You Capture: Emotion

This week’s theme of the You Capture blog carnival hosted by Beth over at I Should Be Folding Laundry is Emotion.

Emotion? Yeah, we've got that.


Sad...

More sadness...the hide-your-little-red-face kind...



Content and happy...

This is the only staged one. I asked Grace to show me her mad face...Her real mad face isn't quite as cute. ;) But she really does crinkle her forehead and nose like this.

Sad...




Excited...





Happy to be with the Wii...



Calm...

Silly... (Is silliness an emotion? It is around here. And we see a lot of it.)

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Majestic

O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Psalm 8:1

Majestic

O Lord our Lord how majestic is
Your name in all the earth
O Lord our Lord how majestic is
Your name in all the earth

The heavens declare Your greatness

The oceans cry out to You

The mountains they bow down before You

So I'll join with the earth
And I'll give my praise to You

Lyrics from Lincoln Brewster's song Majestic.

Wordless Wednesday: The bus stop

A bus stop in Athens, Georgia, on Broad Street/Atlanta Highway.

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Overheard: Feelin' the pain

Josiah was complaining a few weeks ago about how he didn't sleep well with Grace in his room the very first night, since she was repeatedly rolling over and hitting the wall and the sides of the bed. Robert apparently made one too many jokes about this…

Josiah [totally serious]: After I get tired of having her in my room, she'll sleep in your room, Robert. Then you can feel the pain.

~~~~~

Grace found the chewable Benadryl I had decided to keep in my pocketbook just in case she gets an insect bite while we are away from home, since I've seen further proof of how badly she can react. I explained the purpose of it:

Me: It’s so I can give you medicine if you get bit by ants--

Grace [interrupting]: Or a dinosaur, or a croc-ah-di-yal, or a bay-yah…

Hmmm…I have never seen even one dinosaur, crocodile, or bear in our county. I was really thinking more along the lines of ants and bees.

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Josiah: Is it OK to look in the toaster oven when it’s on?

Later…

Josiah: It’s a good thing we don’t have the kind of oven door you can see through--this way, we don’t see the lasers.

Me: There are no lasers in our oven.

Jason Slade: Yeah, we did away with those years ago.

Why the endless questions? (Because, believe me, there‘s more of his questions I can‘t even remember at the moment.) Why the fascination with lasers? Because while Josiah was with me during The Great Swimsuit Quest of 2009, he looked into a price checker at Kohl’s. He immediately got a severe headache as well as blurry vision for about 10-15 minutes. I sat him down until it passed, and then walked with him back to Customer Service to ask what one might expect when one’s child looked into one of the price checkers. The clerk looked bewildered and said, “Ummmm…I don’t know. No one has ever done that before.”

To which I thought, “Yeah, right!"

(Josiah's not the only one to do this. Right? I mean, I don't personally know of anyone who has done this besides him, but...uh, oh...)

It has made such an impression on him that he did it again that same afternoon with another price checker.

In actuality, he didn’t really look into the second price checker; he was about to take another look but merely saw the red laser zigzagging. He was traumatized all over again, prompting another severe headache. Since that time, Josiah has occasionally had recurrent but very short-term headaches whenever he recalls this traumatic event…or whenever he imagines lasers in our toaster oven. I have checked with his pediatrician, explaining that he is my little hypochondriac on the dramatic side, and she said that the headaches are brought on by his panicky state in recalling the event…especially since the headaches only last a minute or less.

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Jason Slade [going over some ground rules with Grace]: You don’t hit the people you love. You don’t kick the people you love.

Grace [completely serious]: No. You hug dem, you kiss dem, and you bake for dem.

Back home in Athens again

On Saturday, we went to Athens since Jason Slade needed to do some research at the UGA library. The kids and I headed over to Grandad and Miss Kathleen's house for a visit. (I'm sorry--This is going to be a series of photos or else I will never get this post done!)

Grandad reading to Grace.

Looking at photos with Miss Kathleen, who is recovering nicely from knee surgery.

Grace sitting among the stuffed animals on the hearth.

Where's Waldo?

Enjoying a Mr. Bean DVD the kids brought for the trip. It's amazing and just a little scary how often we hear the kids--even Grace--quote Mr. Bean.

We also visited with Shirley while we were in town.

Shirley said it'd been a long time since a little girl "fixed" her hair...and I wonder if a princess has ever been the one holding the comb?

Robert and Josiah both enjoyed playing on Shirley's Wii. He was too distracted to stop me from taking pictures while he was bowling. He tried to convince me what a great idea it would be to buy a Wii...His main selling point was that I would be able to take great pictures of him. Ha.

Shirley attempted to get a group shot of the kids before we left (She had the better angle on these shots):

Of course, it got goofy all too quickly...




We picked up Jason Slade from the library at closing time and stopped to eat before getting back on the road. Grace started doing a Mr. Bean impression over and over again while eating her black beans one by one:

"Uh...Bean."

You Capture: Nature

This week’s theme of the You Capture blog carnival hosted by Beth over at I Should Be Folding Laundry is Nature. These are what I have been taking pictures of this week:

The good...

Sunset after church.

The same sunset at home.

Another sunset at home.

And another sunset. I like sunsets. :)

Baby birds in a nest on our front porch.

Another nest that an ambitious (and, yes, real) bird built in the wreath on our front door. I took the nest down after posing Grace's toy bird. Because, really? Our front door?

Much-needed rain.

My morning glory bush.

Let's just call these wildflowers, okay?

The bad...

The newest ant hill after the rain.

Mean little guys...

And the ugly!

Grace's reaction after being bit by ants on Monday. What you see is from only two ant bites, and she wasn't even through reacting when I took this picture--the sites continued to swell. :(

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Wordless Wednesday: Wheee!

These are straight out of the camera. I don't think I could recreate this blurry/focused effect even if my life depended on it. ;)

Grace with what she calls "magic."

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Works For Me Wednesday: My new swimsuit!

Y'all, I haven't been excited about a new swimsuit since...well, never, outside of childhood. But after my friend Kim showed me the new suit she found at Kohl's, I thought I would give the whole swimsuit shopping thing another try.

There were no tears. I didn't even feel a deep need to self-medicate with chocolate.

I found three suits I would have been happy to go home with. Not just one I could settle for--three I actually liked! But the one I decided on was decidedly different from any swimsuit I had ever tried on.

And at the sale price of $36, it didn't cost a fortune, either. Because if it did, it would not have gone home with me no matter how fabulous it looked.

I looked all over the Suit Yourself website but couldn't find the exact suit I have (pictured below); it turns out that it's something exclusively at Kohl's. You can find it here.

This is another suit I liked.

At 60% off in the store, there were actually several great, very reasonably priced suits. And that works for me! (Thank you, Kim!!)

Check out other Works For Me Wednesday participants at We Are That Family.

Fun in the sun shade

The boys set up the Spiderman water slide in the yard (mostly in the shade, at my insistence...Robert insisted I add that disclaimer) and played

and played

while Grace played in the pool end of it in between the boys' trips down the slide.

The boys gently pushed her down the slide, too.

And then...this is almost certainly when Grace was (unknowingly) brushing off ants. (A nearby ant hill was getting splashed with water, and that was what angered them. They traveled a few feet to reach where Grace and the boys were standing.)

She didn't even know she was getting bitten (probably because of the cold water, along with the bits of dirt sticking to her camouflaging the black ants). A little later she came to me, crying, because she said she had scratched herself...it was actually an ant bite further up her leg. At that time, I only saw a huge welt across her foot. I immediately gave her Benadryl and started applying Hydrocortisone cream, since I already knew how she reacts to ant bites.

When I was on the SEVENTH site, with more sites--and more welts--still appearing, I called the doctor's office. (How much is too much Hydrocortisone for a three year old? I didn't want to overdo it. And how much Benadryl could I give her? She was still continuing to react as time went on.)

One doctor visit and two prescriptions later, the ants bites finally appeared in a distinct form (replacing, for the most part, the numerous welts) and I counted at least 21 ant bites. :( She's still very itchy occasionally, but otherwise is doing well.

The boys went back out to play in the water later that afternoon; I put Grace in the bathtub to let her splash a little. It's going to be a while before I let her outside again with the water slide--at least until I can kill several hundred ants...