Category Archives: Making Memories

February 6, 2013 · 2:22 pm

Happy 2nd Birthday Simplywe!

I’m supposed to be doing my homework, so naturally I am using this time to check my email, fb and simplywe.  And though I wish I was still doing my homework and didn’t have the attention span of a gnat, I’m glad I checked because I almost missed Simplywe’s birthday!  SW came to be 2 years ago today!

I have been so busy with everything else in my life, I didn’t plan anything.  This should be where I put a montage of some of my favorite photos, but if I get lost in looking at old photos now, I’ll never do my homework.  I must fight the procrastination…clearly I am not as successful as I would like.

So instead I will share hiking photos, and a few from my solo trip to Prescott.

I took all of these with my iPhone, as I sent my Canon to Keegan in Germany.  I think he will get more use out of it than I will, since I haven’t used it in months.  The iPhone is so much more convenient.

These 1st 3 are from my trip to Prescott.

It rained and rained and rained the whole time I was there, mostly misty rain.  It was beautiful.  The fog was intense.  This fog was at 4 in the afternoon.

This one is from the hike we took at orientation.  How many colleges go on a hike as part of orientation?  I think I have chosen wisely.

The other weekend Der and I took a 5.2 mile hike in Tucson Mountain Park.

These are from our new favorite part of the park.

I don’t know why this one is so grainy, but I sure do love that guy!

The small upcropping of buildings, in the far off distance, is downtown Tucson.

Der and I make a good hiking team.

The rest of these are from various hiking trips.

Bug loves her hikes.

I’ve painted several batches of rocks and left them in random places on the trail.

I like to imagine the finders curious smile when they wonder who did that.

Happy Birthday Simplywe!

I heart Tucson!

 

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Filed under Adventures, Amazeballs, Celebrate, Everything else, Making Memories, Natural Happenings, Petz on Parade, With Gratitude

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January 23, 2013 · 9:52 pm

Random Photos, that took me forever to finally share

Even though I wish with every fiber of my being that we had grass, or the time/money it will take to create a lawn, I still dig our backyard, especially on a cloudy day

I love our trees.

From a sunny, rainy day.

Playing in the rain is so much fun!

I adore it when they are sweet to each other.

I love my sister!

This is the volume knob on the headphones in the library.  All I see is a happy monkey.

This is what I look like when I accidentally lock myself out of my house, but am lucky enough to have my phone to call hubby, and to amuse myself with by taking photos until hubby saves me.

This is what confused wuppy looks like, when she just wants me to come in already and pet her.

This is a real, live caterpillar that looks like bird poop.  It turns into a Swallowtail butterfly.

An instagram collage.

Some lovely butterflies at the Desert Museum.  I want to get that kind of milkweed in our front yard.  It was COVERED with these beauties.

Until next time

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Filed under Everything else, Family, Making Memories, Natural Happenings, Rodents aka kids, So Random

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November 16, 2012 · 4:30 pm

All Souls Procession 2012

I’ve wanted to participate in Tucson’s All Souls Procession for several years, but could never follow through, until this year.

If you don’t know what the All Souls Precession is click here for the history.  It was actually created by one of my drawing teachers in college, over 20 years ago.  It has grown with each passing year and is now HUGE, like-miles-long-HUGE!

It’s a wonderful way to honor those you love, who have gone on before you.

There is walking art EVERYWHERE!  Every float is human powered.  It was hard to get a lot of photos during the procession, but here are a few.

As I said this was our first year, and though I knew it would be amazing, I was a little intimidated and unsure of what to expect.

I found out one of  the great things about the procession is that you can move freely through it, if you want to step out and take a break you can, and then you jump right back in whenever you’re ready.  Because Ami’s legs get tired quickly these days (all that supersonic growing) we mostly watched.

I painted all of our faces.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I just kind of winged it.  Ami and Conrad were the hardest, because they’re twitchy and squiggly and move all over no matter how hard they try to hold still.

I like how they turned out, and judging by all of the people taking our photos at the procession, so did everyone else.

Driving in the car to the procession.  I pulled down the visor to check my makeup and a yellow butterfly fluttered out.

Derek and I both got teary eyed and I said “Hello Benny”.  It was such a beautiful moment and I will treasure it forever!  Thank you for staying with us always, Benny.  You are thought about and loved every single day!

We can’t wait to honor Benny next year with pink flying piggies.

The All Souls Procession was such an uplifting experience!  I am glad we finally made it there and we will be back every year from now on!!!  If you ever get the chance to go, don’t hesitate, just do it!  You’ll be glad you did.

 

 

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October 22, 2012 · 8:55 pm

The last of the Pinetop photos

We were playing a cool monster/dice/drawing game while simultaneously enjoying the beautiful Pinetop weather.   You roll a die 6 times and draw the corresponding monster body parts.  I know this is where I should show you the finished monsters, but I don’t have photos of them.  I do encourage you to go draw your own though.  Find the printable here.

Boy that sun sure was bright!

Two things you should know about Ami are he loves ducks, and he almost always has food on his shirt, face, or both.

Ignore the glaring sun and smile boys :)

No trip up north would be complete without roasting marshmallows for s’mores.

Or as Ami likes to call it, “fishing for marshmallows”.

Notice the food on his face, but to be fair, I think we all had food on our face at this point.

This photo made me do a double take when I downloaded it.  Even though I took it and I knew Keegan wasn’t on our trip, I thought this was Keeg at first…and then I realized it was our man-boy Jeremia.  No matter how much you think you are soaking up your kids when they are young, it’s never enough, they still always grow too fast.

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October 13, 2012 · 12:22 am

Trail Riding In Pinetop

Trail riding together as a family was so much fun.

Der taught the boys to skip rocks at a little watering hole.  We saw bear tracks right at the waters edge.

Conrad and I missed the memo telling us that is was green T-shirt day.

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October 10, 2012 · 11:08 pm

On the way to our Pinetop adventure

We rented a cabin/house in Pinetop/Lakeside last week.  Here are some photos from the drive there…sorry if you’ve already seen some of them on FB.

Is this some sort of rose?  They look like baby apples with green crowns.

 

The shot below is a closeup of the flowers in the above shot.

Ahhhhh….nature, how I love thee!  Oh and Instagram, I love thee too!

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August 6, 2012 · 5:40 pm

Rainbow Paper Suncatchers

I freehand cut blue sheets of paper into clouds.  Then I cut their centers out.  I cut 2 at a time, so there would be twins that we could stack to match.

After cutting tissue paper into thick strips, I gave each boy 1 in every color.

Conrad’s friend, Gavin, was over again and was happy to make one too.

The photo’s pretty self-explanatory, but you outline the cloud with glue and overlap your tissue paper on each previous piece.  We made sure to leave plenty of tissue hanging out the bottom of the cloud.

As you can see we used white glue, but glue stick would have been better.

If you look closely at the tops of the clouds, you can see the hanging string we glued to the tops, in-between the paper.

The cloud shape is clearly visible through the tissue paper, so it was easy to see where to put the next layer of glue, in order to attach the twin cloud.

The boys gently tore any tissue poking out of the top.  Scissors would have created a cleaner edge, but this way was much faster.

Rainbows are so happy!  I love them!

I also love how the different colored paper overlapped creates new colors.  It was a makeshift course in color theory for the boys.

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Filed under Entertain Me, Feeling Fartsy, Let's make things pretty., Making Memories, On The Cheap, Rodents aka kids

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July 24, 2012 · 10:58 pm

Tucson Children’s Museum 2012

The children’s museum has a new exhibit.  It’s beyond cool!

These tubes have air pushing through them and dampers you can open and close to make the airflow change directions.  When you put a scarf or sponge ball in the tube it shoots through the hoses and come flying out of different opening, depending on which dampers you had closed.  We could have played with that thing for hours, but we had to share with the other museum goers.  We want one for the house.  It was a blast!

Everyone was running around, catching balls and putting them back in so it was hard to get photos.  The blurs are scarves and sponge balls as they fall from the shoots.

This table shot air out of those movable tubes and the balls would hover in the air stream.

Or as Jeremia likes to remember it, he uses “the force” to keep the ball up.

Ami loved this tube filled with tiny styrofoam balls.  There was a knob he was turning to make the balls bounce to different sound waves.

Derek drew me an eggbird in the art corner. I love the bird and the man who drew him!

Jeremia built a tomb at the block table.

My favorite exhibit we played with that day was the giant prism box, because it was so much fun to photograph.

It was a long box full of mirrors with open ends on both sides.

We had a ton of fun!  Thanks for the free passes Brooke!

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July 22, 2012 · 10:49 pm

Loveliness

The heavens opened up, in just that one spot, and I was lucky enough to see it.

Big fluffy clouds.

Sunshine in the clouds and flowers…sighhhh.

Picacho Peak, I love you so.

Lovely sunset as seen from our backyard.

I smile every time I see that red and white tower near Nogales Highway.  I am reminded of Benny and Jeremia exclaiming “look it’s dad’s work” whenever we drove by.  Just for the record, we pass it on the way to Der’s work, but it’s not really close to it, so why they thought it’s where he worked is beyond me.  I do so appreciate the memory and the warm happy feeling it fills me with though.

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