*Stuck*

We're stuck in Washington D.C. Our flight out of Providence last night got delayed for way too long and so our connecting flight to K.C. left without us. And of course, the airline wouldn't pay for anything or give us anything good because the delay was because of weather!
But luckily our friends that are watching Max are infinitely patient and and sweet, so he's in good hands. Kris and I just got to enjoy another night at a hotel, without a 3 year old, so we can't complain.
But my email's not working right, so I owe some people an email that aren't getting them. Patience. I'll be back late today--just in time to go and take a test at school.
In the meantime here's something quite exciting. It's a picture of Kris singing karaoke. Can you believe it? Take a good long look because I've never seen this before I don't think it's likely anbody's going to see it again. I'll have to explain later.

Oh and too bad we're not stuck here longer since there are people I'd LOVE to see out here in our nation's great capitol. We're meeting up with Kris's cousin Lisa early this morning for breakfast and then flying out. Smash and Amy, next time we get stuck it's your turn.

.:.:RI:.:.

You haven't heard much from me in the last few days because Kris and I are out in Rhode Island trying to get an idea of what it's all about.
Max is staying with our good friends back in KC, and seems to be having a great time--enough of a good time that he hasn't bothered to ask for me. Oh well I guess.
Here's a picture of Kris on the coast.

We're getting a better idea of places we could possibly live, and how the city is. We've also gotten to know some of the residents Kris will be working with next year, and that's been really fun.
So more later!

~ M ~

Max's school studied "muh" during and after the christmas weeks (oh man, now I'm giving away how behind I am!) They did a lot of different stuff for M, and I probably only captured a small part of it. Here we go.
They talked about mushrooms, mammals, moose, mice, mountain lions and monkeys.

This is a mammal that he brought home to me. It's a giraffe in case you can't tell.

They did a lot of art projects, and here are a few of them:
"Mixing Colors" by Max


"Mosiac Art"


"Edible Marshmallow art" This is one of my favorites!!! He was so proud of it.






I hardly got any of the snacks written down, but they did have mangos, mozzarella cheese with apples, meatballs, muffins and mushrooms with rice. Yum. I wish I would've gotten to eat all of those snacks.

We're sure going to miss this great school when it's time to move!

::Mealtime at Our House::

This is how mealtime looks at our house.



Pretty much any meal. This particular meal is dinner, (applesauce with cinnamon) but breakfast looks about the same. Monkey and zebra both have to attend, and often Mama Fish is there as well.
The only unusual thing about this shot is that Max is actually sitting in his chair eating. I have no idea how I captured that since it only occurs during about 10% or less of mealtime.



He's cute though, isn't he? These are pre-haircut pictures as you can probably tell. See why I waited so long to cut his hair? Isn't it just adorable in these shots?
And how about his tail, do you like that?

I'm working up a post to tell about why we have Sock Monkey. Maybe someday I'll get it done.

*By Special Request*

So I have a pile of fun pictures from my birthday "fest" to post, but of course I haven't gotten them ready and put up because I've been using every extra moment (of which there are oh-so few) to play with Photoshop, which was one of my birthday presents. I love it and I'm excited about it and I SO don't know what I'm doing yet.
But, in the meantime I've had a special request from Kelly to post a picture I took of Max and his best buddy Isobel. This shot is from my birthday get-together. Max was being very energetic and bossing Isobel around a lot. She played along for a long time but then I think just got tired of being bossed and started ignoring him. It was pretty funny to watch their interaction. This picture illustrates how they were relating to each other that evening very well. I think it's hilarious.
I especially love the food all over their mouths.

And in honor of my new photoshop, here are a few other versions of this photo.

vintage snapshot--kind of cool, kind of weird.

this one's using some settings that are supposed to enhance portraits. I like it pretty well.

kind of an interesting muted color version. It makes Isobel's eyes look really beautiful.

another vintage version-I like this but I think it's a pretty cheesy effect. Like I should make a greeting card out of it or something. But I'm not sure what the card would be say....any ideas?

and last, a version with very saturated color. There are things I love about this, and things I don't love, like Max's cheeks looking so strange.

Obviously it's going to take me some time and experimentation, but I'm going to figure this thing out. You just wait! I'm sure I'll subject you to more experiments as time goes on.

.:.:Happy Birthday to Me:.:.

Since it's my birthday I figured I could get away with a slightly self-indugent post. (hah, like they're not all that already, right?)
So to start with, here's one of my all-time favorite pictures.
This is Max sometime in the summer of 2006. He was really mad at me, I can't remember why, and he made this ridiculous face. I laughed so hard. He just held the face. He held it long enough for me to run and get the camera.

And to take two pictures.

Hah! It still cracks me up. You can see he needed a haircut in this picture too. Seems to be a constant problem at our house....
And for a quick trip back in time, here's a picture of my birthday back in 1985. I was turning 5. Fabulous cake, isn't it?

Please note a very young, very cute Megan peeking into the picture from the right.
The tradition for my birthday was to have a pinata. It was often homemade. Our best friends the Williams would come over in the evening and we'd beat that thing long and hard until it broke. Sometimes the homemade ones would never break and dad would have to take the thing out somewhere and smash it for us.

Here's the one from when I was 5. I love the rainbowness of it. I also love that I'm wearing some sort of long pearl necklace. Awesome.

Here we are in 1988, when I was turning 8. Joel and Megan Williams on the left, and Charlotte's best friend Brittany on the right. I love the high noon effect of the big photographic light we had.

And this is 1992. What do you think we were all saying in this picture? Something loud I'm guessing. We didn't even bother to decorate this pinata, it's just the organic newspaper. Completely functional. I bet it was hard to break too. Joel did a pretty good job breaking them as we got older though, so he always had to go last so he didn't just break it first and bum everybody out.
Oh yeah, please note Murphy's hair in this picture. Does it look familiar?
There's much much more, but that's all we're going to see for now. You'll have to wait for my next birthday for more!!
But I'll leave you with this picture.

Remember the clarinet we saw on the sideboard in the tea party picture? Well here it is in action. Why am I kneeling on the floor to play? Who knows, but I played whenever and wherever I could. Doesn't Charlotte look adorable in this picture? What a cute smile.
Happy January! Aren't we glad that it's February now? And that's all the questions for tonight. Later! We're off to watch Lost. It's a good birthday present.

::The Cut::

Before:

After:

So now he can see, but he does still have plenty of hair. And he still has his wings which I love so much.
Kris took him to the haircut while I was in class, so afterwards because he was so good Kris took him to Walmart to pick out a "prize" He came home with this ridiculously huge baseball bat.

It's one of those really light ones. You know, I think all of us had one at our house when we were little. I'm not too thrilled about him running around in the house with that thing, but so far he's been fine. For some reason he's very interested in baseball right now which is really weird because neither Kris nor I care about it at all.

I like his haircut. It took me a little bit to get used to it, but now I recognize him (the first couple of days I couldn't pick him out of the crowd when I was picking him up from school). He's not that happy though. He was very upset about it the next morning. Shortly after he woke up he asked me if his hair had grown. Then he reached up and tried to brush his hair down into his eyes. When he couldn't he broke down: "My hair didn't grow!!! Boo Hoo!!"
So we had to comfort him somehow. When we discovered that his hair now looks just like Kelly's (Kris's brother) that really helped. He hasn't complained much since then.

It's just so funny that he's so particular about his hair. I mean, he's not even a little girl! He's just so emotionally attached to it. I do remember crying after haircuts when I was little because I thought I looked ugly though. And Kris is pretty emotionally attached to his long hair. Max must just be a silly combination of the two of us I guess. Makes sense, right?

He's still not as hairy as Sultan though, no matter how hard he tries. Sultan wins every time.

I just keep telling him that it will grow back. What I don't tell him is that when it grows back we'll just cut it again. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

.:.:Big News, really really Big News:.:.

We heard from the "matching" service that Kris had to use to apply to his residency programs yesterday. We knew that the decisions would all be made public on the 28th, so we were pretty nervous the day before. But somehow we made it through the night and in the morning we got an email at 7:30 saying we are going to.......(a drumroll would probably be appropriate here)........Providence, Rhode Island for the next two years!! (Starting in June as far as we know)

We're not too surprised about it actually, because Kris's interview at that program went SO well, and they were very positive about him. They have a couple of locations, so we figured he would get into one of them. We thought it would be either Brooklyn, NY or Providence. We're happy about Providence because it's supposed to be the location with the best and newest facility and equipment.
We're especially excited considering that there was always a chance that things wouldn't have worked out. If that had happened Kris would've either had to give up the dream of being a pediatric specialist (which really would've bummed him out) or else wait a year and reapply. Neither of those alternatives sounded that good to me, so I'm just so glad that it all worked out.

Interestingly, neither Kris nor I have ever been to Rhode Island! The interview for this program happened in Brooklyn. So we don't have any idea what to expect. Luckily we have some great friends in the ward that just recently moved here from Providence (crazy, isn't it?) They're going to help us figure out some good areas we could live in and stuff like that. We're going to miss them and all of our other fun friends when we actually move. It's so sad to think of leaving, even though we'll be so so glad to be done with school and for Kris to move on to the next step in his "professional life." Probably the best part for me is that he is actually going to get paid. I'm typing it, but I can hardly believe it! He's going to get paid and we will have benefits, which is going to totally blow my mind. Hopefully I'm going to get to quit my job. I'm really looking forward to it.

So although we don't really have any idea how it's all going to be, we do have a few plans...
I'm looking forward to doing a lot of shopping here:

You luckies in UT have one, but poor me, I've have been suffering without. We should have one out here, I don't know why we don't! I'm excited because there's an Ikea between Providence and Boston. Yay!

Also I'm planning on frequenting this wonderful place:
I love H&M!! And for those of you that haven't had a chance to go, it's worth traveling for. Good clothes, cool clothes at excellent prices. There's one of these outside of Boston too.

We're also planning on spending a lot of time here:
and here:
and here:
assuming of course, that these pictures are all of Rhode Island beaches. They're supposed to be....
I love the beach, so I'm thrilled at the idea of living within a relatively short drive of some beautiful beaches.

We're also looking forward to frequenting here:
(New York of course!)

and here:
(Boston) We like big cool cities like these.

Kris is hoping for some good road biking opportunities, which seems likely to me, considering that road biking is kind of a preppy sport, and New England is preppy, right?

And I guess we're supposed to cheer for the Patriots now in football, and it seems this would be a good opportunity to do that, since they are probably going to win the super bowl. But I just can't. I think they're too boring. They just win to much. I guess that's a good problem to have. We'll see if living out there changes my mind.

So thanks to all of you for all your help and support!! Thanks for voting on Kris's application pictures, you obviously picked a good one since it got him some great interviews! Hopefully we'll have a chance to come visit all of our peeps out in UT this summer, maybe in may or june sometime. Everybody better clear their schedules. We'll see you then!

::A Gem::

I've been meaning to post this for a while. It's an absolute gem that I found a couple of years ago when I developed a couple of rolls of film that were shot on my old point and shoot. In my family we got a camera for our birthdays when we turned 8. It was way cool.
So here's a fabulous tea party.

I'm not sure what the event was here, but it does look fancy. I'm not going to name any names here, in order to protect the innocent, in case they want protection for some reason, but you know who you are! I will say though that I'm on the far left, in case anybody can't tell. And Charlotte (my favorite sister) is the one closest to the camera in the foreground.
Anybody in the picture remember what we were doing? Char? We're certainly all dressed up very fancily--hairbows, dresses, etc. We've got candles lit, we have the quilted placemats out, as well as napkin rings (wow!) and it looks like we're drinking coolaid.
Anyway, looks like fun. I'd do it again tomorrow with all the same old friends if I could!
Can you see my clarinet in the background standing on the hutch (or sideboard or whatever you like to call that piece of furniture). This must've been in 1992 or so, which is when I was teaching myself to play the clarinet. It stood around the house all the time because I liked to pick it up and play it whenever I was in the mood. You know, a swingin' version of twinkle twinkle little star brightens up the day. I should probably try that nowadays.