Bloggers Alert

If you haven't checked out my "other" blog, Chelsea's Attic, yet, here's your golden opportunity!
If you're anything like I was, you may be sick of getting your blog header just right. With our first blog (that I eventually gave up since it centered around Chloe...and then came Linus, and it didn't make sense to have a blog that didn't involve him somehow in our family...), I was a dunce. Click HERE to see it. I still kind of giggle when I think about how frustrated I was getting this stupid picture to not jump out of my computer and try to inhale me with it's size...really, it was a simple thing, but I just didn't want to bother with it. I was embarrassed to send our blog to family or friends over it. How shameful. Anyway, I finally got over my technical incompetence when I started my photography (because I had to) and now have evolved to making this lovely tutorial just for you.

http://www.chelseasattic.com/2011/08/designing-blog-banner-in-photoshop-for.html

I would love input on any of you bloggers out there who have done anything like this (or actually, especially those of you who've never done anything like this). My main concern is, does it make sense?? And if it doesn't, where are you hung up? Any feedback would be grand.

Chloe and Linus got into Chloe's Pretty Pretty Princess game this morning. I hope Linus kills me when he's older for posting this. I'm sure Craig will.
I think the blue jewelery matches his eyes, don't you?


Such a goofball.
And yes, that is a brace you see on Chloe's arm. Here she is giving her best poutey face.
On Saturday Daddy was playing with the kids on the tramp and somehow Chloe fell on her arm, although Craig didn't see exactly how it happened. Oh the drama. Our little princess was quick to blame Craig for the incident and didn't let up crying over it for a good hour. I wish I could say that was not typical, otherwise I might have brought her in on Saturday instead of waiting until Monday. She got to have her first X-ray and see her bones, which showed a very slight buckle fracture. The brace is just to protect her from fracturing it all the way, they will see if she needs a hard cast or if the brace is working on Tuesday after Labor Day. We're glad for the brace, though, and with the okay from her doctor, it means that we can take it off so she can go swimming at Grandma's house in Denver this weekend. The hard cast would have meant no swimming on that one.
Check back later for Labor Day fun (Denver, hectic day at church with our first Sunday after boundary changes, then Labor Day Parade and fireworks on Monday- hooray!).

Just make up your mind!

Yeah I know, I changed things around again. It's like keeping the furniture in your living room in the same arrangement for too long. Sometimes you just need to move it around. Or in my case, completely remodel...(if only remodeling your living room were as inexpensive as remodeling your blog...)

Wanted to share with you this magical tool I've used for two kids now and still use it all the time. Sometimes even for quick sauce mix-ups when I don't need a lot (like when I'm making pesto, like tonight- great recipe HERE). Odell has eaten everything off the table because of this beauty, I only bought baby food when we went camping and I couldn't bring this guy along. Now she's old enough that she can ingest most things without gagging or choking on them, so I don't need it as much, but my heart would warm when I could mix her up some of our healthy home cooked meals in a baby edible form. And I wish I knew the name of this because I would share it with you, but I'm pretty sure if you looked up "baby food mixer" at Babies R Us you might find it, because I think it came from there.

Also army men from the roof make for loads of evening entertainment. That is until one particular participant decided to rip the parachute off of the man (like we all didn't know that was coming...).

Dreamlife

A man in a business suit and hat sits at his table at the local diner, sipping his water and reading the paper. Busy sounds of the restaurant are all around him, but he is enveloped in the paper, and does not add to the noise around him except the ruffling of the paper as he turns the pages and the sipping of his water.
Finally, a waitress, young, blonde, wearing a white apron around her blue uniform dress and red lipstick, comes up. She refills the man's water without asking, then patiently waits for the man to order. She does not need to get his attention, he's a regular at the diner. She taps her pen on her pad until he turns to her with a mock look of surprise on his face.
"Hi there," he says happily.
"What can I get for you today?" asks the waitress.
"Hmm...well I like food," he begins. "How about...waffles, french fries, hot chocolate, a cucumber, and...grapes."
The waitress does not flinch at his unusual requests as she scribbles his order onto her pad. "Anything else?"
"Yes," he continues. "Um.....uh......waffles...."
"You said that."
"....and.....french fries...."
"Um...we're all out of french fries. Do you want ah....skeedasoh?"
"Yes. I want that."
The buss and hubbub in the small diner continues, unmoved by the strange interaction occurring between the man in his business suit and the blonde waitress in the blue dress. A few minutes pass as they continue to their conversation, the man continuing to ask for more obscene things or request items he's already asked for, the waitress changing what they are offering, making up food items that are not on the menu. Or actual food items at all, for that matter.
"....So," continues the waitress. "You can have the hot chocolate if you want it. And the skeedasoh. Is that okay?"
"But!" the man protests, starting suddenly to get irritated. His brow furrows over his once serene face. "GAH!.....OKAY! Just...just BRING ME MY FOOD!"
"Okay," the waitress says. "That will be ninety nine dollars please."
The man pulls out his wallet, pays for his food without question, and the waitress brings back a plate full of items he did not order. He pays no attention and begins to eat his food.
"Hey!" the waitress exclaims after he bites into a mouth-full of a full, ripe tomato. "Want to see my dance?!"
"Um...okay," says the man.
The waitress immediately drops her pen and pad on the floor and starts hopping manically in a circle in front of the man's table. She can't help herself and begins to giggle hysterically as she dances, clearly embarrassed that she would dance like that in front of a person, let alone a whole restaurant full of people, but unable to stop herself all the same. She makes an unexpected jerk in the wrong direction when she looses footing and accidentally steps on the man's foot, who until that point seemed to have lost interest in the dancing waitress in front of his table, munching on a bunch of bananas with the peels on.
Suddenly he leaps to his feet and yells angrily at the waitress, "OOWWWWW!!!!! YOU STEPPED ON MY FOOT!!!!" Without warning, he throws his arms up and shoves the waitress as hard as he can onto the floor. The waitress screeches in return as she hits the floor, then jumps to her feet again and shoves the man in back onto his table. His food flies into the air as his plate gets knocked over and his ice water empties onto the linoleum floor beneath them. The man's head smacks into the wall behind him, not enough to cause a bump, but enough to make an audible thump.
"OW OW OW OW!!!!" the man wails, grasping his injured head, and he suddenly bursts into sobbing tears.

"MMOOOOOMMMMMMMY!!! CHLOE PUSHED ME OVER!!!!!"

And then a large woman twice their size crashes into the restaurant, soothes the crying man, makes he and the waitress apologize to each other, and helps them clean up their mess.

Yeah, my life could totally be like a graphic novel or something. Right?



We went to Kid's day at Centerra yesterday, which resulted in 40 minutes of sort of enjoyment and 40 minutes of wailing and gnashing of teeth. We tried to wait in line for face paint, but it was too long, so I agreed to paint Chloe's face for her when we got home. And it was the cheapo stuff that rubbed off on everything it touched. At least she enjoyed it long enough for me to take a picture of her with it. :-)

Odell turns one!

She was pretty excited to eat that cake.
Current stats: 21.5 lbs (59%), 28.5 in. (32%), and 20 in. head (99%). Except they cap it at 99% even if you are way over that. This is what her chart looks like for head size:Yeah, I'm pretty sure if there was a 120% she would be there. Still cute as a button, though! She can crawl and is starting to pull herself up on small things like kid chairs and stairs (not really close to walking yet, but my kids have always taken their time with that). She makes a VERY loud clicking noise with her tongue when she's bored or likes to get a reaction out of people (and I mean very loud, I can't even do it as loud as her). She can give high fives and head bonks and immitate a lot of sounds. She can say "momma" and "dadda" and "dee-doo" (thank you) and "'Laow" (hello). She even uses her tongue for the "L" sound, it's cute. She loves to clap her hands, make loud noises with toys, and does not like it when you walk away from her (but other than that generally very content).

I was thinking the night before her birthday about everything we went through during her pregnancy. It was rough. That night as I was tucking her into bed, I got her dressed, sang her some songs, rocked her in my arms in the rocking chair a bit, and then I said her nighttime prayer with her as she watched me eagerly with her arms neatly folded from her crib (yes, she's figured out how to fold her arms! SO cute). I came back in later as I was getting ready for bed and just watched her sleep and shed a few motherly tears, thanking Heavenly Father for letting us keep her in our family. There was a while there where I wondered if that would happen. I can't get enough of her smiles and giggles and beautiful eyes, I would sit and watch her all day if I could. She has such a calm and inquisitive spirit and we are lucky- blessed- to have her in our family here with us. We love you Odell!!

Just a little promo...

LAUNCHED.
It's, no joke, 2 in the morning and I am finally winding down from all of this! I really need to not stay up so late on the computer. My kids don't appreciate grumpy-up-all-night Mom in the morning...
SO: I've been meaning to do this for a while and finally sat down and did it tonight. I redesigned my crocheting/photography blogs into one super blog, where it will incorporate all the creative things I mesh into my life. All my photography and what little I've done (and hope to do much more of) with my crocheting will be on here, as well as some other fun digital creations and so on and so forth.
To celebrate, I'm doing a fun little giveaway to help promote the blog!
Check out the blog here at chelseasattic.com. I really contemplated combining this blog as well, but in the end finally decided that this blog is a family blog and the other is more of a business blog and I thought I ought to keep them separate.
So if you have a minute and would like to check it out, follow me, like me, tweet me, whatever it is that you do, that would make my day. And enter to win a custom made crocheted hat and custom made personal blog banner created by yours truly.
Love

Most Important Project

So, it being the week of a birthday in this family, Mommy is on the hunt for slideshow music.
It is 12:30 in the a.m., I'm lying on my carpet (which really stinks, never been up close and personal with this one, but it looks like I'm going to have to do some deep cleaning here soon, it reeks...) with a MAJOR slideshow block.
That's right, I said SLIDESHOW BLOCK!! *cue awful horror show music*
Really, it is quite terrifying. I have TONS of good slideshow songs. Really, I have a lot of them. My problem is that I've already used a lot of them for my other two kids on their slideshows and I'm stumped.
And it being Odell's FIRST birthday and all, I need something different than what I would do for a 4 or 3 year old's slideshow. Most of her pictures are cute, soft, beautiful, sometimes silly, but she's the first child I've had my camera for since birth, so I have a lot of pictures of her from the hospital on. Which is great, but all my songs feel like they need to be more meaningful and they just aren't coming out that way and...and...*sniffle* it's late and I'm tired and I'm just not finding what I'm looking for. Phooey.
There. Tantrum thrown.
If you can't tell, these slideshows mean a lot to me and I take a lot of time making them exactly how I want them to be because my scrapbooking has sort of fallen into the back closet and I'm not very good at printing pictures and putting them into albums or anything like that, so making a slideshow for each of my kids of their previous year for them is something that I like to do and I like to do well.
SO- that being said, I'm now open to suggestions. Most of the slideshows in the past have used songs like these:
Till Kingdom Come/Strawberry Swing/Life in Technicolor- Coldplay
Upside Down/ My Little Girl/ People Watching- Jack Johnson
Make You Feel My Love- Adele
Don't Be Shy- Cat Stevens
Stolen- Dashboard Confessional
Kings and Queens- 30 Seconds to Mars
Hot Air Balloon/ The Bird and the Worm- Owl City
Darling I do- Landon Pigg and Lucy Schwartz (LOVE this song)
...the list goes on, but these are just a few. I did decide that the "end" song (the MOST IMPORTANT song in the whole show) for Odell will be "So You Are To Me" by Peter Bradley Adams. I was just looking up singer/songwriters in the same genre as a few artists I like and found this one. It's beautiful.
Anyway, got a second? Tell me your favorite songs. I want to hear them. :-)

By the way. I love this girl to pieces! And am really sad that she's growing up. Those teeny tiny baby years just go by WAY to quick...