Ciara's Big Change

Ciara has talked about cutting her hair for quite some time now.  She wanted to cut it short.  But then she would change her mind.  Last night I was cutting Riley's hair and she asked me to cut her hair.  I thought she meant a trim, but she told me she wanted 5 inches trimmed off.  Then she said wanted it cut shoulder length.  She seemed pretty determined.  Trimming the ends of her hair is one thing, cutting of 12 inches of her hair is definitely a job for a trained professional!  (Plus if she hated it, I didn't want her blaming me!!!)  So I told her I would make her an appointment at a salon for the next day after school, and she could think about how much length she wanted to take off.

So today she came home from school and was pretty excited to go to the hair salon.  I asked her what she planned on doing and she said she wanted it cut to shoulder length.  She seemed a little nervous, but excited at the same time.  (I have to admit, I pretty much felt the same!)

Ciara's beautiful mane of long thick hair.  I think the last time she had a significant amount of hair cut was when she was about 5 years old and we cut off 7 inches.

 Since she was cutting off 10 inches of hair, she had enough to donate.  The stylist tied it into a ponytail to make the initial cut and keep the hair all together to send in to Pantene Beautiful Lengths   I have to admit, a little tear came to my eye when she started cutting!!

 The new cut is adorable and I think she looks absolutely gorgeous.

Ciara's new haircut helps her feel great about herself.  And a wig made partially with Ciara's donated hair might help another girl feel a lot better about herself too.

Fall Traditions

Every year since Riley was about seven months old, we have gone apple and pumpkin picking at a Farm about an hour from our house. 

One of the things I love the most about going out there, is the colors.  Even a bad photographer such as myself gets great photos.  Photos that don't need the colors adjusted in Photoshop!

Fall Festival

Every year at our church we have a celebration called Fall Festival.  It's basically our Halloween Party.  We have a baked potato dinner, chili cook off and Trick or Treating.  It's become a tradition for our entire family to dress up.  Unfortunately I will only be posting pictures of Chris and I, and Riley and his friend because I forgot to put the memory card in the camera!!  I'll have to post pictures of Ciara and Ella on Halloween night.

Riley and his friend E.B. dressed up as Nerds!!  They started a couple of years ago dressing up together.  Last year they were characters from the movie Napoleon Dynamite.  I think the thing that cracked me up the most, was that they discussed dressing up as nerds together, but never discussed the details of their costumes.  When we showed up at the church, their costumes were so similiar!  Rumor has it that next year they plan on dressing up as cheerleaders.

Chris and I dressed up as a Skeleton Bride and Groom.  Even as a skeleton Chris looked soo handsome!

A little bit country

I'm typically not into country and western type stuff but I found these really cute rain boots on sale online.  I couldn't resist buying a pair for Ella and Ciara.  I figured they would come in handy for the rainy and snowy weather this winter.  I also got them matching umbrellas.  Pink and ruffely with a red bronco on top and plastic star cutout.  Very girly!

Although we had perfectly sunny weather this morning, Ella insisted on wearing her new rain boots to preschool this morning.

 

All or nothing

Over the past few years, I have bounced between this blog, and our very own dot com.   The reason I've been back and forth so much is because I'm never happy with how the website looks.  At first I was just content to schlep some pictures up there with a caption beneath it.  My friends and family were amazed!! I mean not everyone had their own website back then, so I practically felt like a web designer or something!  (Even though I was using a template that allowed you to just drop stuff in)

But the templates are pretty limited with how much you can customize them and unfortunately I don't know how to design a website from scratch.  And believe it or not, I often suffer from this "all or nothing" mentality.  If I can't make something into that perfect picture that I envision in my head, the project will either remain unfinished, or sometimes will never even get started!  I'm soo critical of my own work that if I don't deem it to be perfect it I won't put it out there.  

Unfortunately, I've noticed my children sometimes have the same attitude which is something I definitely don't want them to adopt.   I always tell them that as long as they as they give something their best effort, I don't expect anything more.  I guess I need to lead more by example.  

So, long story short, I guess I'm going to blog over here for a while.  And maybe one of these days I'll have some time to learn how to design web sites and I'll make our dot.com pretty.