Mekayla Loves Me!

This happened while I was at sewing class. So sweet...

Mekayla : I'm sad.
Daddy: Why are you sad?
Mekayla: Mommy.

She missed me!!! Yay!!!

Busy Busy Day

Phew. Today has been a busy, busy day... First was sewing class till 1ish. Then I came home, fed the baby, had lunch, went to the car wash, Costco, returned an item at Carter's, came home, fed the baby, put the groceries away, prepped some stuff for lunch tomorrow, stained Mekayla's new table from Ikea, finished prepping tomorrow's lunch, finish staining the table (1st coat). Somewhere in there, Mekayla peed all over the floor and sofa, there were 2 poopy diapers from Nadia and I have yet to get a chance to wash her poopy explosion off her PJs from this morning. I am stealing a few minutes to write this then we have to put the kids to bed, eat dinner and hopefully then, sit down and chill... Phew. Thinking about it makes me tired all over again.

I learned a lot from sewing class this morning which isn't hard since I pretty much know almost zero about sewing and my sewing machine. I did piece a quilt together once when I first got the machine but there were a lot of oppses involved. I felt like such a noob (a.k.a. noobie, newbie, someone who's totally new and clueless). Just the littliest things impressed the heck out of me. One lady there had this monstrous computerized quilting sewing machine. It could sew stitches up, down, left, right, diagonal, upside-down - pretty much any way you wanted. Everything was push button and it had this giant touch screen display with a stylus!!! It could very well cook and make coffee too!

In case you couldn't tell from "Mekayla peed all over the floor and sofa", potty training is not going so well right now. I'm getting bad flashbacks from when we toilet-trained the dog. We might need to re-evaluate our strategy.

Ugh. I hear Carter getting the girl's baths ready. Here we go...

Now That's What I Call Ballet

Okay, so I told myself that I would post only twice today but then I found this on Abbey's blog and I loved it so much I just had to share it. This has got to be the awesomest dance/ballet video I've ever seen. Granted I've not seen a whole lot of dance videos but even if I did, I think this would be somewhere on the top. Apparently it's from a movie called Center Stage. I think I'll have to add this to our Netflix queue. Ballet never looked this cool when I took it... Gonna keep on dancin'... dancin'...

Living Waters Now Available!

After a 2 year wait, the Celebration Church's latest worship CD, Living Waters is done and available for purchase... This has been a real labor of love for all of us involved and truly exhibits the awesome love, grace and power that God has. The annointing that Pastor Babish and our worship team has is clear and tangible as you listen to the music.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this with everyone. A preview of the music is available at the Worship Team's MySpace page. Feel free to also check out Celebration's website. If you'd like a copy of the CD, let me know! Now, if the sheer awesomeness of this CD is not motivation enough, here's more. Yours truly is on it as background vocals. :)

Yesterday's Fire

So, yesterday was a rather eventful day in our little pocket of the world. The girls and I had gotten home from Gymboree and lunch with daddy and were taking a nap. Yes, that's right a nap. A wonderful hour I savored the rest of that day.... However, my glorious slumber was rudely awaken by the sounds of a helicopter flying so low over the house that the entire structure shook. It seemed low enough to try to land in my backyard. I tried ignoring it hoping and praying that the girls would continue sleeping. Then came the sirens. And then more helicopters trying to land on my house!

Okay now I'm freaking out. There's something going on nearby and helicopters could mean 1. There's something news worthy happening (but I didn't think news helicopters were allowed to fly so low). 2. They are looking for a fugitive in which case I better wake the heck up. 3. It's an insanely hot day (in the 100s perhaps?) and there could be a fire nearby in which case I better wake the heck up. So I bounce off the sofa, and look out the front living room window. Nothing but clear blue skies. I look out the back dining room window. Ack!!! Plumes and plumes of smoke really nearby. So I run upstairs to the master bedroom, open the window and look! There's one of those helicopters with the big baskets dumping hundreds of gallons of water over all that smoke! This is both wonderfully exciting and terrifying at the same time. So, what do I do, I run downstairs to grab the camera. This is too cool!

At some point, Mekayla wakes up. So, there we are, Mekayla, Norbert and me both looking out the window at the smoke and the helicopter (which she calls a plane). I take pictures of the helicopter, Mekayla watching the helicopter, Norbert watching the helicopter and getting all growly and Busy Bill going to check out the fire behind that one neighbor's house. It's cute but everytime the helicopter flies off, Mekayla will say, "Bye bye plane! Bye bye plane!" BTW, Busy Bill is a guy that lives somewhere behind us. He likes to know what's going on in the neighborhood and goes around checking things out. The house you see in the 2nd picture is pretty much right in front of his. Anyways, here are some pictures. BTW, if you notice specks on the pictures, it's from my rather dirty windows. Please try to ignore them...



I'm not sure if you can tell but this fire is really close by. It is just round the corner from my house. Carter walked by when he got home to see what the deal was. Turns out there was a brush fire (there's a big empty grass lot behind those homes) and the brush fire spread to 2 of the homes there. (sad) The police guy said at that time that they were investigating the fire and they think it's arson. Yikes. I wonder about my neighborhood sometimes.

Anyways, closer to the home front. I'm taking my 1st sewing class tomorrow... Yes, Carter bought me a sewing machine for my birthday in 2007 and I'm finally taking my sewing class. MJ's latest cute word is "Awesome". We had dinner at Black Angus last night and when the giant appetizer platter arrived, she said, "Wow.... Awesome." So very adorable. Nadia is smiling buckets and has even laughed a few times at some of the whacky things we do for her. She's probably thinking my parents are nuts! She used to do this cute thing where everytime she saw you she'd smile and coo and coo and this would go on and on for minutes. She's just stopped doing that which has totally broken my heart. (sob) Now she coos at the fan and fish in her swing... ??


Also, we are starting potty training tomorrow. Are we prepared? I don't know... We bought 2 potties. Does that count? 1 to keep at home and 1 travel potty. A lot of good stories should come out of this one. I don't know why but the thought of it just terrifies me. All I can say is God bless us... Everyone.

Hello World

Hello blog world. And so begins my foray into blogging... So why blog? I don't know really. The concept was introduced to me several years ago by my then boss when I expressed an interest in writing. Blogging was a relatively new thing then and I was kind of "Hmmm I don't know." Then a friend of mine started blogging and I was still like "Hmm. Yeah okay... Cool. Whatever. Not really for me." Finally, I guess I had 2 kids, my hormones got all messed up, I felt like I was constantly talking to myself (whoever says that 2 year olds listen to you has never actually tried having a full and decent conversation with one) and decided that I needed a (venting?) outlet (beyond my poor husband).

Also, it appears I'm in a new "artsy" phase in my life now (or so it seems). Something that has until now laid dormant under a thick, dusty layer of techno geeky engineering stuff. You see, I am an engineer by training. However I soon realized that it really wasn't quite for me. I understand the stuff and seem to do well it in but never really shared the same passion for it other engineers seem to have. So now, I'm diving into this whole other world that I've only waded in before. In a way, it's rather like the USS Enterprise on Star Trek... "To boldly go where no one has gone before."

I love that this would be a great way for me to share cool, fun things about the 4 Hamiltons with our general family without indirectly contributing to the college and retirement fund of everyone at the phone company.

So with that, I begin my blogging journey with 2 momentous words any student of programming would know:

Hello World.