Happy Thanksgiving

Real chefs don't make this just for Thanksgiving...

Happy Thanksgiving, all, and may you truly be thankful for all of your blessings.

God DOES bless America, our home sweet home!

Happy Birthday Tommy!

It's my brother's birthday today. Every few years it falls on Friday the 13th. Ooooh! Spooky!

I remember when we were living in the Lapeer house and our cat ran away from home. It was an outdoors cat, so I don't know why we were so surprised when he took off. I was sooo sad about it! For days I waited for that cat to come home.

Then Tommy's birthday came. On Friday the 13th. And we were all getting ready for his birthday party when the neighbor calls to say he found our cat. Or something like that. I was little. I just remember that after Mom got off the phone with someone, she said that our cat was found. So that Friday the 13th was actually a LUCKY day.

Hopefully this was another lucky one for you, brother!

In honor of his birthday, I did a Mohawk photo shoot with Olivia and Lucy for his birthday card. Unfortuately Lucy's 'hawk did not translate well onto film. Oh well!

As soon as I gave my name to the girl at the photo counter at Walgreens, where I was picking up my prints, she said, "I LOVE the mohawk photos! They are so cool!" Then she went on to tell me that she did the same thing with her son (who is same age as O) and how her fiance went bananas over them. He insisted that they be made into 8x10's and framed.

What can I say? Mohawks are awesome.

And mohawks on babies are priceless.

Here are some gems from the photo shoot. I hope you got your card already, brother, so that this doesn't spoil the surprise. But I couldn't wait any longer to post!!:

Getting started:

"Mother, are we doing ANOTHER photo shoot? Seriously. If you make me do another one of these I swear I'm going to feed Piglet to the dog."
"You shall put the camera down and stack blocks with me instead!"

The one baby and dog shot. Lucy was kind of nervous about sitting in a rocking chair. She had been even more nervous at the sound of hairspray being dispensed into her fur. She is so obedient!

Reflections in being a caged baby...

Oh, crap. Now that I've busted all my friends out of jail, who's gonna get ME out??

You know it's hard out here for a punk...

Extreme Dining Room Makeover

Before I post pics from Olivia's birthday (you'll just have to wait, heh heh heh!), I wanted to share the "Birthday Surprise" that JB and I worked on in preparation for Olivia's and Dad's birthday party. I was motivated to do this after seeing photos of other parties in our dining room, and realizing the sheer ugliness of that room. A dining room should be a focal point, but ours was more of a "try to ignore it" point.

Evidence:





Now, before you start judging me or the previous owners for the stellar color choice, please note that it was a group effort. The purply-mauve trim was from the previous owners, but I picked the blue. Called "animation blue" and it makes me think of Disney. The intent was to strip the oak woodwork at some point. But we never got around to that, and just let the blue walls clash with the purply trim. And neither of those paint jobs were done very nicely to begin with. It was just one big garish blob.

Here it is before I got a hold of Animation Blue. Don't you love the plastic chandelier?:



This was the heat vent. For one thing, 2 wrong vents do not make a right! Secondly, if you're going to have a hole for a heat duct, you might as well have an actual heat duct hooked up to it, and not have a hole that drops straight to the basement. I believe that it was these owners (and not someone before them) who redirected this duct to go somewhere else. WHY????



So, firstly, Mark and Marian got us a lovely register cover for Christmas one year, after we had the heat duct restored:



And THEN, here is the room that Olivia and my Dad got to party in on Saturday! We think it's much better. We painted that lovely green as we listened to MSU school Michigan in our annual football showdown. It felt good to be a Spartan that day. Go Green!







I consider our work to be a small feat, as we did this while dog/house sitting for the in-laws for 2 weeks. So we balanced living at their place and living/painting at ours. Lots of long days, but it's worth it!

Calendar Girl

Earlier tonight JB called down to me from the office, saying gravely, "April, you'd better come up here. There's an email that you need to see."

"What is it?" I called back.

"You're not going to like it."

I was quite baffled about what bad email he could receive that I wouldn't like, so I hurried to the computer to read the message.

It said, "hello April,

we have chosen to use your photo that is looking from shore out into a bay."

JB is such a trickster!

It was an email from the Clark Twp Rec Committee (where Cedarville is, in the U.P.), saying that they chose my photo for their 2010 calendar. How cool is that?? I'm sure there weren't scads of entries as it is a very rural area, and considering the lack of grammar consideration in the man's email, I don't know how professional the contest is, but it's still fun to be picked!