Hair stylin'

First, before I forget, if you want to see a video I took of a cute little adolescent skunk, go here.

I decided that I wanted lilac streaks in my hair, so I called up my hair stylist - who is also a dear friend - and scheduled a time to come in when Matt could watch the kids. Then Hannah found out what I was doing and wanted to come with me. Then Ainsley wanted to come. Then Hannah wanted to get purple and blue streaks. Then Ainsley wanted to dye her hair "awwl da way pink".

Red hair doesn't take dye well, and Ainsley's hair is nowhere near long enough to even attempt streaks, so that was out. We've tried dyeing Hannah's hair with kool-aid before, but it would burn her scalp, so I didn't think this would go over too well. Still, she was adamant that it would be fine, and neither her father nor I cared if she did it. Hair grows out. So she looked at the color book with me and ended up picking pink. I stuck with the purple.

I've never had my hair dyed professionally before, so this was an experience for both Hannah and me. She watched me get my hair done and then she jumped up in the seat with no hesitation.


Of course, some of that lack of hesitation has to do with the fact that she adores Shannon. Like all hairdressers, Shannon is a pro at conversation and every time Hannah gets her hair trimmed, Shannon talks with her as if she were an adult client. It's lovely.

After we both got done, we had to sit and wait for the dye to sink in and Matt got his hair trimmed. Ainsley kept staring at me with a funny expression on her face, not unlike the time I shaved my head. I did look a little different with all that foil in my hair.



Ainsley *really* wanted a turn on the chair, so we told her that after I got my hair shampooed and rinsed, she could get her hair trimmed. The first trim of her little life. ("No, second," Hannah reminded me. "Remember when I cut her hair?") As soon as my body lifted off the chair, Ainsley's little body was squirming up into it. She loved her new little bob (she doesn't have much hair - especially for a nearly three year old).



After Hannah's shampoo and rinse, Grayson got the first trim of his short life also.



Matt loves it, I don't. I want my little baby back.

So this is how Hannah and I look now.



Hannah's is vibrant and much cuter in person. I was surprised at how fantastic it looks on her.



Mine is not so noticeable. I went to the store today and Hannah had to tell the cashier that her mother's hair was purple after which the cashier looked closer and said "Huh! You're right! That's really pretty." So it's not *exactly* what I was going for, but I am in no way disappointed. I like it very much.



In conclusion, this is what happens when Mother schedules a hair appointment for herself so that Father can watch the kids for a few hours by himself. The entire family gets their hair done.

You should know this.

My brother informed me that today, at four seconds until 12:35, it will be 12:34:56 7/8/9.

That's purty cool.

Park day.

Well, kind of. For a short time, it was park day. We needed to kill a few hours in town before my hair appointment so we went to a local park called 'Storybook Park'. Most of the playground equipment is themed, from storybooks of course.

There's the (pretty pathetic) climbing wall.

There are the dragon slides,


and the unicorn slide. Oh, the unicorn slide.


Look at the freckles on that girl. Her cuteness will be the death of me.

There's the racing boat,

the dinosaur pit,
and the castles, one of which, from an alternate angle, doubles as a rocket ship. (And neither of which you get to see, because they're taking too long to load.) Then there's the tot area with bugs, a farmyard, and a shark. You'll just have to trust me about how cute those are because I want to go to bed and that won't happen tonight if I try to load the pictures.

The swings weren't themed. My kids love swings. I should say that my girls love swings. Gray's never gotten into them too much. This is pretty much what he thinks of swings.

Have you ever seen a kid protest swings like that before?

Funny story for you. A few years ago, when my sister was living with me, we were both pregnant and suffering from severe short-term memory loss. Our kids loved swings and we would spend hours - hours, I tell you - pushing our two girls on the swings. One day we went to the city park for a town celebration and while we were sitting on the grass I noticed that the swing sets miraculously had two empty swings. I turned to my sister and said "Does Emma like swinging?" Seriously. "Does Emma like swinging." As if I hadn't been pushing Emma on the swings daily for the last month. And the best part is, my sister turned to me and said "I don't know." Then she turned to her husband and asked "Do you think she'd like to swing?" He looked at both of us as if we were crazy and took the girls over to the swing set.

Style or utility? Where does your wardrobe fall?

When we pulled the dress-up clothes out of their boxes, there was much rejoicing. The girls dug in immediately.

Hannah went for style. Ignore that expression. She really is rejoicing.


Ainsley, however, went for utility - a ballerina dress went on and she didn't stop moving until the music went off.





Want to see real rejoicing?

Serious rejoicing. Serious enough that it inspired her sister to get in on the act.

And all is right with the world again.

I'm thinking that our run of pictures in which the wardrobe included no dress-up clothes is over.

Snapshot Sunday 07-05-09

How it began.

Other snapshots -
Sherry
Bona Fide Mama
Sunny Day Mama
Jessica is joining us today!
Ramblings
Rinnyboo

If you post a Snapshot, comment and I'll add you!

Ainsley's birth pictures.

I pulled these over from my old private family blog to share with some friends. And I didn't include any pictures of the actual birth. You're welcome.

Ainsley was my first homebirth, and it was surprisingly less intense than my pitocin-induced labor in the hospital with Hannah.



An hour and a half into labor I woke Matt up to take this picture ("It's not labor," he said. "Go back to sleep."). Four hours later, he was holding Ainsley.






Karen, our midwife, doing all of the measurements a few hours after the birth. She waited until we were good and ready to let someone else hold the baby. Such a difference from a hospital birth.



And that's me, fifteen minutes after I gave birth. It was amazing to be able to recover completely at home, wherever I felt most comfortable.

Sidenote: Ainsley came into this world staring (check out the picture of her with Matt - that's two minutes, max, after she was born), and didn't sleep for over twelve hours. I was sure at the time that it had something to do with the lack of medication contributing to an alert baby, but after almost three years with her, I'm thinking that it was mostly her personality.

A strange thing happened on the way to Photobucket.

I was moving my pictures from the camera to the computer when the computer just shut off. No idea why. When I turned it back on, most of the pictures that had been in transit were unusable - simply icons with no details or image. So sad, so many fun pictures gone.

So. Here's what we have today - one snapshot of each of the kids. Three of the five pictures that made it.



(Sorry. It's what I had.)

I live at a spa.

Some women complain about never being able to get away and pamper themselves at a spa. Not me. I live at a spa.

Sauna? Walking into a bathroom where little girls turned the hot water on high, walked out, shut the door, and forgot about it. (this also counts as mopping the floor)

Massage? Lying on the floor relaxing and little girls decide to use your back as a dance floor. (this also counts as going to the chiropractor)

Mud bath? Pssh. That's an every day occurence here.




Nice comfy place to relax after a long day at the spa? We got ya covered.



Pleasant dreams!

Lesson learned.

Lesson learned by them: cousins enjoy playing dress-up in Mommy and Daddy's clothes as much as you do.


Lesson learned by Mommy: when cousins come over to play and get very quiet upstairs, you might want to go check on them.


But if you do, you just might miss out on cuteness of this magnitude.

Right this minute.

I'm an Honest Scrapper.

The Magic Onions (and one of the cutest makers of felted items you'll find on Etsy), gave me the Honest Scrap award-blogshare thingy. Usually, I'm incredibly grateful for awards but never seem to get around to recognizing or passing them on. However, The Magic Onions' list really made me smile and I thought I'd try to think of 'ten honest things'. Here goes.

1) I'm scared of riding horses. I was just fine before I had babies. I loved horses. Adored horses. Rode them any chance I got. I worked for a real rootin-tootin cowgirl at her boarding and training stable near Boise, Idaho. I worked as a wrangler in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where I had to ride stay on some really rank horses while keeping my string of twelve to twenty dudes safe. Yeah, my boss wasn't really smart and I was too young to know better. I even went and worked at a stable in Ireland where I learned to ride English style and jump horses and absolutely loved it. I was bucked off a pony (don't tell anyone) and came off of a horse at the end of a triple jump. Neither fazed me (except for the pony - that hurt my pride a tad). Then I gave birth and now riding horses makes me so nervous that even the laziest plug gets antsy enough to crow-hop if I get on its back. Many theories abound about why this fear should have set in after childbirth, but it's a goal of mine to get past it. Sometime. Later.

2) I didn't want to be a mother. I agreed to have two children because my husband wanted kids so badly, but the deal was that he was likely going to be the stay-at-home parent and I would be the breadwinner. My parents hadn't exactly passed on a lot of good parenting skills, anger management skills, or (I thought) the ability to love little ones. So I went to the hospital to give birth making jokes like "Does the hospital have a layaway plan?" Sometime between the second before my daughter actually came out and when the midwife caught her and began to pass her to me, my husband became irrevocably relegated to breadwinner and I'm not sure he's ever recovered from the shock. I fell in love and have never looked back. I immediately wanted seven kids.

3) Hannah snapped this picture of me this afternoon. (I was ducking my head because I knew she was aiming low.)

Right after she took it, a man came to fix our sprinklers and stood talking to me while I put Grayson down, picked Grayson up, waved to my girls, threw a ball to the dog... lots of things that exposed my at-the-time hairy armpit. Didn't even realize the dang things were hairy until Ainsley lifted my arm up later, rubbed them and said "Soft!" So *that's* why he kept staring at me funny. I'm not talking stubble, either. I'm talking long enough to be soft. I shaved them in a hurry, but I will never look at that picture without thinking "Dude, how did you FORGET?" And neither will you. You're welcome.

4) I love ABBA and George Strait. There you have it.

5) I have never for a moment regretted leaving the religion of my childhood when I was pregnant with my oldest daughter. I have also never understood why some openly questioned my motives, some going so far as to say that I must 'desire to sin' (because a pregnant, devoted wife has so much sinning she wants to do). I am now much more authentic in how I live my life, and it feels good to finally have my spiritual self feel peace and to be able to explore different ways of expressing that spirituality that do not exclude the majority of the human race.

6) I didn't want to homeschool. My husband was not happy with the education he received in his rural schools and since we knew we wanted to live in a small, rural area, he wanted to homeschool our kids and floated the idea when we found out I was pregnant. I was completely against it because of the 'social issue'. Then I found out that the most stylish woman in our 'ward' (Mormon congregation) was a homeschooler (she said, when questioned, that she sent her kid to kindergarten knowing how to count and knowing his alphabet and three days later he insisted he didn't know either of those because none of the other kids did). I also found out that one of my husband's very intelligent co-workers and his wife homeschooled their kids for academic reasons. Then I talked with a cousin of mine that I really respect about why she homeschooled her kids. The rest is history. Now we're doing interest-led education (also called life-learning or 'unschooling'). See what happens when you dip your toe in the water? The river can sweep you away.

7) I do not, nor will I ever, understand the hysteria that surrounds the Twilight books or movies.

8) I do, however, fully understand the hysteria that surrounds Colin Firth, Johnny Depp, and Hugh Jackman.

9) I have warring desires, not in what I want to do with my life, but how I want to live it. I want to homestead, but I want to be a nomad. I want to use the milk I've milked with my own two hands to make cheese and yogurt and butter, but I want to not be tied down to dairy animals so that I can take my children camping. I want to have a centered, down-to-earth, hanging-clothes-on-the-line, homebody lifestyle, but I want to travel. I want to live in the wide open spaces of the Western US, but I also want to live in Europe. With these warring desires, I have yet to be completely comfortable where I am, even as I'm truly happy being there. Strange dichotomy, that.

10) If I have more children, I would prefer to adopt. Adoption is big business these days, however, and as such is very expensive. This saddens me in more ways than one.

I'm supposed to pass this on to seven bloggers. How about...

Sherry at Living and Learning

Farmgirl_dk at Critter Farm, though the punk's in Germany right now, so who knows if she'll get around to it.

The lovely Gina at Unschooled Family.

Madeline at Barn Raising.

The Blankie Chronicles.

my sister at Intermittant Ramblings

and my sister at Arizona Sunshine. I want to see if there are ten honest things I don't know about them.

I'm also adding Sarah at MamaCanon Blog because she makes me smile.

If you decide to do this (and I hope you do), you're supposed to link to the person who gave you the award-blogshare thingy, list your own ten honest things, and ask seven more to participate. Meme away!

Paint and horses and stables - oh my!

Too kitschy of a title?

Yeah, I agree.

We're not real big on crafting kits 'round here. Not sure why. The girls aren't too big on coloring books either, though - maybe there's a connection? Anyway, the other day, we saw these kits for making and painting a horse stable and the girls were ecstatic, so we got them.

I thought it was cool that you get to paint the horses also. The girls got their little horse book and pored through it, looking for inspiration. Then they both painted a 'paint' horse, like the one on the box.


The box only gave traditional colors for the stable, so we had to go to our paint shelf to get more exciting colors. Who wants a red and black stable? Pssh. That's for those with no imagination.

We needed to name our horses, so Hannah had me write her chosen name on a paper that she then copied onto a tag. Delphine Petal. It took two tags. Somehow Ains was able to fit Honey Pie onto one tag. It is still a mystery.
The horses seem to enjoy living next to each other.Now the stables and horses get lots of playtime and get carted everywhere. Hannah had to be convinced that she didn't need to take it fishing with her the other night.

With a dog and a little brother in the house, and receiving such constant attention, I'm not sure how long these will be treasured toys, but the girls are definitely squeezing every last bit of enjoyment out of them right now.

Some quick questions...

-What do I make with 'rib knit' fabric? Not that I have cute fabric in mind, or anything. Not that I could afford it if I did. *sigh* But what do I make with that type of fabric? And does it differ at all from a fabric simply labeled 'knit'?

-I want to make my girls some sun hats but can't find a pattern. I'd like one like this. Any ideas?

-When will I find time to get all of my projects done? Hmm?

Snapshot Sunday

Some Snapshot Sundays are difficult because you look around and there's just nothing that jumps out at you, nothing that says "This is our life!" I don't mind taking laundry and toilet and mess pictures, but they do tend to be a constant in my life, and five pictures of messy would get boring week after week.

This week, however, was easy. I grabbed the camera and everywhere I turned were little tableaus that whispered about what Mother or Hannah or Ainsley or Grayson were interested in during the last few days. Easy peasy.











How it began.

Other snapshots -
Sherry
Rinnyboo (welcome back!)
Bona Fide Mom (Welcome!)
West Coast Girl
Leslie
Ramblings
Cindy

If you post a Snapshot Sunday, let me know and I'll add you in!