Tuesday, March 29, 2011

My Budding Artists

Ally is really good at drawing dragons and warriors and stuff. AND she does have some mad nunchuck skillz - for real. She took karate and everything and has a nice orange belt to prove it.



(Is it "numchuck" or "nunchuck"? It sounds like numchuck, but when I google it, the most legitimate sources say "nunchuck". What's up with that?)


Morgan said it took her over three hours to do the shading on my upper lip.


Apparently there's more where THIS came from.

(But hopefully I won't be the recipient of it. I don't know if my self-esteem could handle much more.)

Thursday, March 24, 2011

35

I am in awe of my daughter, Morgan.

She got a 35 on her ACT.

That's almost a perfect score. In fact she did get a perfect score (36) on her English and reading sections. She got a 35 on her science, which surprised even her, and then her math was a 31, which is still a great score - in fact it's the same as her composite from the last time she took the test.

AND she was really sick the day she took the test. She had already missed 2 days of school. She was so sick, I told her not to worry about the test at all and that she could take it again in a month or two.

I'm sorry to brag here. I just couldn't keep it to myself. I'm so proud that I'm bursting.

Bursting, I tell you.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Random Photos And The Short Stories That Accompany Them

This is a pinata of Summer Wheatley. We ended up with it after a Napoleon Dynamite party at our friends' house last night.

Ally won this bling as a prize. Austin was VERY sad, so now he is the proud owner. He started out as Pedro (hence the leftover moustache if you look closely) but is now Kip.



This is the new rug I got for the laundry room. I was going to paint it this shade of blue (with some new white beadboard) but now I wonder if there is enough blue in the rug. I like the rug because it reminds me a little of how they decorated The Wynn in Las Vegas. (And it looks "happy". I try to surround myself with as much happiness as possible because there is a lot of junk out there that could drive me crazy if I let it, and sometimes I do.)


This is what our downstairs bathroom looked like last week. It is now painted, though to be honest I don't totally love the color. We were trying to work with what we had. Hopefully it will work for 5 or 10 years and then we can deal with it again then. I'll show the finished room when I get the trim up and change out the light fixture and hopefully frame up the mirror too, which may take a few weeks.

This is what the walls looked like from removing the wallpaper and border from the top half of the room. Not sure what happened, if the walls weren't primed before the wallpaper or they had to use extra strong wallpaper paste to put the border on. All I know is it was a pain to fix.


This next one makes me laugh. Every time I look at it.

Here's the story: I happened to have a good hair day a couple of weeks ago. I really wanted to have a picture of myself because good hair days for me are few and far between and I wanted photographic evidence. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to take a picture of me but I finally asked Morgan and she halfheartedly snapped a photo but it wasn't very good. It was from far away and kind of dark. I really wanted a good picture, so I tried to casually snap a candid looking shot of myself while I was pretending to watch t.v. Unfortunately I missed most of me - except for my nose, but I got a good shot of Morgan. This photo is funny because it looks totally staged but it isn't. That's just what she happened to look like right then - like she was caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Unfortunately it isn't a very flattering angle of her either. Maybe next time she'll take her job more seriously when I ask her to document an important occasion.



And last but not least, the picture that had Hal laughing so hard he was crying and he totally offended Austin's 1st grade teacher......

Austin came home one day saying that they had made silhouettes of themselves. I was so excited because Hal has a silhouette of himself at about that age (which I'm hoping we can get from his mom - he's not sure where it ended up) and I thought it would be fun to hang them together. I asked Austin how his silhouette looked and he kept saying "My head looks berry, berry skinny." I didn't think much more about it until Hal came home and tried to tell me how hilarious it looked. He said he just kept laughing and he hoped the teacher didn't see him, but he didn't think she did. The next time I went to help at the school I saw it. Austin's teacher said "Your husband was laughing at this so hard he was crying." I got the whole story from her. This was the first time she had ever done the silhouettes. Her student teacher had wanted to do them. They had a hard time holding the kids still while they traced the silhouettes and then the kids cut them out themselves. I think Austin looks kind of like a sleestak from Land of the Lost. I said something about his mouth and the teacher told me when she had drawn the silhouette, his mouth had not been open. He added that part himself.

I'm glad he doesn't really look like that!