Thanksgiving 2010

As always, Thanksgiving weekend was a busy one!  Luckily for me though, with Linda and Woody in town, I wasn't responsible for a big turkey dinner.  I was in charge of rolls, pie and deviled eggs (my speciality)!  It was quite a spread and I was thankful!  Thankful for turkey and dressing, thankful for twice baked potatoes, thankful for green beans and homemade rolls, and thankful for a warm home, and family.  Believe me, I know how fortunate I am!  We went home stuffed and happy!

The rest of the weekend was spent, well, resting!  I did have the dining room set up for 2 photo shoots that ended up being cancelled.  This time of year is hard when you're dealing with children and flu season!  We took the kids out shopping for special ornaments for the tree.  Ian found this little dog that reminded him of Damien and of course it was playing basketball, how perfect could it be?

Ainsley found a rubber ducky, which was also pretty fitting since that child has about 40 rubber ducks!

And I found one I couldn't live without either!  I mean really, a SOCK MONKEY?!?  Awesome!

To follow our little family tradition, we took Sunday night to make a turkey pot pie with the rest of the leftovers and trim the tree!  This year we mixed it up a little.  In years past the tree has had maroon and gold balls with gold ribbon, white lights and plaid bows.  This year we went a little crazy as our pre-lit tree died and Linda gave us one of the trees from the shop.  Which incidentally is a really nice tree!  We strung it with blue LED lights and went for silver and multi-colored balls to accent our eccentric ornaments.  It's strange, we got to looking at the ornaments and realized that 95% of them MEAN something.  Our tree is not filled with "cookie cutter" ornaments that were picked willy nilly, each ornament has a story.  Henceforth we have an "autobiographical tree"!  I love that!  We sprung for a new tree-topper as well, a glowing star!  

I have to admit, the blue is odd, it makes the tree almost glow.  The kids LOVE it!  Uh-oh, obligatory kid pic in front of the tree! 

Someone else kind of likes the new tree too!  Awww, a new bed for Roddy Ringo!

I may be a sap, but I do love the holiday season.  There really is something magical about the glowing tree and the stockings and the 6 million nutcrackers!  ;)  Or maybe it's not the glowing tree at all, but the glowing kids!

Ian-ism of the Day:

While we were grocery shopping at HEB....

Me:  Ian, go grab some cooking oil.
Ian:  Which kind?  Vegetable or crapola?

He was dead serious, then he caught what he said and looked at me, we both just cracked up!  Serious tears in the baking aisle!

Ainsley-ism of the Day:

"Mommy, I want to be a kangaroo so I can have a couch for my baby!"

I swear I could just eat this girl up! 

The Launch

I'm sure it's quite obvious that I have been busy beyond belief with the kids and schooling and field trips and camping and illness and workshops and Halloween and seriously... should I go on?!?!  And of course right smack-dab in the middle of all of this, I have been working my ASS off to finally bring something very important to fruition.  It is my goal to officially launch my photography business on December 1, 2010!
I have a name:  Rocket Queen Photo & Design
I have INSANELY badass, double-sided business cards!
I have a website, thanks to my super-savvy hubby:  www.rocketqueenphoto.com
You will have to forgive that the content isn't quite up and running, but the PORTFOLIO and NEWS & EVENTS sections are both up.
I have my "Assumed Name Records Certificate of Ownership" and I'm waiting for my tax ID #.  I will be shortly set up with bookkeeping thanks to my good friend Chelle who is a professional bookkeeper who also happens to be the singer that Brady gigs with!  She needs photos, I need bookkeeping.  Win/Win!

I have had photo shoots almost every weekend for the past 3 months, most for trade and donation in order to get to know my studio lighting and to plump my portfolio, not to mention getting word of mouth going in my network.  I will be starting a new blog for the photography biz and Brady will get me set up on Facebook with a fan page.  Then it's GO TIME!

All of this is happening SO fast and ahead of schedule!  I honestly didn't think this thing would launch until at least January, but hey, you gotta take opportunities when they present themselves.  Thanks to Brady's connections, we are on a billboard, A BILLBOARD PEOPLE, out in Lakeway to promote Damien Mandola's restaurant!

We also have a shoot scheduled for Iron Cactus, another local restaurant, on the 21st!  I have a full weekend planned this weekend with a friend of mine with a large family for XMAS photos and an album cover photo shoot for the incomparable Chelle Murrey on Sunday.  I have been lucky enough to photograph newborn babies (which I LOVE), beautiful pregnant bellies, little dancers and so much more!  I always said when it was time to step back into the working world that it was gonna be something I loved or nothing at all.  Well, I LOVE this!  How fortunate am I to have a spouse that is backing me 100%?  He's willing to pound the pavement and work his ass off at his job to allow me to follow my dreams!  Someday I hope to return the favor!  I have a really good feeling about this.  It's hard, juggling the homeschooling and all of the kids' activities and the house and everything else, but I feel this kind of urgency, maybe because I'm seriously pushing 40, that NOW is the time and it's now or never.  And I'm sure most of you know that I'm not a patient girl.  Once I set my mind to doing something, I don't mess around!  So stay tuned for the "official" launch on Dec. 1st!

Ainsley-ism of the Day:

While wearing Ian's Anubis mask...

"I am Anubis and I will get you because you have stolen my breakfast!"

Mama got a brand new do!

Short and sassy baby, short and sassy!  It feels totally weird though and no more ponytails!  :(  But it's awesome because the amount of product I use has been cut in half!

Trick or Treat

Smell my feet, give me something good to eat!  Have I mentioned I love Halloween?!?  Like seriously, LOVE Halloween?  I love the costumes, I love the time of year, I love watching my children run through the streets trick-or-treating with sheer abandon!  I love Halloween.  However, Halloween is a double-edged sword!  As much as I love Halloween itself, getting there every year damn near kills me!  I'm not complaining though.  I would rather go through hell for a month than send my kid off trick-or-treating in some stupid polyester costume than some poor kid in China had to slave over!  This year was an especially interesting year as the kids chose SERIOUSLY off-the-wall stuff.  Ian chose to be Anubis, the Egyptian god of mummification, the guardian of souls and the protector of tombs.  Then Miss Ainsley decided she wanted to be an owl.  There seems to be some sort of running theme with owls in our house.  I sometimes wonder if the owl is our family's "spirit animal".  But any-hoo... back to costumes and Halloween!  It took 3 of us to pull this off.  I did most of the sewing, Brady took care of Anubis' mask and staff and Linda took on the owl mask!  And since I STUNK at making an Egyptian headdress, I was pleased to remember than my mom had brought a pharaoh's headdress back from Vegas for the kids to play dress up!  Whew!  So anyway, here was the end product of a lot of hard work.  And once you see them, you will understand at once that although I gripe and whine during October, every bit of effort we put into the costumes is SO worth it!

Without further ado... ANUBIS (or as Brady likes to call him, Ianubis!)

  And if you were wondering, yes, Anubis is a little beefy!  He's got a muscle suit on underneath all that bling!

He was so amazing!  And he played the part so well, very quiet, yet fierce.  And oh my gosh, did people ever flip out when they saw him!  Granted, most people had no freakin' idea who he was and he was getting a bit annoyed at being called King Tut all night, so I had to explain to him that not everyone is as well-versed in ancient Egyptian mythology as he is!  But whether they knew he was Anubis or assumed he was just some pharaoh, they were all duly impressed.  We had people stopping us to take pictures (which normally I would have said no, but hell, he had a mask on, no one could see his face).  He was very proud and he had so much fun, well at least until it got dark and he couldn't see squat from behind his mask!

And what about Miss Ainsley you ask?  Well our little owl rocked it as well!  She tu-whoo'd her way through the neighborhood and charmed everyone in Hyde Park with her big owl eyes and her Converse hi-tops!  Her Daddy calls her "Owlsley"!

 

Nana did a smashing job on that little mask!  I think that's about 2 hours worth of work!!

Tu-whooooo!

And of course we had to get a pic of them together!  (To get a better look you can click on any of the pics.)

They had so much fun and they loved all the attention AND it didn't hurt that at several houses they were told they had the best costumes of the night and were given handfuls of candy!  As per tradition, we headed over to EZ's for burgers after trick-or-treating!  It was a great night, Halloween is always a blast in Hyde Park!  The houses are awesome, the costumes are awesome, personally my favorite costumes of the year (besides the kids) were the slab of bacon who was hanging out with the Hare Krishna!!  These were parents of course, but so funny!  This is truly one of those "Keep Austin Weird" events and we love it!

DC vs. Marvel - A Comic Book Party

OK, so as if trying to get it all together for an owl and Anubis wasn't enough, the kids were invited to a DC vs. Marvel comics birthday party!  Oy!  Thankfully neither of the kids had ANY interest in being a super hero, they were more interested in being villains.  I mean seriously, how could you not?  Villains have WAY better costumes!  Ian decided he wanted to be The Joker and Ainsley wanted to be Cat Woman.  Thankfully Cat-Woman was easy because she's 4, it's not like I was going to deck her out in skin-tight patent leather and whips!  We borrowed a leotard and tights from a friend, purchased a $5 set of cat ears and a tail, and I painted her face and plumped up her hair like Barbarella! 

Is she not the most awesome little Cat Woman EVER?!?  And the attitude to boot!

 Let's not forget our infamous Joker.  I don't know if any of you know this, but when it comes to costumes, I just do NOT screw around!  I take each one as a challenge, even if it's just for a little birthday party!  Of course I could not for the life of me find a vest small enough for Ian, although I went to 4 different thrift shops, Target and yes, even in a desperate attempt, WAL-MART.  But alas, no such thing could be found.  Not only did I need a vest but a REALLY ugly and loud vest.  Turns out my prayers were answered, so to speak, at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop!  I found the nastiest lime green ladies vest.  It had pockets people!!!  Deep pockets and it was more of a square vest than a fitted vest.  But hey, it was lime green and it was $1.25.  SOLD!  I took it home and since I already had the sewing machine out for the Anubis and owl costumes, I took that vest in about 6" on each side and then cut off the pockets sewing a hem right above where they used to be and viola... A Joker vest!  However, no Joker costume is complete without white face make-up, green hair and an ugly tie (donated by Daddy)!  We settled on a mix between Jack Nicholson's Joker and Heath Ledger's Joker as Ian looks A LOT like Heath Ledger did with all the hair and THIS is what we came up with!

 This kid is a better Joker than the Joker himself!!  And quite convincing!  I love it when he turns it on for the camera!

My dastardly duo...

as they plot to overthrow Gotham City!