10...9...8...

Owen has joined the space race.  We spent nearly an hour last night watching YouTube videos of (only successful) launches and landings.  It's not of the actual shuttle, but the end of this one is my favorite:



Whatever you do, don't call a space shuttle an airplane.  A perfectly good playdate went south on Monday when Owen's playmate had the nerve to misidentify spacecraft as aircraft.  Oh, and also don't mention the whole cancellation of NASA's Human Space Flight program.  Let the kid dream a little longer.

Teenage Marriage (Updated)

Scott and I got married 13 years ago today.  His groom's cake was chocolate with Han Solo and Princess Leia atop, plus some really awful purple flowers I've opted not to recreate here.

And now we have a Yoda.  (Not true to George Lucas' original storyline, I know, but height specifications limited me to Yoda or R2D2.  And don't even ask why they're all on a planet with a chocolate icing lithosphere.)

Happy Anniversary Love!

Update

I asked Owen to take a picture of Scott and me with the cake, and he delivered on his first try.  Scott's in trouble now that there's a third person in the house who can take "couple" shots of us.   

First Day

Owen started a new year at Mother's Day Out today.  Let's all feel sad together and recall what he looked like on his first day last year.

He was a cool cat when we entered the main building this morning.

He was a cool cat when we approached his classroom door.

But then said door was opened to reveal a circus of recently abandoned toddlers weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth.

His face went blank and his mouth dropped open, and I know for a fact he was thinking, I really have to stay in here with all these whack-a-doodles?

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Let's part with something fun.  We chatted incognito with Beck Beck and Uncle Joe last night.  Chatting any other way will be boring to me now.

Joe does a wicked Inspector Clouseau, and he never breaks character.  

Photography assignment

Owen loves to take pictures, so I gave him our point and shoot camera and told him to go take pictures of his favorite things:

Now I just need to learn how to use my DSLR so I can take pictures of him taking pictures.

B & A: Staircase

A short nine months in the making, here is our new stair rail:

It has been an odyssey.  And I mean more Homer Simpson's than Homer's.

We started with 40-year-old railing so wobbly and so low it couldn't have passed safety inspections in India.  And I can't believe I didn't document it in a photo before we had it stripped, but there were two stories of gold metallic flame stitch wallpaper on three of the walls.  It kinda looked like this:

I think it was really expensive stuff, but it just wasn't for us.  There was also a leaky skylight where the drum shade now hangs.

If I had it to do over, I would opt to drive the interstate rather than walk the unimproved hiking trail... barefoot... through purgatory... with no GPS, but I'm pretty happy with our destination.

O-shun

I know it's really just a gulf, but Owen likes to call it "de O-shun".  Remember April?  All it took was one more trip to cure him of his fear of the waves.  I guess next time we go down he'll start surfing?

Beach Trip: Oil Spill Edition

I confess I was morbidly curious about what we would find when we got down to the Gulf, but thankfully there was far more evidence of precaution than actual oil.  The one and only tarball I saw is in the bottom left corner of the above picture.  I felt like I was meeting a B-list celebrity when I came across it.

Makeshift work stations were spaced a few hundred yards apart down the length of the beach.  The folding chairs were comically out of place, but I guess giving the workers beach chairs would have been a real public relations blunder.

Long weekend

We've decided to take a last minute trip to meet up with some friends here:

In case you're feeling envious, just remember that we must first survive 5 hours here:

Frog Advisory

It's been stinkin' hot around here this summer, but we can always count on the cool water and the shade down at the creek.  We've watched little black dots along the banks become tadpoles and those tadpoles become frogs.  We've caught minnows and crawfish and chunked hundreds of rocks (most not directly at anyone).  And even though Owen always comes home with ears and pants full of sand, it's about as close as I can get to a perfect day.

Everyday Owen: Self-portraits

The result of some fun in the car with a disposable camera.