one week

One more week.  It's started getting dark by the time the kids go to sleep and the Dude keeps asking when he gets to go to school.  He's riiight on the cut-off date so I could easily keep him out this year, but for now he's just chomping at the bit to get in there and get going.  How rude, right?

I haven't been posting very much because I've hated taking too much time off for myself - even for blogging.  I will have time next week.  Which angers me, but once I do have a few free moments to do exotic stuff like vacuum I'll be okay.  I have loved every single day of this summer and watching my kids grow together.  This year I had two actual kids - not a kid and a toddler - so we could do actual things.  Really awesome fun things with water and glue and swimsuits.  It only took me 7 years to get to this point.

Seriously, all I want to do is wax poetic and moan and groan about how school is going to steal my precious children and they are growing up too fast and somehow blame everything on the Skull and Bones society.

Instead, can I just take a moment and expound on how awesome it is to be a Mormon?  It's fabulous to live life with the knowledge of WHY I'm here and where I'm going.  I look up into the sky and think about all the planets and galaxies and massive stars out there and how we are these simple people on one small planet who have evolved to care about important things like who got cast as the new Batman.

I can't look at what we are here, and what is out there and think we are the product of some random chemical reaction.  If we were, I would be even MORE ashamed of the fact that reality TV exists.  I mean, if we were the only people to ever be in this great universe, and we used this amazing gift to focus on what Real Housewife did to the other one... well, it would crush me.  Instead, I know we are part of this amazing, huge plan and have been given the free agency to do nutty things like professional eating and killing each other over ideological differences.  Which is not as depressing with the knowledge that this isn't all there is.  Life is just one stop on our journey.

That's what keeps me going and gives me hope.  I love knowing.

cut . it . out .

I was seriously sick of my super long hair that was just the right length for Thing 3 to yank. Hard. But if I go to get my hairs cut, I want to do something new and fun, and for now I have no ideas. So I asked the husband to trim the scraggly ends. Which means something entirely different to the two of us. Anyway, this happened:

crazy train

I'm not a year and a half into this take-a-picture-every-day thing and though I've learned more about my camera, I'm still totally in the dark about editing.  I thought I'd share a bit of the trainwreck process with you.

 "Okay, this picture looks good.  I'll edit that one."

 "Maybe I'll crop it in closer and brighten up our faces."

 "Maybe I'll use some retro filter."

 "Or sepia.  Everything looks cooler in sepia."

 "Hrm... back to the original and I'll up the saturation.  More color I say!"

 "Or no color at all.  Wait, where did my nose go?"

"Aw, screw it."

black

Am I the only one who has trouble picking out an outfit to wear to a funeral? I don't know if all black is just cliché or so cliché that it's inappropriate, especially if I'm not related to the deceased. So this was my compromise this morning.

It wasn't one of those funerals where they lived a long healthy life and had a pile of grandchildren and it feels like a lovely culmination of a journey. I sat next to the deceased's 6 year old daughter and heard her baby sister behind me and prayed for strength the entire time. For all of us, for the rest of our earthly journeys.

This life thing is not for amateurs.