted. As much as these 2 are a mess, it just doesn't get any better. I may or may not have turned on the light to take a picture of this. It's a good thing that I have hard sleepers!

Friday, was Mimi's {my mom} birthday. She didn't want us to do anything over the top, so we went out to dinner and then had dessert at her house. I decided to make her birthday cake...she requested chocolate and white icing. I jazzed it up a little bit and did a raspberry filled chocolate cake with buttercream icing. I'll have to share the recipe, I just need to find it again. It was way yummy! Don't judge my icing skills, that has to be my least favorite part of baking...

Last, but not least...when you have kids, one of the most asked questions is 'who do they look like?' Poor Emery is going to look like me, at this point I think it's safe to say she doesn't have any hope. The following picture is of me at about Em's age now...

To finish up, I have to share one of my FB statuses from this weekend. I thought Joe was going to pull the car over he was laughing so hard...here's the status:

As we are driving by Target, a {grown} girl walks out in a bikini top, basketball shorts, and some kind of cartoon crocs {not lyin'}...Trey's response? 'nuh uh, that is unacceptable! A girl is not supposed to wear that!'

Don't say I didn't warn you that this post would be scatter brained!! However, if you hang out with me long enough, you'll know that's how I roll.

{Summer}

We are enjoying the first few weeks of summer. Why, you ask? Because we've been doing a whole lot of nothing! I take that back...last summer the picture takin' business was s.l.o.w. Not this summer! We are loving it, we've picked up some new props and can't wait to start working them all in! We are going to hit up the garage sales in the morning to find some more!

I am trying to brainstorm ideas for Emery's 3 year pictures...can't decide what 'theme' I want to go with, or which Etsy shop to buy it from...decisions!!

I can't wait for next Friday to get here....COACHES OUTREACH! It's one of our favorite weekends of the year. This year, several of our coaching friends will be there...SO excited. There will be a trip to Fredericksburg on Saturday which is never boring.

While we're gone to Coaches Outreach, Trey and Em are taking their first flight on an airplane with Mimi and Grandma. I'm kind of sad we won't get to witness their expressions, but I know their grandma's are excited to get to witness that.

I cooked yesterday and baked/iced a cake for my mom's birthday....write it down, it hasn't happened very often. However, I finally made a meal plan for the week 3 days...baby steps y'all. I'll share the recipe of the cake if it tastes any good tonight. I made a raspberry filled chocolate cake with butter cream icing and raspberries around the bottom.

One of these days I'm going to have something exciting to blog about, I hope.

Well, Hello Blog...

Oh, my goodness...2+ weeks with no post. SORRY!

We are still alive and well, just super swamped. The last 2 weeks, I have had 3 shoots a week! I am NOT complaining! However, when you mix in the end of school with that, and a trip to Sea World...whoa!

Here's a little bulleted recap of the last few weeks, and then I should be back in the swing of things this week:

• The end of school was uneventful...hallelujah.


• Data Recovery LTD...RECOVERED MY PICTURES FROM MY HARD DRIVE!


• We've been in the pool a few days each week. Trey up and decided that from one day to the next that he no longer needed his vest, and that he could swim. NO lie. He is swimming across the pool unassisted...so proud.


• Emery is in the midst of potty training. We have our good days and bad days. She is a mess though, and when she's tired of thinking about it she will just bring me a diaper and say, 'me want diaper on, no more panties'.....wonder where she gets that laziness? {don't answer that}


• Joe and I celebrated our 8th anniversary yesterday...we celebrated by driving home from San Antonio and going swimming. Don't be jealous of how romantic we are! :) No worries, we decided we would celebrate Friday!


• We used the teacher fun passes to go to Sea World on Monday, and had a blast! If you don't have coupons to get in to Sea World....holy cow, it's expensive!!! The only ticket we had to buy was Trey's and it was $49.99 + $20 parking. Adults are regularly $59.99! We had such a good time with the shows, and letting the kids pick what other little things we saw. I loved seeing their faces when they saw something new, priceless. The pictures are over here on Facebook, {You might have to friend me to see them, but let me know who you are...I have to practice what I preach to Trey and Emery and not talk to strangers!} I am too lazy to put the pics over here at the present moment. Again, I'm not quite sure where Emery gets that trait?!


• Last night, we put Emery to bed in her pj's. I did my rounds to check on the kids before I went to sleep. I found Trey sleeping peacefully in his bed looking so sweet. However, I had to put my hand over my mouth when I went to check on Emery. She had stripped down and out of her pj's and was passed out across her bed in her bathing suit. This girl y'all...is giving me gray hairs.


• We are home now, and counting down the days until our Coaches Outreach Marriage Retreat...can NOT wait!!

Off to bed, and to gear up for 2 photo shoots this weekend!

Rambling

Well, the days are flying by and we are only 7 days away from SUMMER!!

Here is my current Facebook status:"The last full week of school is upon us....does anyone else hear the choirs singing, "Hallelujah!"?! :)"

Y'all...this year has been complete craziness. I taught a brand new class to me, and I've made it out alive. The state of education right now is pretty scary, but luckily Joe and I are safe, for another year. The rumor is that it's going to be worse in the coming years. I love teaching, and pray that I get to be in it for the long haul.

We haven't been up to much in the last few weeks, other than the usual...school, home, play, photo shoots, etc. It is finally hot enough that I see many, many days in the Brewer pool. Speaking of Brewer's...Shannon, one of my oldest friends had her baby on Thursday, and I got to be there...it was a beautiful thing. Click here to see his pictures.

We are still dealing with my hard drive crash. I should know something this week. Should they be able to recover the data, I will be chopping off my right arm, and selling my kidneys just to pay for it. Hey, who needs those things, right?! Moving on...

It's hard to believe that football season is knocking on the door...2 months! I am however, more than PUMPED for Coaches Outreach this summer. I just learned that several coaching couple friends will be there, and that means one thing...FUN.

Well, I'm off to supervise my students finishing up their projects stare aimlessly at the never-ending brilliant ideas on Pinterest!

7 more days people, 7 MORE! {and 3 of those are 1/2 days!!}

Graduation!

Trey graduated from his preschool last Thursday. Lord, help me. I swear I blinked and my baby boy grew up. Sigh. I will make it. I have all summer to get myself prepared for the first day of school. Luckily, Joe will be taking him and he won't have to witness his mom being a blubbering mess. Moving on. His preschool {my high school's Early Childhood Program}, put on a fabulous shin dig and Trey loved every minute of it.

He's doing the monkey dance...

The picture does not do his hip action justice...

He was picked to lead the Pledge...

He did SO good!

With his 2 buddies...

The scrapbook they do is AMAZING.

Each kid gets one, and we LOVE it!

Sweetness.

Mimi and Em.

My school also has a culinary program, and they made the cake.

It was DELICIOUS.

In case you're wondering, NO...I do not have my data back yet. It is going under the knife sometime this week. We may be out of a home, and have to sell the car broke as a joke...but by golly, I'm gonna get my pictures back.

Hard Lesson to Learn

Don't worry that this will be what my external hard drive looks like in the next couple of weeks.

You know the drive that has everything...I mean EVERYTHING on it. The drive that is going to cost me $500+ to get the data recovered. {Hit the pause button...I need to go vomit in the trash can really quickly}

Seagate, shame on you....actually shame on me, because this is twice. First time shame on you, second...shame on me. You, however, have failed me for the last time.

Before you start shaking your finger at me and telling me I should have backed it up. I thought I DID have it backed up...no thanks to Backblaze. We purchased that over a couple of months ago. I set it up to back up our C:/ and my external...they tell you in the initial back up phase that it can take a couple of weeks. Every night I'd look at it and it said it was still running and backing up. It doesn't necessarily tell you which drive it is in the progress of backing up though....so, much to my disgust yesterday when I went to check my restore file, it only had the C:/ done. THANKS FOR NOTHING BACKBLAZE. If I hadn't already paid you for a year, you'd be fired too...kicked out to the curb, right along with Seagate.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Best Buy and begged the Geek Squad girl to give me good news. Darn her, she didn't listen. She told me it was 'dead'...hence the fact I'm going to have to pay $500+ to recover data. I may or may not have gotten in the car, called Joe, and started my pity party and bawling the whole way home. The drive has everything...school work, design work, and gazillions of pictures. Y'all in less than 2 years I've managed to fill up a 500 gb drive...that's how many pictures. {I might throw up again} I could care less about the school files, they can keep them...but the pictures. They are worth every penny that it's going to cost me to get them back.

Learn from me....sign off, and go back up your pictures right now {go check out the cloud drives on Amazon for online back up}. Thankfully, I have a husband who is level headed and is managing to keep me calm and see that this is not the end of the world. I know there are much worse things in life, so I'll go put some big girl panties and deal with it. On a more positive note...I took and passed the Adobe Certified Associate exam in Adobe Photoshop yesterday, whoop!!

Have a great week!

Just did it.

I think I've mentioned that Joe and I are weanies when it comes to spending a lot of money in one fail swoop...we just don't do it. I garage sale, I rarely buy anything that isn't on sale, and Joe and I haven't taken a true 'get on a plane and go somewhere' vacation since our honeymoon. We simply cannot afford it, without putting it on a credit card...which we refuse to do. We have even cancelled our annual drive to Illinois this summer...because it would cost us $600 in gas alone. No.Can.Do.

So, fast forward to Friday afternoon. I had told Joe that I wanted to offer mini sessions in Galveston. I love the history there, and the possibilities for locations are endless. He got online and kept sending me google maps of where I should look for locations. As I was staring at my computer screen in class, I sent him a text and said...'Let's just go!' {totally uncharacteristic of us...we both usually talk each other out of something in 5 minutes} We had something we had to do Saturday morning, but that was it. Our little kick off to summer came to fruition and we took off for Galveston Saturday before lunch. We didn't tell the kids where we were going, except that we were going on an adventure. They were THRILLED when they finally figured it out.

Saturday, we didn't make it on to the beach...we went over to Crystal Beach on the ferry {Trey LOVED this} and went to Fort Travis to explore the cool bunkers. Joe was like a kid in the candy store. We found an open manhole that dropped down about 6 feet and would have gone into the bunker area...I told Joe he would have to walk home, just to keep him out of there...We left there and checked into the hotel and then were off to the strand.

Sunday morning, the kids were up and at 'em at 6:30 a.m! We grabbed a bite to eat at the hotel, and then were off to find a good beach spot. We found just that, and the kids had a blast! I finally got Emery in her itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini! Note to self...a not-quite-3 year old in a white skirt on the beach doesn't last very long. Hmmmph. Anyway, we made some great memories and I'm excited to have more little quick trips like this in just a few weeks when SCHOOL IS OUT!!!