Majorette Magic

Shazaam!

Word of the Day: Deluge

Here's how Word of the Day posts are supposed to work:
I put up a word for which all commenters are to use in a sentence.
For example, today's word is DELUGE. I know what the word means, so I don't need boring comments like, "The deluge of information she received overwhelmed her." I'm looking for clever, even irreverent sentences, such as, "The deluge of athletic supporters in the "FREE" box in the faculty locker room at BYU catapulted Mark into a frenzy. He flipped and threw the jock straps every which way, searching for his size."

The winning comment will be posted for all to see, thus the winner will receive much fame and glory and lucrative joke contracts from David Letterman.

And for today for the winner, I'm throwing in a plate of cookies just to sweeten the deal. Yeah.

I May Be 30 But I Can Still Do This:

Now We Are Six

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a good portraiture of a 6 year-old?

I do.

He's not really interested in smiling for the camera over and over again. He's right in the middle of that painful smile phase. He prefers to look silly, pouty, scary or mean over charming.

You know what did the trick for me, finally? Getting him to do really sweet, awesome, incredible tricks while I snapped away.

But like Grandma Rass says, "Use the best of what you got. And then what you got's the best you got."

There's real wisdom in that.

Here's the best of what I got:

Happy Birthday, Bud.

Cross Out 2, Circle 3

We recently finished reading Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary to the boys. They enjoyed it a lot and one of our new favorite things to say comes from the book. In it Ramona has to do these worksheets where she circles pictures that begin with the /s/ sound and cross out pictures that don't. She also applies this procedure to things she does and doesn't like. For instance, when she's mad at her classmate she thinks, "Circle Ramona, cross out Susan." Now that Clara's three, we can cross out two and circle three.

Here are the birthday pictures Joel helped me out with on Saturday. We would have taken a lot more pictures, but it was raining for part of the time, and we all (including the kids) walked away with about 10 mosquito bites each. We took the pictures at Grandma Rass's house, so I guess it doesn't matter whether you live in a nice neighborhood on the east bench or down in the swamps of Utah Lake - you can't escape the mosquitos.

She was excited to have her picture taken after she saw the special treatment Mary got for her birthday pictures. Which one of these do you think I should print out for the grandmas?

Happy Birthday, Clara!

She's the One

(I think she looks just like my baby pictures in this one)

(I got that headband down to the Beehive Bazaar)

(A little tantrum is par for the course)

Happy Birthday, Mary.

Even Babies Realize the Genius of Heart