rickandjenny.com

We took the kids bowling for the first time today. Vaughan likes to play Wii bowling, so he was pretty excited to try the real thing and he talked about it for a week before we even went. Rheya is still too small to do any actual bowling, but she had fun wandering and exploring.

Sorry, but all the pictures were taken with our cell phones. I grabbed the camera before we left, but when I went to check it to make sure the battery had enough juice, I discovered the battery had no juice at all.

I actually won this game! I never win anything, so I had to take a picture of the scores at the end.  :)

Rick and I got new Droid phones recently and we have been having some fun with all the cool apps that are available for the phones. One of the fun things we’ve been playing with is the Camera FX app which does some neat things with your photos. Very cool and artsy!

This is the “Polaroid” effect:

This is one that Vaughan took of me…well, sort of…

This one had a red filter and a vingette applied:

This one is the green filter:

Lots of fun! I love the funky results and I love giving the phone to Vaughan to see what he comes up with on his own!

The weather on St. Patrick’s Day was absolutely beautiful! The kids and I hung out in the backyard for almost three hours just enjoying the sun and fresh air. We even ate lunch outside! Here are a few pictures…

We really do have the best kitties ever. How many cats have you met that are actually good with children? It’s not that the cats just tolerate the children…they actually play with them. It’s amazing! Here’s Keo keeping Rheya entertained this morning.

I just can’t resist taking pictures when the kids are in such cute little matching outfits. Of course, it has become nearly impossible to get a picture of them together since Rheya has discovered that she can just walk where ever she wants.  Mostly I just got some cute individual pictures and lots of blurry pictures!

Ok, maybe “mad sewing skillz” isn’t an appropriate description, but I am pretty proud of myself for making this cute little tote bag. In addition to following the pattern, I also added a lining and some interior pockets…one of which has a zipper. Many firsts for me and my sewing machine!

And Vaughan has already discovered that all those pockets are great for storing dinosaurs.

We got a few dress-up items for the kids to play with. These are some fun little hats that Vaughan has been having a great time with.

I’m not sure what that crazy face is all about though…

Vaughan is just getting to the point where he can start to recognize letters and numbers on his own, so I figured a little help from some fun counting bean bags would make learning a little more entertaining. I found a really great idea/tutorial at Chez Beeper Bebe and I decided to give it a try.

I used some fat quarters that I got at Hobby Lobby to make it easy to color coordinate all the bags and numbers. I also used navy beans to fill the bags and I added buttons to the backs of my bags to help Vaughan learn the numbers. If he doesn’t recognize the number by looking at it, he can flip the bag over and count the buttons.

My machine embroidery skills leave A LOT to be desired, so after I got through about half of them and decided they looked pretty bad, I opted to do a simple hand embroidery stitch on the remaining five bags. I guess it all worked out in the end, but if I were to do this again, I would just skip the machine embroidery and do them all by hand.

As I have for all three of Vaughan’s birthdays so far, I took this set of pictures of Rheya to remember how she was at one year old.

Here are a couple of other cute shots…

Yes, Rheya is a year old! Wow, that year went by entirely too fast. She’s starting to take a few steps on her own, she’s understanding lots of what we say, and she has even picked up on a few signs so she is starting to communicate. It’s amazing how quickly children learn and grow!

We celebrated her birthday with Nana, Grandpa and Grandma…and a few gifts, some dinner and a cake. Yum!

Here are the cakes I made.

She dove right into the cake. She picked it up with both hands and managed to get quite a bit in her mouth.

Happy birthday, sweet girl!