Kittens at Day 30

Finally, two of the puff balls are eating wet food from a bowl. Only the orange male still only eats from a bottle. Here's Walter playing nanny dog.

The Mitzvah Kittens

Ethan's bar mitzvah torah portion is something about caring for animals, so he and Rachel decided that they would raise Project Purr kittens for their mitzvah service projects. It's not hard to put in 13 hours with kittens, especially when they need to be fed 4 times a day. So they spent a whole Wednesday night temple school class picking names for the babies we got that afternoon. We're calling them the Mitzvot.

The little black female is Nushica (kisses).
The orange tabby male is Hishamru (beware). Yes, he earned it. Feisty boy.
The tiny brown tabby boy is Shalem Tov (wholeheartedly good). Love his white mittens on all four paws.

So that's why I've been neglecting this blog! Hope I made up for it today. I wish I could say it will never happen again... but we all know better. The Brook Knoll yearbook is almost done, baseball and soccer are over for a few months, and school is almost over. So I'll have more time to blog, right?

Tea Helpers

These are the four cadettes who helped: Sarah, Zoe, Rachel, and Sydney. They were totally exhausted at the end of the day.

Girl Scout Tea For Two

This year, Rachel and I signed up to work all day at the Tea, instead of being guests and ending up helping anyway. There were only four cadettes there, and they did most of the table set-up and clean-up, and led the younger girls in games the whole day. They rocked.

Bubbles Dance

Jessica is in Samoa, so Rachel and Olivia had to go to the dance without her! SHOCKING!

Happy Mother's Day

My Mommy came to visit this weekend!

This is my mommy and my big sis.

Mommy and ME!

My big sis Alysa and my niece Amy, her clone.

Grandma Judy, Grandpa Art, Bryan, Amy, Sean and Rachel. Those two scorpios have to stop dressing in matching colors... bad enough they act the same!

Alli comes to play

Alli came to play on Wednesday! Sean decided that little girls needed to learn how to play with motorcycle jumps. Go figure.

Kyle's Turtle

Kyle found this baby turtle in a pond near his house. He decided to bring it to our house for a sleepover Friday night. I had a long talk with the boys about salmonella and washing their hands with soap! Looks to me like this little guy has an eye infection, so I looked it up and emailed the parents.

Gold Country Jawbreaker

Sean went on a school overnighter to Sacramento and Coloma last week, came back with the biggest jawbreaker known to mankind. We hit it with a hammer until we got to see all of the layers.

Walter and Ginger

I picked up Walter's girlfriend this morning for a playdate. Turned into a photoshoot! Now I need lessons on how to shoot playing dogs without blur.

Kaleidoscope 2008

Since our Girl Scout Council has combined with the council to the south of us, we were invited to join their HUGE camporee, which they only have the energy to throw every other year. So we packed 8 girls, 2 moms, and a brave dad, into two LARGE vehicles, and drove south for almost 5 hours. Santa Barbara's Live Oak Campground was full of tents, crafts, camping skills competitions, and porta-potties for the entire weekend.

In case you're not able to picture what 2000 girls between the ages of 10 and 17 looks like up close, I took three shots and merged them as well as I could for you. I wasn't going to camp with the new DSLR, so you have to settle for the old snappy camera. Click on the picture to blow it up.

The oddest thing... after 2 days of eating camp food, sleeping on the ground, and trying desperately to keep all 11 of us hydrated... is that we all agreed we'd do it again.

KK 44

Happy Birthday, Kenny!

Poor baby, having a birthday during Passover. So I did a trick I learned from the woman who threw the seder Saturday night, and I sliced the rock-heavy passover cake into two layers and stuffed it with whipped cream. It looked like a Susy-Q on steroids.

Soccer Princess

I took about 100 pictures of Rachel's coed soccer team today. I really need the bigger telephoto lens if Coach is going to keep playing her on the far side of the field from me for both halves of the game!

Sean played his first baseball game with kids pitching today. To get him ready, Ken and I took him into the tennis court and worked on his body mechanics. I finally got him to spin on his back toe by kneeling behind him and spinning his hips, and then he spun all of the way around and hit me in the side of the head with the bat... possibly a mild concussion. We'll see if I still have a headache tomorrow. But he got the bat on the ball both times he was up today!

Baseball Boy

I took 104 pictures of Sean and his teammates yesterday, just practicing. Trying to blur out the fence, test out sport-mode's multiple frame shooting, make each boy look like he hit the ball.

Here's my slugger, and his power stance. Doesn't he just look like a home-run hitter? Someday I'll even get the ball in the picture.

New Subjects for my camera

Well, some of my new subjects were invited over, and some must have literally heard about my new camera over the grapevine and invited themselves!

Baby Kate is definitely a fav subject, because she could make any photographer look good.

And the Bambis... most definitely NOT invited into my yard to prune my cherry tree from the bottom. A big limb fell on the deer fencing, and they got in but couldn't find their way out. Too bad there was no one else home to take a picture of me herding deer!

If I were a good photographer, I'd learn to either get the second deer's head in the shot or crop it out entirely. I'm allowing you to see my true lack of skills so you can be impressed with my progress later. ;)

As always, if you click on the pictures they should take you to the full-sized version.

Maybe tomorrow I'll share some of the 104 shots I took at baseball tonight.