Fall Fun

We were laying on the ground and took this photo

self portrait of my lu-lu love!

Well...fall came late here in La Mirada because it's been stinkin' 80-90 degrees in November and early december. NOW it's lovely!! But...it was hot for a while. One day we finally got to go and jump and crunch in some leaves. Most of the photos were taken by Emily.

Fun with Abbie!

Self Portrait

My dear friend!! LOVE you ab!

Ry crawled into Narnia!

We went over to our friend Abbie's house a couple weeks ago for a post finals celebratory dinner. She has the coolest little house. Her upstairs bedroom has the closet on two sides of the window with a crawl space to connect the two. The kids think it's "Narnia" (I LOVE THAT!) so Abbie, being the awesome 'aunt' she is, usually paves the back crawl space with candy. This year, she put lollypops and christmas ornaments. Thank you Abbie for loving our family!!

new design

Emily has a new design! two actually (i couldn't find the camera today to capture it, so i'll post it another time!) here is her latest design. i also included her scarf as well. she wanted to wear a scarf to abbies house and wrapped and tied it all up herself. i'm not embarrassed to say that she has taught me how to wrap my scarf!! my little designer! oh...i love her!!

Fame...

So...we're famous! again!! we were 40% off last week in the Michaels ad and our awesome photographer, Adam (www.adamkaz.com) facebooked me a couple more links of people who had our photo up...oh...and if you order photos online at costco, (at least during christmas this was true) our kiddos are on the photo site! (okay, i just checked, we are not on costco anymore)

http://www.burrellcolourimaging.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=12_148_149

http://www.drraystrand.com/

those are the two sites we are on!! here is the michaels ad : )

Date with my buddy...

When Emmy goes to school, once a week Will and I have a date!! donuts and home for fun playing!! ah...i love it!! hopefully this semester it can be more than one day a week! anyway...

So this one day i happen to photo our time together. I forgot the camera at the donut shop, but our time usually begins at the donut shop. he gets a fluffy orange, pink or choc with sprinkles... he hasn't quite landed on a favorite yet-i think they are all their favorite! My favorite is chocolate bar!!

We came home and he wanted to play with his potato heads...we made (per his direction!) cute little potato heads and had conversations with our little spudies!! :)

then we ended our day with feeding the ducks before we went to pick up Emily. One of the many cool things about living on campus, is right next to our 'garage' aka our two parking spots, there is a storm drain gutter thing (i don't know the official name!) and there are about 30 ducks there. so we always save the old bread or snacks to feed them.

where do i begin?

The Low girls!!

Fountain Jumping

Cousins!!

The Califf's!! (with Jude coming tomorrow!)

Our little monkeys!!

Silver ballet slippers are better with flowers!!

Waiting in line for the merry-go-round...when is it our turn?!!

hey!!! man, it's been a while!! the last time i wrote to catch y'all up, i was in the thick of finals, and now, i'm about to start up interterm...i'll tell more on that in a moment. here are some photo highlights of the kiddos before christmas...

we had a great visit at fashion island with our cousins (well...ry's cousin danny's wife erin and their two cuties and other one will arrive tomorrow!!) here are some photos of our time playing around the island...Thank you for such a great fun day, Erin, Paige and Blake. We can't wait to meet you, Jude!!!

Thankful

The Classroom
Carpet time-singing and signing the good-bye song for the day
silly cousins
me and my darling niece alicia!!
alicia and grandma linda

I am so thankful this season for so many things-but one thing in particular is Emily's school. She has the privilege of attending Leffingwell School in East Whittier. She attends daily morning preschool there. I say privilege because she has the honor of learning along side beautiful not-typical students (they integrate them with a handfull of typical students).

I have seen this deepen her compassion ten-fold!!! some students have learning challenges, others are mild-autisic or sight impaired or downs. I'll ask her a specific question about a student I know who has a challenge and she doens't even discuss their disability when talking about them-it's not even an identifying label to her. Much like we say, 'oh you know so and so, he's that hispanic guy...' or 'you know her daughter, she has such and such'...it's never EVER been about that with Emily. She has taught me so much about identity this semester. My identity is not being her mother, or being Ryan's wife-those things don't identify me/define me...my identity is being a daughter of the King in whom we celebrate this season.

I am thankful for Emily-for Ms. Monica and all her aides for their endless patience with their class and endless compassion to care for those in their room. The photos posted are from a day we were all invited into their classroom to celebrate Thanksgiving. I am so thankful this season.

our new car!!

okay...so....it's not one we can drive...but it's a new car!

some awesome men (JD and others!! THANK YOU!) from Hart had a GUYRAD (stands for - get your roomate a date). they all made cardboard cars out of old fridge boxes, 'drove' aka walked them over to the park and sat in their cardboard box with their date and had a 'drive - in' movie night! awesome!! one of the left over cars, the guys put outside our door and made a license plate that read 'emily and william'. our babes were SOOOO stoked when they walked out that morning to see their new car!

so...wouldn't that be a great date night??!! next time you have access to a fridge box, don't let it go to waste! make a car out of the box with the kids-then put them to bed for the night, walk your hubbie out to the 'car', pretend to drive it into the living room, or if you have a projection screen, project the movie onto the side of your house and sit, eat popcorn, make out and have a great inventive date night!!

the car is a bit saggy now and will have to be recylced soon...BUT they have had so much daily fun in that car!! THANK YOU hart!! we heart hart!!

man...time flies!

So has it been about a month since my last post??!! Well...I still shouldn't be taking the time to post right now-but...writing my paper is NOT on the top of my list right now. Although, I have so much material-I could write the intro to my dissertation (if i wanted it to be on the comparison of benedictine monasticism and the 12 marks of the new monasticism...interesting, but not my idea of PhD work, i'll leave that to Dr. Peters who I interviewed!)

Okay...so enough of school work! I'll show you some photos of HIGH procrastination!! In all efforts to avoid my four papers (three down, one to go! yeahoo!) I taught myself how to upholster my head board and foot board!! (yes, you read correctly!)

So, i've just done the basic so far (i LOVE staple guns!) so now i need to get some fabric to cover the basic form now-and maybe paint the rest of the bed (i'm sooo over our natural knotty pine bed!!) i watched one of my favorite old HGTV shows (which, sad to say, is not on any longer!) design remix. They take about $50 and what you already have and re-make it into something awesome. I had two king bed matress toppers aka foam and an old sheet set and voila!

so...to me...this is also green living!! i used something that was collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom...and re-purposed it!! yeah!!

i also went through all my clothes-shoes-accessories (which is VERY limited! two belts!) and re-arranged, re-organized and re-made up some new outfits. in an effort to NOT spend money shopping, i've been holding onto some old catalogs of favorite stores to inspire me to re-create what i have into new outfits. i'm pretty suprised on my success thus far.

what have you done lately to re-purpose something? there is a blog a friend directed me to (i'll let you know about it when i remember where it is!) that she re-purposes old vintage fabrics and pillowcases into bags, skirts, etc...i want to check out her skirts!!

my next re-purposing once school is out-making our family christmas cards / letter out of left over paper over the years. i am determined to blog/email/facebook the ones i can and then mail out the rest of folks who i don't have a means to contact them electronically. with the remainer of the paper i have over the years, i hope to NOT have to purchase more paper. maybe i'll have enough left overs to actually mail out all the letters we send!!

what can you re-purpose/re-mix/re-create this season?? post your ideas!! i LOVE new inspiration!