I'm off to a photography workshop this weekend, so Chris came over to help better acquaint me with my camera. I think we both learned a few things while flipping dials and playing with settings. I ran outside to the apple trees to test out a few different things, and I think I'm getting a sharpness to my photos that I've never had before. Yippee!

Basket, Day 4:
About 1/4 of the children's books we own which actually appear to be random weird coloring books, books that are falling apart, or ones that we seem to have duplicate copies of.

My children hate milk, so I'm on a constant quest for new calcium-rich items to enhance their diet. They adore yogurt tubes, but they're a bit higher in sugar than I'd like. We store them in the freezer and the kids think they're one step away from ice cream.

One day I stumbled upon these silicone tubes which allow you to make your own. They're stupidly pricey, but I think they may save me money in the end if I keep on using them. So far I've only done strawberry, but I'm going to see what happens when I throw yogurt and other kinds of fruit in a blender and then freeze.

Basket, Day 2:
– wadded newspapers that were jammed by Neko into our fireplace nook (pointless, since we have a gas starter)
– random stuff from dog drawer (old medication, half-eaten dog bones, more dog toys)
– weird fleece-y item I don't recognize and am not sure actually belongs to anyone who lives here
– various duplicate kitchen utensils

We spent a big chunk of the day on the front porch since we're painting the basement and the fumes are outrageous. The pool and the play equipment is out back, so that's our default hang-out. But today we wandered out front and rocked and yammered on about a whole lot of nothing. Boy, does Ellery love a good rocking chair.

We headed out for dinner (see note about fumes). On the way there Neko drank an entire can of sparkling water, which we didn't think much of until on the way home she suddenly really had to go to the bathroom. We offered to stop by Grandma Barb's house, but she declined. And then we pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop, and she declined. Finally we figured out she was holding out for a gas station bathroom.

This probably sounds like a weird, and somewhat troubling, preference. But I think it stems from one of the gas station bathrooms between here and Chicago which had a power dryer similar to the Dyson Airblade, which is about as much fun as hand drying can be.

Anyway, we declined to cater to the bathroom preference, so we had a really wiggly five-year-old in the back seat the whole ride home. She was doing okay until we turned onto our road, which has up and down hills that often give you that roller coaster feeling. As we progressed down the road, all of a sudden a she gave us a look of horror and wailed, "Oh, no, not the hills!"

And Tom and I laughed until we cried. Probably mostly because we are so tired, but also because we've all been in that desperate situation where the littlest thing could tip you over into the realm of not quite making it.

And, yeah, she was super-mad about us laughing so hard, so we spent the rest of the evening telling her tales of times when we had to go to the bathroom so badly we thought we would die. Like that one time the navigation took us to the wrong hotel in Boston, and just as Anne and Tom thought they might have a chance of not exploding, we ran headlong into a Mexican Pride parade? (They made it…but just barely.)