Dancing and waiting for sunset

I decided to take the kids to the park after dinner and play and get rid of some of their excess(and never ever ending) energy. The sprayground was still on and so of course Kate and Sam had to stop by and visit. Hopefully, today wasn't the last day, otherwise, we will miss you dear sprayground. Anyway, after that the kids were wet and still hyper, so I decided to let them run around the front yard until the sun kissed the sky goodnight. There was dancing, bubble blowing, and Katie pretending to be a flower girl. You may wonder why there are barely any pictures of my dear Sam these days. It's because he DOES. NOT. SIT. STILL. EVER (oh wait, except when he sleeps during his 1 nap or at night). Trying to get a decent picture of him, with eye contact, would take an assistant, whose age is more than almost 4. But I'll include a pic of him, in all his boy glory, which includes a scraped up face and some grass. Go figure.

A pre-Birthday celebration

Keep this on the DL, but next week Miguel turns the BIG 3-0. Eeeeekkkk....I guess that means that he is really, officially a grown up? Maybe? Nah....we'll never grow up. LOL Anyway, we had a small family get together. His big present this year is our trip to St Thomas (yeah, you know I'll share pics from that trip, I am sure they will be in the 1000s. Seriously.) I took a few pics on Friday just to mark the occasion.


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Oh Bubbles....

We love bubbles here. Katie is not a happy kid without bubbles being around at some point during the day.




And a couple of bonus ones of Molly, just because.


"Don't you dare take my picture!"

"Really? You're going to torture me like this? Really? I should poop on your stupid camera. Really."

Atlanta and the sky

On top of Stone Mountain

And the rest of the hot pinkness....

Hot pink, it's her favorite color.

I still have one more session after this to do with Kate. We'll get to it at some point, I guess. :) This is one from last week. She was just being crazy for these pics. Nothing I could do, 'cause ya know, she's only 3.

Yesterday's Session with my model Kate....

I was going to try and do a slideshow, but for some reason when I play the slideshow the color management is horrible and the colors look neon bright. You should fix that, Flickr. So here they are for you to look at.

Katie's Portraits

Teaser Pic. First of 3 sessions. Did the first one today. Studio session tomorrow and an urbany session sometime this week. :)

Katie, The Conqueror

So as some of you may know Katie has quite a fear of heights when it comes to climbing and slides. But yesterday at the park, she climbed up the little climbing thingy and jumped down the pole without much hesitation. Yay Katie!! She goes back and forth between being scared and not scared, but now that she's getting older maybe we can cast aside her fear of heights, just maybe.



We did lots of stuff at the park yesterday. Bike riding, playing soccer, a quick run at the sprayground, and Popsicles. Normal run of the mill kid stuff. Oh and Katie insisted that I post a picture I took of her and Molly and one of her in her igloo tent. LOL. Just showin' her love for her pup and her new toy.

Bowling and Gymnastics

Put them together and you'd have gymnastic bowling. Now, that would be something wouldn't it? LOL. I haven't been posting much since last week we all had the stomach flu and this week is a team challenge at Crossfit. The challenge means lots of strategy planning about how we are going to make it into the gym everyday and earn our team some participation points.It's all very exciting stuff, really.
Anyway, once we were feeling better last week we took Kate to her gymnastics class. She LOVES gymnastics. Hence the gymnastics picture, and yes, I am sneaking a pictuer through the door, because mommys aren't supposed to stay and watch. But who can help it? She is so cute walking backwards on the balance beam, forward rolls down the mat, and jumping all around being crazy. Soon she will be starting a dance class too. We'll see what she likes better. We were also going to do soccer, but we will be missing quite a bit of the first fall session, so maybe in the second fall session or the spring. Meanwhile, I think dance and gymnastics and all the fun things mommy has planned should be enough to keep her busy until Christmas.
We also took the kids bowling last week. Kate, of course, participated and loved it. Sam tried to pick up bowling balls and ran around all willy nilly. Bowling is exhausting when your kids are young. Oh and in case you were wondering, Miguel kicks my butt in bowling. Once of the few areas he can.

Some conversations just need remembering.....

This convo took place in the bathroom as we were getting ready yesterday.
Katie: "Mommy, what can I be when I grow up?"
Me: "Whatever you want to be when you grow up. "
Katie: "Well then, I want to be a mommy when I grow up."
Me: sniffle...slight tearing of the eyes, because that's just so sweet..."You can be a mommy when you grow up, but you can be other stuff too."
Katie: "Nah, I just wanna be a mommy."

Of course this convo was followed up later in the day, by this question:
Katie: "Mom, how do I become a mommy when I grow up?"

I will say that I followed that question by explaining she needed to be married to a daddy first and then she could be a mommy.

So that part of the conversation was followed up this question:
"Mom, when I grow up will you help me find a daddy?".
Here's where I chuckle, and say "Sure, if you really want me to when you grow up."

LOL
I don't think that she'll be asking me for that help when she grows up. Still it's a sweet thought.

The return of sunshine

Since the sun decided to make a brief appearance yesterday, the kids and I headed out to the Sprayground. To dry off after the sprayground we drew with chalk, where Katie drew the planets and Sam ate some of the chalk. We sat on the sidewalk watching Sam run around in the grassy area generally being a boy, while we sat sunning on the sidewalk, generally being girls. The sprayground wasn't enough for them yesterday, so after lunch, Katie wanted to do the water slide in the backyard. I took some video yesterday because I decided that we needed more video of the kids. I hardly ever take video these days. Time to change that I think.

Katie enjoying the mushroom at the Sprayground.



This one is Sam and Katie enjoying the pool in the backyard.


And I just love this pic from Katie playing underneath the mushroom. Taken with my p&s (point and shoot for you non-photographers) S3IS. Gotta say for being like 4 years old and a p&s, it does pretty well.