Ada had dance Saturday morning, but we didn’t spend our typical Saturday together. We headed to one store to pick up a gift for her birthday party she was going to in the late afternoon. Then we went home to spend time with my brother.

I went to listen to Ira Glass speak Saturday night. He talked mostly about This American Life and some about journalism in general. He did it well. He told his story rather than gave a lecture. It’s what he does best. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would like to go see David Sedaris in April. I’d need to grab tickets to that soon.

The other event of the weekend was the sleet and snow that started while I was at Ira Glass. Most people sort of tumbled out of the parking lot rather than drove. I’m not kidding when I say that the entire line of cars in front of me on Crestline slid down towards 15th. It would have helped if any of them knew not to ride their breaks. A few cars were going sideways, and at least two went off the road to avoid hitting others. I just downshifted as soon as I started to slide and managed to make it down without incident or further sliding. Imagine that.

Lastly, I caught the sickness of the kids, or caught something. Combine that with being up with Jay most of Saturday night, I spent a lot of time Sunday in bed. I had one big house chore that I wanted to do today, but I still don’t feel great and didn’t sleep well. I’m going to spend today much the same way, tackling only laundry and dishes. I even have dinner already made.

I decided to have the kids open gifts early due to the snow reports. We decided to abandon Lawrence so we could be close to KU Med. We got a suite so the kids had room to romp. The hotel shop had Toblerone, so on Christmas Day while every one was snoozing, I went down and picked one each for the kids so they woke up with a Santa gift beside them in bed. I’m glad we did leave because the blowing snow was difficult to travel in, and having to only go from the plaza to KU Med was easier than Lawrence to KU Med. When we got home, the snow at the bottom of the driveway was almost one foot deep, and the drift up by the garage was above my knees. You couldn’t tell our porch from the front of our garage. It was just a wall of snow.

We are fortunate for our friends who immediately jumped to help, whether it was to bring food to family, support Mac at the hospital when I couldn’t be there, offers to watch kids and actually watching the kids so I could be there with Mac.

There has been no cooking since this happened. There has been no photographs (except for yesterday). Tonight will probably be my first cooked meal in awhile because I have to cook the meat that I got for Christmas Eve dinner within the next couple of days. I am looking forward to cooking a meal.

The kids are driving me completely crazy today. I want to get some more house chores done, but I need to get the kids out of this house to do something besides bicker and hang on me everywhere I go. I know Ada would love to build a snowman with me, but I have no appropriate snow wear. I still haven’t managed to replace my boots. Perhaps I should just bundle them up in their snow gear and boot them out the door. Or we could go shopping. I have about $40 in Build-A-Bear gift cards, and a $5 off coupon. And I could get some boots. And a friend of mine went to Lush yesterday, and now I’m jealous.

The recent good news is that Mac was finally able to go pick up the new car yesterday. We traded in the ailing Mazda for a 2009 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. It was a program car, so it is the very base model without a lot of fancy extras. Mac is happy to have a convertible again. I wanted to take a photo, but he got back really late. It won’t be as shiny since he drove it to work, and it will still be dark when he gets home. I might have to go ahead and do a garage shot instead of a nice outdoor one. Now I have to learn how to pronounce Mitsubishi correctly.

So why does he get to be buried in a Pringles can?

It didn’t say that the can was put inside of an urn, which we were told we couldn’t do either. I’m guessing that we were probably lied to.

His can of choice was Maxwell House.

There seems to have been a huge non-communication about this on Mac and my part. Sorry. I’ll even call people.

Anyhow, totally going to lie in bed and play the 360 tonight. I haven’t done that since, um…my Sega.

James has been moving around more–cruising along furniture. I’m counting down until he decides to let go and make a break for it. He’s getting so much better with food as well. He’s mostly lost his gag reflex, and is eating more solids.

This is my 3-year old nephew, Josh. He is the youngest of my brother’s clan. It is nice to be able to take a photograph of a child who can hold still long enough for me to take it. I tried again with Ada last night, and nothing would make her stay in one place for more than a couple of seconds. That’s how she always is, and it is very difficult to get a photo of her. I got one, eh, it is okay, photo of Ada by trying to get her to pretend like she is sleeping. That bought me about 20 seconds of shooting. James is getting equally hard because there isn’t anything as interesting to him as my camera lens. I have lots of pictures of his close up face trying to eat my camera.

There are some things I’d like to learn about portrait photography, but unfortunately, I don’t have a model or a good space to set up and try them out. I have about zero room in my house now. I guess I’ll have to wait until the weather is nice so I can park the cars outside and use my garage.

I typically upload my photo before I pack up for work, or plan ahead and upload it the night before and just mark it private. I did neither, so I’m posting this late.

This is my seven year old niece, Stephanie Lyn. In our family, we pass on middle names, and she was the lucky one to be named after me. It was fantastic to have her here since my opportunities to visit with her are rare. The one thing I remember most about her when she was younger was at 1 1/2 years old, I could understand about 90% of what she said. I could never believe that I was talking to a 1 year old. Now at 7, I can not believe that I’m talking to only a 7 year old. Her intelligence is amazing. That could be a biased opinion, since she is part of “Clan Lyn” as I call it. The conversation usually goes:

My brother: She thinks she knows everything.
Me: She doesn’t think she knows everything. She does know everything. She’s a Lyn.

Chris, Stacy and the kiddos have left. There were a lot of people in this house, and half of them were age 9 and under. I’m exhausted.

Five of us adults left yesterday early evening to go gambling in Kansas City, leaving Mac alone with all six kids. He is brave.

This morning after I got Ada and James dressed, I mixed up a batch of cupcakes. Stephanie and I talked about doing some for her dad (my brother). I told that we could, so I started early in the morning so they could get on the road to travel back to Hutch. I made eleven^* and one round cake. Steph decorated the round cake.

My coffee pot wouldn’t grind coffee this morning. Talk about a bummer. Time with the kids here seems like it has been filled with constant running around and cleaning. I’m just too tired to look at it now. I hope I get some energy by tonight so I can make coffee tomorrow.

This birthday celebration for my brother marks the end of the food season. November – February is marked with so many holidays and birthdays that it is one big food fest it seems. I need to hit the CMD again. Seriously.

*One of my square cupcake holders is missing. I’m guessing it was accidentally thrown away last weekend. I caught myself almost throwing one away today.

We decided to go ahead and get the kids pictures taken. Mac wanted to get family pictures for his Father’s day present. He agreed to my plea to wait for pictures until end of October to give me more weight loss time. In the meantime, our grandmothers have back-to-back birthdays, so we got the kids pictures taken. We are taking one for Mac’s grandmother this weekend to her birthday party. I’m going to mail a framed one to my grandmother.

My cash monies diet is working well. It was hit and miss at first with lots of fluctuations. I think I’ve finally found my calorie limit to make it work. I’ve been on it 3.5 weeks, and I hit the 8lb mark this morning.

I took a vacation day today to get other things done besides pictures. One of those things was to get my hair touched up. My roots were showing. Charity redid my color, and I love it. I’ll have to get Mac to take a picture. My cut is a little different too. I didn’t end up liking the back of my first hair cut. I still have the a-line cut, but it is textured a lot more. I like it.

Today, which Mac declared the hottest day ever and blamed global warming even though the only thing to blame is that we are in Kansas in August, we took the kids downtown for some lunch, and then some time at the kid’s wading pool. Ada and I enjoyed it. James–both of them–tolerated it. When I came home though, I felt bone-creaking tired. After my treadmill time, I felt even more tired and started getting an instant headache, but in the back of my head instead of my typical eye-strain headaches. It turns out that in making sure Ada and James and Mac were sunscreened, nobody–even myself–remembered me. I was wearing a sundress, so now I have a strongly-pink back. I also took my camera to practice shooting Ada. She isn’t a good subject since she will not hold still. This shot is the only one that I got of her facing me. The rest are of her back. Even James wouldn’t look at me. The sprinkler in the pool was nice enough to not turn its back on me though.