yum

Bought tons of produce from fruit market and Sams club

Played a touch of indoor football with mini watermelon

Sliced up the stuff until past dark

Put it all into happy little bags for easy on the go healthy snacks! I even looked up online what a "serving" really is for a child of 1, 3, 6 or 9 and it was smaller than I thought--especially for a baby like Charlie it is a tablespoon for a serving of vegetables. Hooray!

I know that the reason we eat so much crapola is because it is easy to open the bag of chips and start mowing---well now it will be easy to open a bag of sliced strawberries and carrots.

whadda you know!

The cardinal actually came! To our cheerio thingies we made! Hooray!

This is not a magazine

Please know that some of the biggest mistakes in my life have come from being fake and acting fake to impress people who cannot be impressed, who should not be impressed, who would not like the real me anyhow, who are incapable of liking themselves, of loving life, of seeing truth or beauty in anything... I will never get those hours back or all that energy spent but there is always the Now.

I love art and beauty and color and form--light and shadow and hue and tone...I love taking 27 pictures of myself and then posting the one where my nose looks straight...but there is a very bad thing that can happen when we all worship artifice, live in miserable insecurity and useless competition, self conciousness and shame...we are divided against one another, our humanity altered and our senses and our psyches can suffer greatly.

This is not mySpace, and I am not about trying to edit crop cut paste or feed any more fuel to the Mommy Wars. I dedicate this entry to reality--more beautiful than anything else. The truth will set us all free, even in photography! (I hope!)

I have another blog for the super fun and the super cute and the stylishly E-D-I-T-E-D versions of things. www.freshmamaworld.blogspot.com But this home life is perfectly imperfect just the way it is! Finally I can say that and mean it.

Drop me a line and tell me your opinion...

bird treat project

We strung cheerios onto pipe cleaners, melted peanut butter, poured it all over the strung-O's, then put them into a large ziplock bag of birdseed.

We hung these birdy treat "bracelets" out on top of our bird feeder.

We are trying to encourage a great variety of birds to come to our yard this year, and Cardinals are who we studied last week. So we hope they nest here. If they do, we'll post pics for sure!

Precious oldies

These are from 2004. Mostly June. Casey age 1 Mickey age 4 Greta age 7.

*sniff*

They're all so plump and babyish! I thought they were so big! Sigh.

I am addicted...to photosoftware

I have always known about photoshop and stuff like this. But I never wanted to take the time, or effort, or money, to figure out some weird software. Yuck. Frustration and rage is all I pictured.

But for some reason we have this program, called Nero, which my husband downloaded as a free trial for something else, and IT ROCKS. I have been playing with it and I love my (cheapo 3.1 pixel 99 bucks three years ago xmas kodak) digital camera again--or, more truthfully, for the first time!

So, I guess Hearth and Home is as good place as any to post these rock dawg fun pics. I couldnt be more pleased with the fun effects and how much I can go in and fine tune. I had so much fun tonight doing this. Thats what happens when The Baby Sleeps for a Little While Without Nursies. (What, was I suppossed to go do the dishes or something?)

M a g i c !

YOU CAN RED-EYE REDUCE A ZIT. THAT IS THE LEVEL OF FUN I AM TALKIN' ABOUT HERE, PEOPLE.

ENJOY! AND P.S. IF YOU DONT THINK NAKED CASEY ON A SPONGEBOB POTTY SEAT WITH SPECIAL AGING AND COLOR-DESATRUATION EFFECTS IS BRILLIANT, YOU REALLY REALLY MIGHT NOT BE HUMAN.