Spring Time Odds and Ends

I have a few things I have been meaning to post about. They don't really relate to each other, except that they all happened this spring. So I will start with the most recent. This is what my girls did yesterday:

We are finally getting some nice weather this spring. It has been so warm the last couple days the girls begged me to put up the bounce house. We had a non official swim party with most of the neighborhood girls. Non official meaning: the bounce house is pretty much a magnet, put it up and kids will come. Just a funny note about this picture the first one I took Kaylee was on the swing set playing something else, but when she saw the camera she headed right over. She is the one running on the side of the bounce house, that girl never misses an opportunity to be in front of a camera.

Neighborhood Spring Cleaning Party

No pictures on this one, but I have wanted to post about this for awhile because it ended up being a fun idea. My friend and neighbor Irene came up with the idea to have a spring cleaning party. At first I was reluctant, I didn't know how well it would work, but it ended up being a great idea. This is how it worked: you get together about four or five people, more would be too many and you would probably want to split up, then you take one day and go to each of the houses and spring clean. Of course we didn't spring clean the whole house, but we did the basics like baseboards, walls, doors, and blinds. It only took about 1 hour to do each house, and it was so much fun to be able to chat with friends while you get your spring cleaning done. I haven't had so much fun cleaning blinds.

Basement Bathroom is Finally Done.

This has actually been done for awhile but I've had better things to post about. We ran out of money last fall when we finished part of our basement so the bathroom sat on hold with just a toilet and a tub. When we got our tax return this spring we used part of the money to finish it up. This is how it turned out:

Shaun did a great job with the tile. And now we have got a bathroom to go with our extra bedroom. So now none of you have any kind of excuse for not visiting. We will be expecting you shortly.

Fun with Photo Shop Elements

When I was in Idaho this weekend my friend asked me to take some photo's of her new baby. We also took pictures of her two boys. I'm only a novice picture taker, with a nice camera. I like all the practice I can get. It seems like the more pictures you take, the more you learn about what works and what doesn't. I mostly learn what doesn't. Luckily even though I've got a lot to learn about taking pictures, I am getting pretty good at Photo Shop, so even mediocre pictures turn out pretty good once they are edited. I thought it would be fun to show you a few before and afters of my photo shoot.

The Before:

The After:

So, mostly I just cropped this one closer and removed the background color, then make the background darker.

The Before:

The After:

Can you believe this is the same picture? Same thing as before: I cropped this a ton, then I used the cloning tool to get rid of any brown in the background. And finally I used Gaussian blur to get rid of the texture in the black shirt and smooth everything out.

The Before:

The After:

This one didn't require a lot of editing: But two things that editing really helped with. First, cropping fixed the off center problem, and second I wanted to point out another cool feature of photo shop: skin tone correction. I use it in all my photo editing, see how much better the skin tone looks in the after pictures. Such a small thing makes such a big difference.

The Before's:

The Afters:

I was really excited about the editing technique I learned in these to pictures. We didn't want the chair red because it didn't really match the boys clothes. So I was just going to remove the color from the chair and make it a grey color. But I started playing around and decided to use the blue from their sweaters to color the chair. Some of these tools are just like magic.

Temple Pictures

I drove by the temple on my way to check on my crafts and decided to take some photo's so I could play with the editing. I've wanted a good one of the Idaho Falls temple to hang on my wall.

The before:

The After:

Okay I showed this technique a couple weeks ago but its a good one, you really should try it.So I cropped it then remove a couple cars. Then I applied the Old Photo affect and added the writing on the bottom.

Happy Easter

We had a quiet but fun Easter. The weather did not want to cooperate for an Easter egg hunt, but we did manage to color some eggs and the Easter bunny hid the girls baskets with some yummy candy in them. I'm sure we have had general conference on Easter before, but I can't remember the last one. It was nice to just be able to relax at home and listen to a the apostles talk about Christ. My vote is for general conference on Easter every year.

We colored about 36 Easter eggs. Sydnie had fun throwing her eggs into the dye. She cracked all of her eggs, but it is always nice to have a few to eat while you are coloring them.

The Easter bunny came on Saturday morning this year. He left bunny footprints for Sydnie to follow and left clues for the older girls to follow. They all had fun finding their baskets.


The #1 requested candy this year was bubble gum. So the Easter bunny left them lots. Sydnie couldn't wait to did into her bubble tape.


Even Lu Lu had fun on Easter. She had a lot of fun playing with the empty Easter eggs.

Return of the Tumble Weed

Every year I wonder when they are going to show up. It's usually sometime in March when the wind really starts to blow. Last year they showed up when we were at church. We went to church, no tumble weeds, and when we came home, there they were waiting for us. Today when the wind really started blowing, I knew they were going to show up any moment. Sure enough, I went to Walmart and when I got back there they were. All of the houses on our street look this way, although the neighbor just next to us always seems to get it the worst. If you can imagine anything worse than the picture above. We hate the tumble weed, they are the true tumble weeds too, big balls of thorny twigs. The only fun thing about them is after we clean them up, we get to burn them. You can't imagine the huge bonfire this many tumble weeds creates.

Meet Lu Lu!
Yes, its true we have a new member in our house! A cute little puppy named Lu Lu. We have been thinking about getting a dog for quite awhile now. We got pretty serious about it over Christmas, but decided that it would be better to wait until spring, when it would be easier to house train it. We went out looking for dogs today, and fell in love with this little cutie.

Kaylee showing off Lu Lu, she it taking over roll of boss of the dog. She makes sure everyone is taking turns and treating the dog right.

In kindergarten, Brianne had to draw a picture and write a sentence to go with it, about why she loved her family. She drew a picture of a dog and wrote, " I love my family because they are getting me a dog." I will rest a lot easier knowing Brianne loves us now.

I don't know if you can imagine a little girl who loves animals more than Sydnie does. She is never without a stuffed animal, and when she sees a dog, even a extremely large dog, Sydnie is never afraid to go and pet it. Her older sisters don't know it, but they have Sydnie to thank for this dog. Shaun never even considered a dog before Sydnie, but seeing how much she loves animals, finally turned him around.

So wish me luck. I know I've got a tough job ahead of me. Especially these first few nights. Not to mention potty training, so far no accidents but its just the first day, so I better prepare myself. Does anyone know of a good cleaner for accidents? I'm sure I will need it. And what about Shaun, the one we had to talk into the dog? He had had to have his fair share of turns holding it, and the puppy took a two hour nap on shauns lap. So I'm pretty sure he likes her.

Sydnie

I think one of the things I love best about blogging is it gives me a place to write down those silly things your kids say and do. I didn't have a blog when Kaylee and Brianne were little and I didn't get around to writing down all of the cute things they said when they were little, you think you will remember them but even a month later you can't remember exactly how they said it or did it. So here are two cute things about Sydnie I thought I would write down before I forget.

Sydnie calls churches castles. I don't know exactly where she found out about castles, probably from Dora, but one day when we were going to church, she got so excited and pointed to the church saying, "mommy castle". Kaylee and Brianne tried to correct her, but she just kept insisting it was a castle. I of course don't correct her because I think its cute. So when we passed one the other day and she started saying, "mommy castle", I just said, "yep, its a castle". Then she looks at me and shakes her head, "no mommy, church".

Yesterday I caught Sydnie in the bathroom dumping out the air freshener I have for a decoration. This is the second time I caught her doing it, so I gave her a tiny spanking. Evidently it wasn't hard enough because she didn't cry, she just glared at me and when I turned around to leave I felt a little slap on my bum, she decided to spank mommy back. I tried not to laugh, but Briannne and a couple of the neighborhood girls were in the bathroom when this was going on and they thought it was hilarious. So wish me luck with this one. Now in Sydnie's head, spanking mommy equals everyone laughing and paying lots of attention to you.

Can you tell I'm avoiding spring cleaning?

Three posts in a week. My life must be pretty exciting, or there is something else going on. Could it be that I am suppose to be spring cleaning? Well like it or not I have to get started, but I will do one more post before I do. We did do some fun things this weekend:

Kaylee's first Piano recital

Kaylee preformed in her very first piano recital Saturday morning. She did a good job. She played three songs: I'm a Little Teapot, Bear Necessities, and Campdown Races.

Kaylee concentrating on her piano piece

Taking a little walk

On Sunday it was so nice we decided to go for a little walk behind our house. This is where we ended up:

You can see our house way down below. We didn't go all the way up the mountain behind our house, but we did go all the way up one of the smaller foothills. Kaylee and Brianne have their pockets full of treasure. Brianne thought almost every rock was a treasure, we had a hard time convincing her to drop some of them.

Sydnie resting at the top. The only thing Sydnie brought home was a TICK!!! We didn't find it until it was half way embedded in her neck. Shaun tried to pull it out with the tweezers, but it's head broke off in her skin. I took her to the doctor to get the rest out this morning, and you will be surprised to know, (at least I was) that they don't get all that concerned about ticks in Utah. They say that Lyme disease isn't a problem in Utah and the tick usually has to be in the skin for at least three days for you to even have a chance of getting it. They didn't even take the rest of the tick out. They just said it should come out on its own in a few days. Who knew? Unfortunately I do now.

On our walk (hike) we were on the look for fossils and we really lucked out and found a rock jam packed with fossilized seashells. Not just impressions of seashells but the actual shells. Here is Kaylee and Brianne holding a portion of the rock. Shaun broke it into a few smaller more manageable pieces to take home.


Here is a close-up of one of the fossils if you click on this picture you can get a good view of them.