PICTURES!

Lauren all dressed for dance class.



Natalie wearing the Ponte onesie that Jayna sent.



Lauren accessorizing with Bunny sunglasses and four purses.




But painting without pants...





And talking on the phone with Grandma Lissa. Doesn't she look relaxed?

Heading back to San Antonio

We had a nice 4 day weekend. On Saturday we hosted a little BBQ at our house. Ben smoked a brisket and I made hashbrown casserole. We had our friends Mark and Megan, Katrina and her girls, Mandy and her son and Brandi over. Mandy brought a really delicious salad and Brandi brought sugar cookies. The brisket turned out great, Ben always does such a good job with that.

We've been using the Wii a lot lately. I get on and do Wii Fit every other day or so, and Ben and I have been having Dr. Mario battles most nights. He's been getting better, but I'm still the champ. Oh! And we upgraded to HD TV last week. DirecTV came and installed the new HD DVR receiver on Monday and we also wired up the playroom with satellite for Lauren.

Natalie's MRI is coming up on Thursday. We just got a call today that she has to go in on Wednesday at 1:30 so we can fill out some paperwork for the anesthesiologist. We were going to drive down tomorrow night, but I guess we'll drive down tomorrow morning instead. Friday morning we'll head back home unless she gets done early enough on Thursday.

I have some packing to do for San Antonio so I better get started.

Inspiration

I have to tell you about The Pioneer Woman. I originally was pointed to her site for her recipes... specifically her Bacon Wrapped Jalapeno Thingies and her Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever. But recently I started browsing around her site more and she has an entire section about photography and photoshop.

I want to be The Pioneer Woman when I grow up.

She has free downloadable Photoshop Actions on her site, and I downloaded them and started playing around with some pictures. Wow. Seriously. I'm having so much fun.

Take this picture of me and Natalie:

Turning a color photograph to B&W is nothing new, of course, but aside from cropping it, I only had to click one button to end up with this. It adjusted levels, turned to B&W and softened things to make a lovely looking picture. I also did this picture of the girls:

Just to show you the difference:

I'm just having so much fun with it! Plus, I didn't even know Actions existed before this. (I know, I know, but you learn something new every day, right?) Now, I can make my own actions and that will be just awesome! I'm so excited.

But- even if you aren't into the photo stuff, there's a lot of good recipes on there, and a lot of other fun stuff to look around at.

Happy New Year!

It is so quiet when both girls are napping. Quiet and rare. But they are right now. Yay!



We had an uneventful New Year's Eve. I think we were all in bed by 10. That's ok with me, though. I forgot how little sleep you get with a newborn in the house. Last night she did pretty well, she slept most of the night and woke up to eat every two hours or so. That's better than the two nights before when she woke up at three and just wanted to be awake.



Today I'm making Taco Soup from the crockpot365 website. And tomorrow I think I'm going to attempt tamales. I got all the stuff from it. I got two shortcut tips, though: 1. use parchment paper instead of corn husks. (Ben doesn't like this idea, though, so maybe I'll do half and half.) and 2. Use the crock pot. Again, this is from the crockpot365 website, but it just makes sense, and I don't have a pot and steamer that's large enough anyway to do it the other way.




Ben took this picture of me and the girls. Natalie's hat is falling off and looks kind of weird, but it's a picture of the three of us, anyway. I'm always surprised now when I pick up Lauren and she feels so heavy. There's a big difference between 6 and 25 pounds.