Isabelle turned another month older on Alan’s birthday. Here’s our monthly family picture.

She’s getting so tall. She can reach the pedals on her tricycle now.

And I know she hasn’t had little chubby baby fat legs for a while. They’re skinny little girl legs. But in this picture it’s soooo apparent.

And finally, a video I’ve been meaning to share from last month. I turned away for a second and Isabelle had grabbed my camera. Not a cheapo I don’t care about camera, but my camera that I love and use all the time. But instead of grabbing it away from her, I just held my breath, hoped for the best, and grabbed the camcorder. And here’s the video (totally worth the feeling of terror to capture this moment on video).

She enjoyed playing with my camera so much and it was so cute that I dug up my old i-zone Polaroid camera. And now she plays with that instead. She stands there saying “cheese“, “snapping pictures”, and working the little switch.

I’ve been trying to get a picture of her doing that for a month. Every single time she does it, I grab my real camera, and try to take a picture. But once she sees the real camera, of course, she wants to hold the real thing. She stops saying “cheese” with the little i-zone and tries to chase me down to get the real camera. Finally…FINALLY today I got this picture of my little wannabe photographer.

Go to month twenty nine.

Look who has joined our household, Bonnie! Bonnie comes from Nichol.

She gardens to Allison Kraus. Her garden is full of wildflowers and every day Bonnie picks dandelions and brings them to Violet, her elderly neighbor.

Hee hee, I love the stories Nichol makes up to go with her dollies.

I went ga ga over Bonnie, remember? Well Nichol contacted me and said she’d do a trade for a print of my drawing. So that is how Bonnie came to join our household.

Ok we didn’t really fight over Bonnie. I would never pull on Bonnie’s arms.

This is what really happened: Isabelle’s eyes absolutely lit up when she met Bonnie. She said “BUNNY!!” with her arms outstretched. I said, “no. It’s mama’s dolly”. Isabelle squealed, “dolly!”. And I handed her over. I’m such a push over.

And don’t ask me what Isabelle was doing here. I don’t have a clue. Maybe she was trying to convince Bonnie to do headstands with her?

Ok let me take Bonnie off my lap. Yes she really is sitting on my lap right this moment as I’m typing. With Bonnie in my lap I thought, oh I must have Angst too. But I just checked and Angst is already sold. You snooze. You lose.

Talking of bed, I’m off to bed. I’m still trying to figure out how to get back in the habit of posting and drawing. But you know, it might have to wait for next week. Alan’s on vacation again and sorry Olinda, there may be sporadic posting if any posting at all.

I have beach pictures, zoo pictures, and sewing to show but just thought I’d pop in and share a little drawing and a video. This little clip been sitting on my desktop since October! It’s one of those little clips that I think, oh I’ll put that up tomorrow. Or next week. And next thing you know, five months have gone by. I’m a goober.

I still have photos to go through from the beach and the zoo but there are so many of them I’m procrastinating. And for some of you this may be more interesting.

I don’t know about your Joann Fabrics, but the one near me has a sale until Saturday for Simplicity patterns. They’re only $0.99!! A limit of 10. I should have gotten more…

Isabelle usually gets antsy while we’re in a fabric store so it was meant to be a quick trip. I knew exactly what I wanted. I planned ahead. I looked through the patterns online and jotted them all down so we could just dash in and out. But then Isabelle saw the aisle full of crayons, paints, and books.

I grabbed her a couple of books and she happily occupied herself, flipping through them. She was surprisingly well behaved. Usually the fabric store bores Isabelle to tears, even with the distraction of books and crayons. Well not this time! I was actually able to leisurely go looking through the fabric aisles. Sadly nothing really called out to me. I got a few yards of seersucker, some yarn and black felt to finish Isabelle’s Maggie doll and that’s about it.

Then we came home. I avoided going through all the older pictures and instead took new pictures of my new patterns just so I could tell everyone who reads this, there is a sale. Isabelle thought she was a more interesting subject to photograph and got in the way.

I would have to agree.

Alan’s off I don’t know where. It’s not that he disappeared, it’s that I can’t remember what city he’s in. He’s somewhere six hours south of us at a paintball tournament. He left yesterday morning. I think he took his computer with him and maybe he has internet access so I’m going to post a bunch of our beach pictures so he can miss us even more than he already misses us.

We went to this beach in Pacifica with Olinda. The night before, Isabelle kept bringing sewing thread to me saying “kite!” I dug a kite out from the garage and she ran around the house happily with it trailing behind her. So we decided that a trip to the beach was in order. We could do some kite flying and sand throwing.

Isn’t our kite pretty? We couldn’t manage to get it very high into the air though. Other people had no problems with their kites. Our kite sucks. I guess it just looks pretty but isn’t as functional, though I swear I remember flying it really high before.

Maybe it wasn’t windy enough for our pretty sucky kite.

Isabelle didn’t mind. She had fun playing with sand. She always does. The only thing is, she doesn’t like it under her feet at first. It took her a while to agree to have her shoes taken off.

I don’t know why she’s so picky about how the sand feels seeing as she’ll lie on it. She gets it everywhere, even in her diaper. How does she manage that? It probably didn’t help that at one point she fell into the hole Alan dug. I missed it but Olinda said it was hilarious.

Only picture of me. I really need to remember to get in front of the camera and not always stay behind it.

And the video: