odds & ends

So... My sister, Erik and the kids are away in Florida... which is wonderful for them, but totally weird for me! I'm so used to always having them here... always being able to see Kaleb & Ella whenever I want. So, not having that luxury this week has sort of been an "eye opener" for me. I'm coming to the realization that I'm going to be away from them for 3 whole weeks & I have no idea how I'm going to make it through. I miss them SO much now and it's not even been a full week yet! Right now I just keep telling myself that I have a month to figure out how I'm gonna deal. But no matter how hard I try I still can't convince myself that it's going to be OK. I know this is going to be an amazing trip & I know that I'm going to survive, but I'm still so afraid of the time I'm going to miss with them. (now, that being said, I'm not even gonna start to type about the meltdown I'm having inside about leaving Andrew for 3 weeks...)

Now that I got that out of the way... I'm hoping to participate in some online "challenges" that have been posted. My friend Beth has a challenge posted over here. I'm going to try really really hard to complete this challenge this week! And one more, I'm going to try to complete a layout based on this challenge.

My first step to completing these challenges was to take a few pictures... so I shot a couple self portraits. It's been a while since I've taken any pictures of myself and I thought the "today" challenge would be the perfect reason to take a couple. They aren't perfect, but self portraits never really are (at least for me). Here's a look at a few that I played with in photoshop...





these three were the "best" ones... if you can call them that. I'm not a big fan of myself in pictures, but they'll do!

I hope to post the we spy challenge soon!

As I mentioned in the earlier post, Monday was Kaleb's first ever soccer game! He was super excited and so was I! Andrew played soccer when he was this age and I always enjoyed going to watch his games...now I get to go watch Kaleb and I think that's pretty cool! So... i share with you some pictures from the game.


getting some tips from Daddy on the sideline!


i couldn't resist sharing these too! Ella was content watching the game as long as she had her lolly pop!

busy*busy*busy

Sorry... I've been a "bad blogger" these days! I've been meaning to post since sometime last week and it just didn't happen. (besides the fact that I really don't like posting without at least one picture to share, but we won't go there right now!)

School has been crazy busy, turns out that 2 of the classes I thought would be no-brainer's... actually require my brain a whole bunch! Work has actually been busier then normal... so basically life has just been busy!

Kaleb had his first official soccer game on Monday night (of course I couldn't miss that) so I'm going to try to share some pictures from that maybe later tonight. Watching Kaleb play brought back LOTS of memories... Andrew played soccer for years when he was younger and it was a pretty big part of our lives so now it's pretty cool to see Kaleb experiencing being part of a team and learning about the sport too!

That's about it for now! I'm gonna try real hard to post some pictures tonight!