Week 8: Something I Miss

Something I miss very much is gardening with my mom in her simple, but beautiful garden. I loved watching her take care of her flowers while she would give me little helpful tips like where to trim the roses or how to find the seed packs in pansies (her favorite) and bury them together to make mixed colored pansies. We would find the little princesses in the middle of the pansy flower and make the lady holding the parasol with hollyhock flowers. She'd sing and hum the same songs in her sweet voice that I miss hearing. I love that the first thing I see whenever I can come home for a visit is her garden.

My favorite time of the year is spring when you can smell her lilacs and when all the bulbs (daffodils, iris, and tulips) are in bloom. Everytime I pass a "Double Delight" rose (my favorite) I think of my mom. It has the most DELICIOUS scent! mmmmm

My mom loves antiques! Old is better than new. That is why I wanted to paint the picture this way. I was inspired by some stamps that I saw, and so I made us dressed from an older time and tried to make it a little bit "Art Nouveau"- that's one of my favorite styles). I also painted it to look like toile fabric. Although my mom doesn't have long hair I chose that to keep with the style of the picture and time period. :)

Week 7: Shoes

This week's challenge is "shoes". The story of the ruby red slippers is special to me now because of where we live. The little home that we live in use to be on MGM's lot back in the 30's while they were making the Wizard of Oz. This house was the tailor's shop for that movie. Our landlady is the granddaughter of the tailor and she has memories of sitting by him while he sewed the munchkin costumes in this home. I like to imagine that his expert sewing spirit lingers here and when I sew he helps me along. :)

Our home is very special. It actually has two very large windows that go most of the length and heigth of the house on one side. Our tailor friend requested the windows to be that large so that he could look over the studio lot as he sewed. When he retired, he asked to live in his tailor shop. So, MGM picked up this little tailor shop by truck and let him pick where he wanted it placed. And, here it has stayed in a beautiful neighborhood with a rare, beautiful backyard in this crowded city.

We love being a part of this little history and it's fun to feel like we own a little bit of those ruby slippers. :)

(Does the black and white striped background remind you of anything from the movie? First person to guess right gets some candy.) :)

Deck of Me- Week 6: Love

Well I finally did another painting. I've had lots of ideas of things I have wanted to paint, but haven't felt like painting for a week or two.

For Emily's "Deck of Me" this week's challenge was: LOVE. Fitting for Valentine's Day. This image came immediately to mind. It's of me, my hubby Seth, and our two girls- Makenzie and Kendyl "secretly spying on the fairy kingdoms". (That's a direct quote from a song that Seth wrote on the guitar about fun adventures). So what I love first is my family and next is the magic we find and make together.

We're pretty into little magical stuff and playing pretend in this house. We're always finding places where magic has happened. I LOVE fairy rings! Seth proposed to me in a fairy ring that he made in a forest. He made his own toad stools out of clay and painted them and then hung twinkle lights all around the trees surrounding the fairy ring of moss and toad stools. He rented a prince costume and invented a glitter blower to fall on us and had beautiful music playing from the movie soundtrack of "Hook". (He hooked the lights and tape player and glitter blower up to a generator). He quoted a poem to me that he wrote as he proposed and got down on one knee. He designed my ring and it is a fairy ring of flowers and toad stools (and a diamond of course) :) It's the most beautiful thing!

Although we aren't as romantic, as often as we use to be, we still do some fun things from time to time and try to create adventures, i.e. for dinner tonight we all ate outside in our backyard at the table back there with candles and roses and turned on the white twinkle (fairy) lights in the trees and made up stories. If it had been just a little warmer we probably would have sat out there and played our guitars- we like to do that in the summer evenings. (With all the atmosphere, too bad the meal wasn't so elegant. :) I had been drawing and painting today so we all ate warmed up frozen burittos. -yum)

I'm so blessed and I LOVE my sweet husband and crazy fun girls (even when I'm cranky- which happens often enough). :)

This is my little Kendyl. She love Love LOVES painting her nails. She changes the colors constantly. It's so fun to watch her love being a girly-girl one minute and playing in the mud and acting like a dinosaur the next. She's learned to be free from her big sister who is whatever she wants to be as well.

I was thinking the other day about how I was when I was little. I loved dressing up and singing for pretend audiances and then the same day playing basketball with my brothers and their friends outside and taking off my shirt when I'd play like them. (Mind you- I was definitely under 8 years old- I thought that was the rule for playing basketball.) When I got older I loved sitting with my dad in the garage and feeling so important handing him different tools as we worked on cars (not knowing really what he was doing) and riding motorcycles in the foothills with him and my little sister on the weekends. All the while still loving to dress in cute clothes, being on dance teams, and thinking about boys and getting good grades and still playing other sports.

I like how girls can be girly-girly and tomboys at the same time. It's wonderful! It's great being a girl! LOVE IT!

Week 5: Use some ephemera from your week

An ephemera from our week last week was my daughter's loose teeth that came out. It was her little pass to some money! Oh shoot, I guess the definition is something printed with limited time use. I thought it meant just something small that was a pass to something (like a tooth is a pass to some money). Oh well, I was inspired to paint this little painting and I'm gonna use it. :)

Makenzie lost her 5th and 6th tooth and was visited by the tooth fairy. Kenz is very proud of the fact that she lost her 5th tooth while in a time out. I guess she had nothing else to do so she just pulled her loose tooth right out. In all the excitement we forgot she was in a time out and danced around and looked at the neat new hole in her gums. Now she is officially missing her two front teeth. Is there anything cuter than that? Not that I can think of. :)

It's always a surprise with Makenzie. Our poor tooth fairy has to go to so much work just to pay the poor kid off. I threw such a stink about wanting to keep Kenzie's first tooth she lost and not let that tooth fairy at it. So Makenzie came up with a great solution. It was that she would leave a note for the tooth fairy to please give her some money for loosing the tooth and put her tooth under her mom's pillow for that time. Works for me.

Four teeth ago the fairy found a note under Makenzie's pillow asking for a fuzzy, sparkly journal with jewels on it instead of a dollar. That poor fairy put her money back in her purse she was about to give to Makenzie and went out that night to several stores looking for such a journal. After two days she finally ended up finding a journal with a big "K" on it (for Kenzie of course) with jewels in the K. Makenzie seemed pretty happy about that. (phew)

Three teeth ago that fairy was so sleepy that she missed her accidentally three nights in a row (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?) and felt so terrible that she gave her two dollars hoping that would make up for it. Makenzie was a little worried about the missing tooth fairy and felt sorry for herself, telling us that she was sure that everyone else who lost a tooth that week was probably getting a puppy and that mean ol' fairy kept forgetting her. The increase of payment by double made her feel better though.

This last time the tooth fairy led her on a treasure hunt for her money before Kenzie could ask for anything different.

I found the most adorable thing that we are going to make. Here's the link http://www.thetoymaker.com/Toypages/06gazebo/06toothfairyGazebo.html It's a little gazebo that you put together for the tooth fairy to come rest in when she stops at your place. Sleepy thing. It must be exhausting working the graveyard shift night after night. Come to think of it, we have a little lantern that I use as a decoration and put a little Tinkerbelle figurine in that the tooth fairy could sleep in if we just kick Tink out. hmmmm, I'm not sure how that will got over. Tink's a little feisty.
Anyway, this looks too fun not to make if you ask me.

So these are our adventures with this little fairy. We sure like her and how hard she tries to please this quirky and opinionated kid of ours. Heaven help us when Kendyl starts loosing teeth too.