I am done with the term! And today we finished moving! Two big things off the list and hopefully closing the chapter on what will be the craziest time for awhile.

Now, it’s Spring Break! I’m going to clean the house, do my application for the BSW program and become semi-fluent in Spanish before next Monday when I began fast-paced second year. I haven’t spoke more than a few words since I finished Spanish 4 in high school at the beginning of 2002. Seven years. Oops. Oh well, that will be my only class this spring so I will have time to focus.

Btw, yes we are still getting married. We have all the details just no invites yet so if you are needing travel info or anything please get ahold of either Tony or myself and forgive us for not getting this part together sooner. It’s one of the things that really slipped through the cracks…

Hopefully I’ll find some time for some more consistent blogging now.

PS- cannot wait for spring, warmth, and sunny skies!

So there are a few things I’ve been meaning to post for awhile now. And as I sit here to do so, I realize they share a common thread: Ali is becoming quite a little artist.

Let’s begin with her recent foray into photography. As anyone who has been around us knows, daughter is quite adept at using our iPhones. She grabs them (now usually accompanied with cries of "Pictures! Please! Pictures! Please!"), unlocks the screen, scrolls through the programs to find the pictures or the apps we’ve downloaded for her to play with, and can entertain herself for quite awhile. Every so often I would find a bunch of random text in the notepad and more frequently my icons would be re-arranged. Since we’ve moved, she’s learned how to delete pictures (although its not clear she understands what she’s doing, she clicks the little trash can and then confirms the deletion) and paradoxically seems to delete ones she likes. Then, one day I discovered these:

It seems our little kid has become quite the Bourke-White, as a whole series of "Shopping Cart" pictures have appeared lately. Here’s one of my favorites (brief appearance by my foot in upper right):

Now that she can take pictures and subsequently delete them, who knows what kind of Ali art has already been lost. And yes, we let her play on the phones sometimes during long shopping trips (on long Costco runs or about the time we hit the curtain section in Ikea and she’s all played out). Which brings us to our next item of business, her easel. From Ikea. See what I did there?

Ali has loved coloring for quite awhile now, and has recently gotten very into colors. She likes to point out the colors of everything and is often more excited about the color than the item itself. We’ve been wanting to get her an art setup for awhile now (her table and chairs, previously for coloring, are now the domain of "eating" whatever she makes in her kitchen), so when we saw an inexpensive easel, we snatched one up, and she has really been loving it. Here are a few of our masterpieces:

She likes to do some side by side drawings where she takes one side and you take the other. She really likes the multicolored pacis, and Cookie Monster and Elmo are the only characters I can even remotely draw, so they tend to pop up a lot.

Well, I had to cut this post off once to head out earlier and now I’m super tired, so the rest will have to wait.

Obviously, right? Well, I just took some precious time to try to give an updated and it got eaten. Or whatever it is that happens in cyberland. And I don’t have the time or energy to invest in something that can disappear like that for now.

Check out new pics on the right sidebar. See what I’m (and sometimes Tony) up to via our Faceook statuses on the left. Or, better yet, come find us on Facebook.

Sorry

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We need you to act TODAY to keep this school year whole!

Sign our petition and tell Oregon legislators NO MORE CUTS: www.stand.org/nomorecuts.

Urge the legislative budget committee to use the Federal Stimulus dollars to prevent further cuts to schools! Tell them Oregon’s kids can’t afford to lose any more school days.

It takes less than a minute to sign the petition. Do it TODAY, then pass the message to your friends: www.stand.org/nomorecuts.

We’ll present the petition signatures to the legislature this Friday.

Thanks for taking action today!

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Seriously people, the children are our future!

Pssst, Abi. Better late than never I hope.

A couple weekends ago my "family of origin" and I got portraits done as JCPenney. The pics just got picked up with afternoon which reminded me to post a few here, if you haven’t seen them already. They are very low-res, so sorry about that but, trust me, they turned out really great.

Tony and Ali snuck in for a sec:

See more here.