The 2011 Gingerbread House Edition

Gingerbread house construction has become quite the tradition around here!  And why not, it's FUN!  This year's experience was a little easier for me, all I had to do was construct the houses and let them have at it!  I helped Ainsley a little bit with some of the decorative frosting, but I only put it where she wanted it and she was in charge of candy.  Of course, she wanted to eat the candy more than decorate with it!  Ian, on the other hand, took full charge of his house this year.  He wanted to do the frosting and the candy and he did a GREAT job!  He was so proud of his house when he was finished!  They both did a wonderful job and I feel like next year, Ian will probably be able to construct his as well and Ainsley will be completely in charge of decorating hers.  It's wonderful to see them create!  And without further ado, this year's gingerbread houses!

Close-up!

Bravo kids!  BRAVO!

Halloween 2011--Beetlejuice and Lydia

Oh my GOSH!  It is December 13th and I just realized that I haven't posted about HALLOWEEN!!!  Clearly I have TOO MUCH stuff going on!  I feel like I have been living in 3 alternate universes at one time.  As much as I think I'm dialed into my calendar, I'm still missing stuff, showing up to dance class late and all sorts of wonderful stuff.  Sometimes I really long for a much simpler life!  But alas... that is another subject entirely and I just want to share the Halloween AWESOMENESS with everyone!

This year, Ian and Ainsley decided to go as two of their favorite movie characters, Beetlejuice and Lydia!  I was excited about this as I LOVE Beetlejuice and I couldn't wait to make the red wedding dress!  Like last year, Brady and I tag-teamed costumes.  He was primarily responsible for Beetlejuice and his black & white striped suit, I was responsible for Lydia and the dress.

Brady managed to find a white, baptismal suit on eBay.  Here is a before photo...

It's important for it to be comfortable enough for ninja maneuvers!  He took masking tape and taped off the stripes and then we used black, fabric spray-paint.  It worked pretty well.  The lines weren't perfect, but then again, neither was Beetlejuice's suit.  He was dead and dirty and whatnot.

We also found Ainsley a dress on eBay.  And just an FYI, it is really hard to find blood red dresses for 5 year-olds!  We finally found a pageant dress that had spaghetti straps, which is nothing like the actual dress in the movie, but hey, we were desperate.  So I went out and bought like 15 yards of red net to fluff the dress out, make a shoulder wrap and fashion a veil.  I also had the chore of finding a black wig with bangs as I refused to cut her bangs or dye her real hair black!  With much hard work and a couple of "dress rehearsals" to test make-up, the kids were ready for their Halloween debut!  I think we rocked it, but you can judge for yourself!

I stylized this one a bit, just for fun!

And, for good measure, Brady and I dressed up as Barbara and Adam on Halloween night!

Nevermind the gray hair, it was strictly for theatrical effect!  ;)

We took the kids and Linda to our normal "haunt" in Hyde Park and had a blast!  The kids' costumes were well-received to say the least.  We had numerous people stop us and ask to take photos.  They got loads of candy and accolades and once we were all sufficiently pooped out, we packed up and headed to EZ's for our Halloween night burgers!  It's a great family tradition.  What can I say, Halloween is absolutely my favorite holiday of the year!!!

Stepping Stones

We have been participating in A LOT of activities this summer, mostly indoor activities because seriously, this heat is KILLER!  Luckily for me, the local toy store and the public libraries have had loads of good stuff happening.  Now for just a smidge of background, we recently got rid of our trampoline, it was falling apart and the kids were rarely using it.  We have decided that we would like to make a little patio back there and I was discussing planters and stepping stones and such.  I thought it would be cool to have some that the kiddos made and got online to price them out.  The next day I received a flyer from the toy store and the first thing I saw was a stepping stone class!  Woo-hoo!  First they had to make the mold, and wait a few minutes for it to set a bit.

Then they got to decorate with various things and when it was all said and done, we ended up with these lovely stepping stones!

They are now gracing the front garden as I don't have my back patio quite yet!  They did a great job!

Easter Eggs!

The kids did a great job with Easter eggs this year.  We tried several new techniques and they all came out so original!  We LOVE coloring Easter eggs!

And now for the close up!

Oh you didn't think we'd forget the gingerbread?

We were so happy to have Daddy home on Christmas Eve!  So we took advantage of this and baked and decorated our gingerbread cookies!  They had a lot of decorating to do!

I sometimes wonder if I should cut my gingerbread recipe in half!  But then again, I do make awesome gingerbread, lightly crunchy on the outside, but totally soft and wonderful on the inside and the frosting ain't too bad either!

Here are the kiddos showing off their awesome creativity!

And now to taste the finished product!  YUM!

I have to admit, this is one of my favorite holiday traditions!  I LOVE making gingerbread with my family!

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!

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!