Intrepid Murmurings

Okay, so today was a looooong day with one sick kid (Elsie, feverish, but on the mend) and all three home all day. I am realizing that those days that Emma does not have school can be Oh So Exhausting, mostly because I often save sanity saving errands & outings for the days when we are already heading out for school anyway, and plan on getting more done on the "home days", which does not always work out, with three kids pent up indoors a fair bit of the time. Gotta get my work done more efficiently so we can go do fun stuff out there in the world, instead!

Unrelated to any of that, here are some random shots from the past month(s) that I have been wanting to share but haven't, yet.  No time like the present (thank you NoBloPoMo)! 

Flubber swim party

And we'll end with a little twin gem taken in August. OMG, I love it! And also can't believe how much their language & pronunciation has changed, only 2.5 months later! 

Today, Elsie started freaking out at the lunch table.  She was clawing at her nose,  which on closer inspection revealed a pea lodged in each nostril.  She could not breathe through her nose or get them out.  I told her to blow and she did, and the problem was solved, hopefully to not be repeated anytime soon.  While trying to hide my laughter, I told scary stories about children needing ER visits to get things like this out of noses, and noted that your mouth was the only orifice that she can put things into.  I know this is a common toddler activity, and I am actually surprised I made it through almost 4.5 years of parenting before this actually happened.  This is the child who still puts EveryFreakingThing into her mouth, so not really a shocker that she ended up trying this.  

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Last week, as you might have seen in my twitter feed, both Elsie and Delia made an escape out the front door, down the steps, through the (open? closed? I am not sure?) front gate, down the driveway, ACROSS THE STREET (at 5pm on a weeknight) and down to our mailboxes.  I, guiltily, was futzing around on Facebook, Lonnie was upstairs playing with Emma.  I knew Elsie and Delia had left the living room where they were playing, but assumed they had gone up with Lonnie and Emma.  Lonnie looked out our bedroom window at some point and saw them wandering down the street, with our neighbor trying to corral them.  Both had no shoes on and were wearing (or rather, trailing) silk fabric scarves for their "coats". We ran out to get them.  "We were checking the mail" of them said, "We held hands!".  

We have now reinstated the carabeener that is our makeshift gate lock (the latch on our gate is easily reachable by them).  They had never, ever given any indication of doing this before, and we had totally gotten lazy about it.  Whoops!

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Its definitely fascinating to watch the bond that E & D share grow and deepen.  They are best friends, clearly, and have so much fun together.  Lately, they have been getting into these silly laughing fits where they just crack each other up, with uproarious laughter, for 5-10 minutes at a time.  Sometimes its just something goofy they are taking turns doing, or copying each other, sometimes, I have no idea what is going on between them.  It happens daily, often multiple times a day.  Here is a video I shot from a little more than a month ago.  It had been going on for awhile before I started recording. Coincidentally, involving peas as well!

Yesterday the girls headed out with Lonnie after work to harvest our carrots.  Here in Seattle we've had an unseasonably cool, cloudy summer which means some of our crops have not fared well -- though many have finally come around in the past few weeks, woohoo!  All three of the girls love carrots, and there is something about the surprise of the "reveal" that is kind of fun.  

These photos (and the video at the end) were taken with my brand new point and shoot camera, which Lonnie found on sale (online) this week!  Nothing fancy, but it will do the job for capturing moments when we are out and about.  The video sound quality is pretty bad (the hissing noise is annoying!) and some of the photos were blurry, but most turned out well and I am sure I will learn its quirks as I use it more. I love having a camera that fits in my pocket or backpack easily!  

Emma & Delia examining the carrots


Emma shows off the harvest


Emma


Elsie harvesting "baby" carrots


Elsie


kale


chard


kids and tomatoes (they are finally ripening!!!)


where the curls come from


Delia's "rat tail" curl, ha ha!


Lonnie with more carrots


Washing the carrots

This is where I tried taking some video on the new camera:

Lately, I have been feeling swamped by media.  Not TV, Internet, radio, magazines and the like (though the latter is kind of overwhelming sometimes, even though I only subscribe to a few!) but more my the media that blossoms with parenthood -- digital photos and videos -- and one that perhaps is becoming obsolete, but I still cling to -- old fashioned CDs.  

With those first two (photos and home video), I feel like my generation is kind of charting new waters here -- the old fashioned musty photo albums with photos stuck in between sheets of plastic are a thing of the past.  We have thousands and thousands of photos documenting our kids' childhoods, which is awesome on one hand.  But.  As the keeper of such things (for the time being anyway), I feel like I need to figure out a meaningful way to manage, display and preserve them.  

CDs 

Right now I have three boxes of CDs that I need to organize and put into big CD wallets (I've already done about 1/3 of them).  I ditch the cases, and many (but not all) of the liner notes.  For more than two years, I have been living without access most of my music -- thanks to half of them being "lost" in the depths of our attic after our move (back when I was hugely pregnant, and not participating in much of the packing and unpacking!) and the rest being fairly inaccessible to me on Lonnie's computer.  

That music is there, and I an access it via a program on my computer, but I find I rarely want to listen to music on my laptop (I don't have decent speakers, just the internal ones).   All his music is in a format that is incompatible with Itunes (flac, which is lossless & therefore the best for sound quality), which means no putting it on my Ipod, burning a new CD, yada yada yada.  Sigh.  

The project that is looming though, that I MUST break down and tackle, is sorting all these CDs alphabetically & by genre, getting them into the wallets.  I have a couple big 300+ ones and several several ones for the kids.   I also got one with a bunch of "removable wallets" with space for 10 or so CDs to put in the car, to take on trips, and to keep near our kitchen CD player.  It shouldn't be that hard, its just one of those projects that doesn't work well with kids around, and since I don't have a space to leave it out away from them, I kind of need to do in one (long) sitting.  Blah.  It will feel so good when its done, though!  Soooo very tired of this taking up space in my living room...

Home Videos

Videos also are proving a challenge -- I love taking them of the kids, and adore having these little memories saved for the future.  It is so amazing to watch ones when the girls were littler -- seeing what they did and said, remembering those times, OMG, love it.  But, I don't love dealing with with the actual video files (which can be huuuuuge!).  

Even though I don't think I take tons of video, they were rapidly filling up my laptop.   Lonnie recently got an external drive to store them on, which has solved one issue.  Lots of space now!  But, downloading them, renaming them in a way that makes them easy to find again (with dates & descriptions) takes time.  There are tons of old ones I still need to go through, separating out events, editing, etc.  I'd love to got through and edit them down a bit (mostly just cutting out the boring or unusable parts) and I also would love to get them all on DVDs, maybe organized by year or something.  Lonnie thinks DVD's are not the best way to store media, which I suppose I understand, but I still feel like I'd like to have hard copies as well as having them all stored on our computer drives.  Don't you think?  What do you do with home videos?  

Digital Photographs

And then there's photos.  Man, do I take a lot of photos!  I just want to capture these precious moments, document our daily life, so I can remember it and pass it along to my girls.  Photos remind me about so many things I otherwise would forget -- they feel so priceless to me. But right now, most of them are just sitting on my computer, not getting looked at.  

Right now I try to edit them somewhat upon download or soon after -- deleting bad ones, cropping & some amateur-ish editing to enhance color & contrast, lighting, etc.  I try to download off the cameras every few days, and then upload most of them to our gallery (hosted on our server computers here at home) once they are edited (which I can then easily use on my blog if needed).  They are all, obviously, also on my laptop.  I NEED to back them up somewhere else, though.  

I also want to print out a bunch of pictures, some high quality prints for framing and hanging (I'd like to do several photo walls in our home), some smaller ones for photo flip books for the kids, which they ADORE.  I have plans to create more printed photo books, too -- I was really happy with the Blurb book I made of the babies first 6 months, but just haven't found the time since then (no hours upon hours in the nursing chair with laptop, ha ha).  Anyone have other photo display ideas for me?  Are those digital photo frame things worth having?  I tend to use my screen saver as one -- it automatically shows photos from one year ago, which is pretty great -- I love seeing what we were doing a year ago, and to see how much the girls have grown!  

So, here is my short list of things to do in the media management arena:

• Organize CDs into wallets
• Label, name & organize videos
• Burn videos to DVDs?
• Backup photos & videos (On disks?  Online?  Off-site somewhere?)
• Print photos, frame & hang some, put some into kid-friendly albums
• Create (and have printed) photo books, spanning increments of 6 months to a year 

Here's one more from the other day at the park.  This was really fun.  I think we have some future curve-ball throwers and rock-skippers on our hands.  I love that this park is only 5 minutes from our house!  

There are not many toys more aptly designed for twins than a teeter totter...

A clip from a few weeks ago, highlighting the general silliness that happens around here...

Visit to Grandma & Grandpa Waitt's

Check it out....