Here are some quick pictures from the first couple days in Madrid & Barcelona. The places are beautiful, but I'm pretty homesick. I'm still very much adjusting to being away from home, hopefully each day it will become easier.

This is the Palacio Real. The picture doesn't really do justice to the building's size & beauty.

This picture is of the Plaza de Oriente. This is the square right in front basically of the Palacio Real.

A house in Barcelona, I couldn't get the whole house with the lens I had on the camera. But regardless it was beautiful.

This was the ceiling inside the Palacio Real. We weren't allowed to take photos once we were inside the Palace, but we managed to fire off a few random shots. Basically I just held my camera facing up and shot. (that's why there's not any real "framing" done on the picture, either way I still liked the picture.)

This is in Gaudi's Park Guell. This park was amazing. I have tons of pictures from here, I'll have to post more hopefully tomorrow.

Another one from Guell's Park.

This was in Plaza de Oriente as well. The weather this day was gorgeous.

One more from the Plaza.

Today we toured Casa Batlo, Casa Mila & The Sagrada Familia. All were beautiful. The "houses" have these amazing rooftops. And the church is still a work in progress... but amazing none the less. I hope to edit some of those pictures tomorrow & post.

Tonight Melinda & I went to the Hard Rock Barcelona. We both just really needed a meal that felt like home! Pasta & mashed potatoes never tasted so good! And yes I ate both pasta AND mashed potatoes... i didn't feel so bad she had mashed potatoes AND onion rings!

Tomorrow is a free day in Barcelona. We fly back to Madrid in the evening. I'll try to post more pictures tomorrow.

i love and miss all you guys!

leavin today...

So my Spain trip is here... I had no idea it would show up this quickly. I had no idea I would get so emotional. I had no idea it would be so hard to leave them... so I'm gonna keep this post short. I don't have much to say except...

I'm gonna miss these guys like crazy!

more random stuff...

First... I tried to post these two pics a while ago and for some reason it was taking forever and I gave up. But... here they are now!

Kaleb was a monkey in the Friends School Play. (and a cute little monkey he was!) note: he's wearing his art institute tshirt! love it.

This was a quick shot of Ella riding in the Jeep. She is quite the little rockstar when she's in the Jeep. She dances in her car seat and her hair blows all over the place... it's a sight for sure! (note she's wearing her I love my auntie tank top! love that one too.)

So this weekend was full of randomness. I went to First Friday in Doylestown. I went because I had to shoot the event for a project at school, but ended up hanging out for a bit once I had taken care of business. There are all kinds of artist's work on display throughout the town and shops. It was pretty neat.

Saturday I did a "planning" run to Ikea. I got some pretty cool ideas as far as furniture and picked up some misc stuff for the kitchen, etc. Also caught the Sex in the City movie with my mom... I liked it!

Sunday we had company for dinner which was really nice. I took some quick snapshots of Ada & Ella. Also Kaleb did some posing for me outside by the Jeep.



This week is SUPER busy. One final down (this morning) and another on Wed. And the one week countdown to Spain starts on Thursday! YIKES! I can't believe it's here already! I hope to post lots while I'm away! (key word is hope)

Happy Birthday Kaleb... xoxo

June 3rd is FOREVER a special day in my life. Kaleb's Birthday! As most of you that read this blog know, Kaleb means the world to me and has a super-special place in my heart always. Well, my buddy is turning six... I can hardly believe it. He's turning into quite the young man, it's really a bitter sweet feeling. He's a total blast to have around these days, he's funny, he gets our jokes, and he doesn't mind just being with us, we don't always have to be up to something or going somewhere special, we can just hang out and he's happy about it, but at the same time he's not a baby anymore. I just want to put him on pause. Only for a little bit, not forever, just for uhm... well a little bit. I know I'm not being realistic but, sometimes it's comforting to pretend that he'll always be my baby. (ok, I know he's my sister's baby but I tease him that he's my baby!) Moving right along... I did manage to take some pictures of the Birthday Boy on Sunday. (I have to take advantage of these times since he's still going through that "but you have like a hundred million pictures of me, Aunt Stess!)


OK, now I should probably warn you that Kaleb and his cousins decided to get all yucked up in the water behind the house, including a triple dog dare to ride his bike through the creek back in the woods. So, I should note that my sister does NOT usually allow her son to become this messy in his GOOD clothes. But it is HIS day, so.... this is what it looked like.



After all of the water activities... he had some cake!


Happy Birthday to the bestest godson in the world! i love you more then you'll ever know!

Since it's been ages since I've posted... I'll update on a few other bits of news. I finally signed an agreement last night for the purchase of my FIRST home! It's still not really sunk in yet, but I'm getting there. I didn't really want to post about it until it was official. But as of last night I signed the papers and so did the home owners... so I suppose it's official now.

Also, I have a few pictures of Ella to share from Kaleb's birthday too!

The prettiest girl at the party, of course!

I suppose that's it for now. Hope to post more frequently. Oh and holy cow I leave for Spain in 17 days! And I'll be in heaven both Tuesday & Wednesday night as I'll be at the Dave Matthew's Band Concert both nights! Life is good!

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!