Whatever's French for "Huzzah!"

Last weekend we took the boys to the last day of the St. Louis Renaissance Faire, which was our first time back in a long time and their first time ever to a Ren Faire. The St. Louis fair is smaller than some, but overall it was pretty good. Their setup is modeled after a French Renaissance village instead of the typical English one, but in essence it's the same as any other Ren Faire.

The boys were both a little wiped out, but they hung in their long enough to listen to a storyteller and see the joust, an acrobat, a pirate show and a surprisingly excellent whipcracker. Logan pursued the King's Quest, which involves kids going around to various village denizens and getting stamps on their quest parchment. There were a few things that we passed on - the archery, the "warhorse" pony rides, things like that. Maybe once they get a feel for how a Ren Faire works.

The joust was a little tame compared to what I've seen in the past, and I was a little disappointed that there wasn't any sort of sword-fighting or melee combat demonstration. Those are usually big crowd draws, but they must not have had a group to perform.

The shows we saw ranged from the so-so pirate show (A for effort, but a little lacking) to the amazing Moonie the acrobat, who looked entertaining but we only caught the very end of his show, to the surprise of the day - Adam 'Crack', the whipcracker. He started with basic bullwhip cracks, then went on to double-whip cracks, including a hilarious musical number, and ended with the Whip of Fire (see photos below). Ended up being a great act, and if you have the chance to see him (he tours all over the country) do so.

Our side of the tourney field was cheering for Sir Duncan, aka Sir "Cheat to Win".

Adam Winrich, aka Adam Crack, and the Whip of Fire

Okay - Mom, Logan, and I will jump OUT of the rabbit...

Logan's completed Quest

It's Officially Summer

We had the great fortune to actually be at home this weekend (that's been a rare occurrence lately) and were able to host Jan and Kathy for a quick visit on their way home from Milwaukee. They were only able to stay a night, but they made the most of it and treated us to a Cardinals home game down at the new Busch Stadium. (Thanks again!!) Despite the fact that it's been awhile since the new stadium opened, it was our first time there.


Jill took this picture at least four times, I don't think Liam looked at the camera for any of them.

We were up in the field boxes, but frankly there's not really a bad seat in the stadium. We had a great view of the field, and the only thing that would have made the evening better was if the Cards had won. It was a pretty close game until the seventh inning, which I believe lasted 6 hours and during which the opposing team (the Colorado Rockies) scored 115 runs.

Ha ha, no, I kid. They only scored 9 runs that inning. At one point it was 8-1 and I turned to Jill and asked if it was time to go. Her reply was "No, I'd like to stay until the end if we can." A moment later she relented with "If the Rockies get to double digits, then we'll go."

Three minutes later (I'm not kidding) Colorado hit a 3-run homer to make it 11-1.

We all still had a good time. The boys got pretzels and cotton candy and lemonade and everyone enjoyed themselves. The weather was perfect.

I tried everything I could in Paint Shop Pro, but I can't improve the image quality of this ugly lump.

That's much better.

Our view of the action.

I have no idea why Logan looks so startled here.

It took a minute for Liam to get over the fact that he was supposed to eat "the soft part".

Overall, a great evening. Hopefully we'll get back to the stadium before too long this summer. Maybe the next time Logan and Liam will actually realize there's a baseball game going on. You know, in between snacks.

Memorial Day Camping Trip 2009

The camera batteries were nearly out of juice, so we weren't able to take as many pictures as we would have liked. Here's a small sampling of some our our camping fun!

Kicking off Summer

I don't have much to talk about at the moment, just wanted to post a couple shots of the boys from Memorial Day weekend that turned out fairly well.

Tiger to Wolf, and All Points Between

Last Thursday Logan graduated from Tiger Scout to Wolf Scout. He's spent the year just getting acquainted with the idea of Cub Scouts, and so far he seems to be enjoying it fairly well. They've done a food drive, visited a fire station, got up early to visit a donut shop, helped out with a couple of community projects, and had a lot of devolved-into-silliness den meetings. There has been some attrition in his den but going into next year I think there will be a core of Scouts that he'll be able to get along with and who will have a good year.

During the graduation ceremony Logan got his new Wolf Scout neckerchief, so after a summer off he'll be ready to get back into things. It'll be another year or two before he starts getting into summer camps and whatnot. Given how busy our summer is already looking, that's probably a good thing.

It's Great to Be a Mom!

It's been a nice day. Both of my boys made me lovely floral arrangements! Liam made the garland in my hair, and Logan made my beautiful basket of flowers! I certainly feel loved!







My children are such a blessing to me. How lucky am I to have such sweet, thoughtful boys and another baby on the way?

Logan is so responsible and always tries hard to be patient with his little brother. He is starting to become more independent around the house by getting breakfast for himself and Liam in the morning, among other things. But even as he grows up before my eyes, he still kindly lets me cuddle with him on the couch or give him a squeeze every once in awhile.

Liam constantly showers me with affection and will never allow me to utter an "I love you" that isn't immediately followed by "I love you MORE!" In fact, I frequently hear a spontaneous, unprompted "I love you a google!" He wants to play games with me multiple times a day - something we both enjoy. He is also becoming a little more self-sufficient and likes to pour himself a glass of milk or juice when the containers are not too full. Liam still enjoys sitting on my lap (what's left of it!) to read stories, and I'm glad that we have one more year together before he heads off to school with his big brother. It's been pretty special to have one-on-one time with my boys, and although it is tough to send them off to elementary school, it has been great having time alone with each of my children as a stay-at-home mom.

Even the baby is bringing me joy today! I felt lots of kicks and nudges during church this morning...as if baby was reminding me that I'm actually the mother of THREE children. I am so eager to find out who this little one will be and to enjoy lots of our own special moments together. (If the pregnancy is any indication, I think we will both share a love for desserts! I think baby enjoys them as much as I do!)

I've had a beautiful day reflecting on how lucky I am to be a mother! I hope all of you mothers out there (including my own wonderful mom) have a Happy Mother's Day too!

Birthday Pics

Some photos from Liam's birthday yesterday. My learning with the camera continues. I got some good shots yesterday, but almost all of them have a pretty heavy warm orange cast to them, and somewhere along the line I seem to have deactivated the auto flash option on the camera. I'm getting better at understanding what the camera settings do, just not so good at actually USING them. Still, nothing a little post-processing can't fix.

It's tough to catch in a photo, but the Hungry Hungry Hippos action was fast and furious.

Liam's prolonged "I Won Hungry Hungry Hippos Happy Dance"

His 'cake' was actually one ginormous chocolate chip cookie.

Liam is FOUR!

In honor of our sweet little boy's fourth birthday, here are four of my favorite pictures of him (and you realize that it is an impossible task to select only four pictures, but I did it somehow).

And I'll include a couple of great recent comments from Liam as well:

Mom, when I grow up, I’m going to be a football player. And when I next grow up, I’m going to be a baseball player. And when I third grow up, I’m going to be a soccer player.

Wow! How many times are you going to grow up?

Four.

* * * * *

Mom, when Dad took us to get donuts, I got a Papa John Long with sprinkles, and Logan got a Papa John Long with sprinkles.

Happy Birthday, Liam! We love you!

Baby Love: Liam's Affection for Cousin Carter

While I was looking at the updated photos of my nephew on Lisa's blog, Liam came over to take a peek...

"Oh, this is Carter! I just LOVE Carter!"

The Rocketeers

Finally, FINALLY, the weather has been a)warm and b)sunny enough to get outside with the camera and do some shooting. The boys and I spent a good portion of yesterday outside braving the wind to have some fun with Logan's rocket launch pad. Thanks to the Lennings for this entirely awesome birthday present for Logan, with which we were able to clear the huge locust tree in the back. You step/stomp/sit heavily on a rubber airbag to send the rocket skyward, and the boys had great fun trying to jump on it as hard as they could and see how high the rockets would go. With a little more space and a little less restraint, I'm thinking that FAA or NASA notification may be needed for future flights.

At any rate, the photos turned out fairly well. I've been experimenting with fast f-stops and fairly shallow depths of field, mostly because it tends to blur and de-emphasize the backgrounds which, let's face it, tend to be a lot of subdivision goings-on which aren't always the best backdrop. Unfortunately, using a fast f-stop with auto-focus means that the thing you're trying to get sharp and in-focus isn't always what the camera thinks, so sometimes I get a shot of a fuzzy Liam and a nice, crisp sidewalk in the background. I need to get a little better with the manual focus, I think.






Those fuzzy white blobs in this shot are actually very close and out-of-focus flower petals from the pear trees in the yard.



I think that at some point I'm probably just going to have to take the camera outside with the manual and a couple of hours to kill and work through all of the options. It's a vast improvement over our last camera but I know that I'm still not getting the full potential out of it.

Jammies

Tonight, Liam decided to wear fleece, footed pjs. The weather is relatively spring-like at the moment, so I asked Liam if he was sure he didn't want to wear some cooler pajamas. He answered, "No, I like these. They're snug."

Spring Break is Over

Okay, so the photo project isn't doing much, because a) it turns out there aren't as many old photos as I thought, and b) the weather hasn't been nice enough to get out and take new ones yet. There are only so many interesting photos that I can take inside our house. But spring is just around the corner! I can tell! Yeah, so we had a snowstorm a couple of nights ago, but still!

Here are a couple of shots from Spring break. There are more I'll get to, but these are the ones I started with. First up is a shot of Liam at Grandpa Phil's 60th birthday breakfast. It's a good shot because it captures perfectly Liam's response to having his photo taken, which is typically something like "NAAAAAAAHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh....."



The second is a great group shot of the boys with their cousins at...well, I don't know where this is, because I wasn't there. It appears to be Oz. Is it just me or are Tin Man and the Lion a little creepy looking?

As is clear in the photo, they're never all looking at the camera at once. Also, it looks like Liam might have a future as a professional tough-guy, maybe a bouncer or celebrity bodyguard.

It's An Off Week

I had hoped to get more new photos up by now, but the boys are off in KC on Spring Break vacation, and I don't have the new camera with me. But, I'm still working on retouching some of the older photos.

This is a fairly early photo we took of Liam, again at the botanical garden here in St. Louis. It's basically 50 acres of nothing but excellent photo opportunities. This photo is a little overexposed, as his clothes are almost washed out. Playing with the brightness helped a little bit, as did converting it to black and white. I like it because it's the only photo we took of him that day where he's actually looking at the camera.



This one I like just because the lighting and angle all worked out really well. There are a couple more where he's actually reading the books instead of throwing them around, even if he is reading them upside down.

Photo Project - March 10

This is one of my favorite photos of Logan, and it's not even a very good quality photo. This was taken back in 2004 in the middle of the English garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden down in Shaw Park. I love the composition and feeling of spring when I look at it, but it was taken with our first digital camera, and the overall quality of the photo itself is not that great. So, I used it as a guinea pig to explore some photo manipulation techniques. Added a vignette, and oversaturated the colors and contrast. I'm attempting to recreate a bit of a lomography effect, but given the source material (the photo is loaded with greens and blues, hardly any reds) the end result isn't quite what I'd like. But it's not too bad.



Interestingly, that day at the Botanical Garden really stands out in my memory. It was a perfect spring day, about 70 and ridiculously sunny. Logan was only about two and running around acres of garden for a couple of hours was still a source of wonder. I'm not sure he'd get the same enjoyment out of it now.

The Cobapple 2009 Photo Project

I've been thinking about ways to improve the frequency and content of this blog, since it appears you all are still coming here fairly frequently and we're not really doing much.  It also happens that we just got a new camera, a Nikon D40, thanks to Circuit City's bankruptcy and a sweet 30% off sale.  So I'm excited about exploring photography a little more in-depth, now that I have a DSLR camera that is quite a bit better than what we've been shooting with.

I'm also exploring my options for photo editing, since a lot of good photography these days is made in post-processing.  The perfect opportunity to use that lies in the thousands and thousands of photos we've shot over the last 7-8 years and hardly touched because we shoot a LOT of photos, dump them on the hard drive, and then forget about them.  So what I'm envisioning for the rest of the year is a combination of old, retouched photos that you may not have seen, plus new photos from the new camera.  Hopefully I can start to expand my photography skills and get away from the old standard bad-lighting, poor-focus, indoor snapshots of the boys.  

To get things kicked off, here are a couple of photos I took of Liam painting over the weekend.  I converted them to black and white to tone down a lot of the clashing colors in his pajamas, and to bring out the shape of his paintings instead of the primary colors.  I also experimented with a different shooting angle.  What do you think?

Updates Coming...

It's rather amusing that I believe we have updated the overall theme and color scheme of this blog about 3-4 times in the last two months, but not the actual content. I suspect readers would prefer the latter.

I have an idea for some upcoming photo content, so keep your eyes peeled...

(By the way honey, this green polka-dot thing is not doing it for me.)

The Photo Finish

Here are some photos from Logan's Pinewood Derby last weekend.

Logan's car - "Fire and Flames"

Logan with his car on the track

And they're off - Logan's car is second from the left. Sadly, this is about as close as it ever stayed to the rest of the pack.

Logan and denmates

I Feel I Should Explain Myself

We're back from the holidays, all the gifts are put away or into use, and 2009 is well underway. Naturally, that means back to the weekly rush of activities and whatnot, and for Logan that means back into Scouts full speed.

Unfortunately, full speed was pretty pathetic. Last Saturday was Logan's first Pinewood Derby for Tiger Scouts, and we'd been working on his car off-and-on since Christmas. It was a pretty simple design, in fact most of the time and work was spent on the paint job. The idea behind the Derby is for the Scout to do most of the work, with assistance as necessary, and I wanted Logan to be involved and do as much as he could. I think that's a good way to get a lot out of his Scout activities.

What it is not, apparently, is a good way to do well at a Pinewood Derby.

Logan came in dead last. Out of 15. I take full responsibility, since it appears that the primary culprit was his car's inability to even cross the finish line. Not heavy enough, you see. The cars have a weight limit of 5 ounces, which means most cars clock in at 4.9 thanks to carefully attached weights. We had no derby car weights, and Logan's car was about 3.5 ounces. I correctly predicted that his car would accelerate just as quickly as the others (as gravitational acceleration is independent of mass), but I failed to account for the momentum it would need to keep going. Ah well, live and learn.

His car was also a little lacking in the appearance department, and that I'm a little more disappointed with. Not in Logan's car - in everyone else's. As I said, the Derby is supposed to be about the kids building the cars, for the most part. Most, if not all of the other cars at the race, were clearly the product of a lot of adult labor. From the car design to the paint job to the polished finish, there were some really, really well-done cars. Now, I have a fair judgment as to the abilities of a 7-year-old, and if those kids built those cars then I know of some high-paying skilled machinist jobs they can slide into TODAY.

So in the end, I'm rather proud of Logan's car. Logan designed it, Logan helped cut it out, Logan helped paint it, and Logan also seems to really like it.

But next year, we'll make some changes.

December Catch-All

So, we've been pretty busy with the holidays and neither Jill or I have had a whole lot of time to blog. Biggest thing going on these days was Logan's 7th birthday - we celebrated at home last weekend and he had some friends for a party on Wednesday. Overall things went pretty well. It's getting to the point where birthday/Christmas shopping for the boys is kind of difficult. I mean, they have so many toys that most of them don't get played with as it is. This birthday was primarily LEGOs and a couple of Xbox 360 games, with a supplement of always-appreciated art supplies from Jan and Kathy. Logan seemed to be pretty satisfied with everything, although the wide-eyed reverence he gave to the 360 game was tough to beat. His birthday party Wednesday was at Chuck E. Cheese, which frankly I was looking forward to about as much as back-alley dental work. I had heard a lot about Chuck E. Cheese over the years, almost all of it bad, and I was prepared for the worst. Entirely unfounded, as the evening actually went off really well. Not too crowded, the place was fairly clean and if not for the overloud music loops blasting at certain points in the place, would have been almost perfect. As it was, the party turned out great.

Gearing up for the holidays now and hopefully we'll be able to see some of you over the next couple of weeks. It just occurred to me that we typically do one of those "Year-Ending Holiday Letter" things at this point on Cobapple to catch everyone up on what's been going on with us all year. You can't tell, but I just sat for 5 minutes thinking of all that I could write about and it wasn't much. So, here's the condensed version. Logan's been doing well in first grade, at times probably not being challenged enough, but he still seems to like school so aces there. Liam's been enjoying preschool, and we continue to fight the Sisyphean task that is potty training with him. I've spent the last year working Business Development here at work, learning all about the fascinatingly irritating world of politics and defense procurement. Jill's been doing everything else. We had a great vacation to South Carolina back in September (go read the archives if you missed it), and are thinking of trekking to Colorado for next year.

The boys are both doing well, and getting excited about Christmas. Logan is getting heavily into Indiana Jones, although we haven't let him see any of the movies yet (the LEGO versions are more his speed for now). Liam is basically into whatever Logan is into - the big brother worship is going strong. Right now one of his big things is bookmarks. Logan has been reading chapter books, and they're usually too long to finish in one night (or even two or three), so we've had to bookmark his spot. Liam thinks this is just tremendous. So now, he likes to call a sudden halt to his books about 2/3 of the way through as declare "OK - this is where we're leffing off." Then he'll stick in a bookmark and call it done. He's very proud of himself.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The other day Logan drew the most beautiful picture. It was completely unprompted...just drawn on a piece of recycled scratch paper. But I found it to capture the gratitude I feel during this season just perfectly.

Thank you, God, for your abundant love!