Texas State Fair

On Monday Dustin had the day off so we decided to head to the Texas State fair with his parents, and boy, was it wet! We all got pretty wet so I didn't take all the pictures I wanted for fear of getting the camera wet. I didn't get my picture with BIG TEX, I'm a little bummed but I got to see him so that counts for something right?

Some Highlights of the fair:

To get to the fair we took the train and the boys LOVED it, probably their favorite part of the day.

Feeding the animals

Seeing the dog show

Seeing all the Superman costumes used in the movies, starting with Christopher Reeve to the most recent one, Thomas LOVED that as well.

Eating a Krispy Kreme hamburger, you read that right. It was a hamburger with 2 Krispy Kreme donuts instead of buns, and it was actually really good. 

Petting Zoo

I totally I forgot about these pictures till today, a couple weeks ago my in-laws' neighborhood had a little get together and had some hamburgers, blow-ups, and a petting zoo. Thomas loved feeding the animals and riding the little pony. So here are some pictures for the grandparents, and since we will be going to the fair tomorrow you probably will be seeing more pictures like this later this week.

Big 30, Sick, and Sky-Diving

This past Thursday was Dustin's BIG 30TH birthday! And I had some fun ideas and plans to make him feel the big thirty and guess what? We all got REALLY sick this week, and I had zero energy that day, that he had to go and buy his own cake, yup, I didn't win the best wife reward this year... with the little amount of energy I had, this is all I did:

Ha ha, poor guy. But he was really understanding since we all were so sick this week, I've never had a flu last this long. Dustin probably got it the worst, but Thomas and I have been sick all week, and there were a lot of throwing up and a lot of laundry, and just barely are we starting to feel good. 

But honestly I don't feel too bad for Dustin because I did take him to a Weezer concert last month and a couple of weekends ago him and some of his high school buddies stayed at a hotel for a weekend and went sky-diving for all of their 30th birthdays, so I don't feel too bad, but I am super jealous that he got to go because that is something  I have always wanted to do, maybe my 30th birthday...

Anyway, I'm glad this week is over and hopefully next week will be better because I want to start doing some fall stuff!

And Happy Birthday Dustin!  I love you, you are the greatest husband, and I'm so glad I get to be with you forever!-and I'm glad you didn't die jumping off the plane.

Busy, Busy

Sorry, another boring post. Life still remains to be busy so I rarely get to take as many pictures and blog as much as I would like. And it seems we haven't done too many fun things as a family since school started but since it's fall and the holidays are coming (so excited!) I hope we can do some more things as a family now that Dustin is getting used to being a teacher and not being so overwhelmed.

But here are some pictures from a typical day for me:

My boys play together a lot, I love it! It is so fun to watch. They are a lot of work but they are so fun and growing too fast.

Final Art Homework

A couple weeks ago I finished with my gesture drawing class, and already miss it. It was such a great class! It also got me drawing a lot more, so I hope I keep it up.

Anyway, our last assignment was to come up with a character and look at the model for three minutes and come up with little "stories" using our character/story, and we did 2 sessions of this so that's why I have two stories going on. We could make up a character but I decided to do Peter Pan and Hermione from Harry Potter, because I love both of those stories and they were the ones that popped in my head when I started drawing the model. Again, these aren't finished, perfect drawings, they are exercises but it was a lot of fun. O, also we were allowed to change the pose  a little bit to tell a better story, so our main goal was for the audience to know what's going on first glance, so here was my final assignment:

Oliver @ 8 Months!

This past Tuesday Oliver turned 8 months!

Eight months was a big month for Oliver, he has a learned a lot and is growing way too fast!

This past month he started feeding himself, well, he can pick up pieces of banana and bread, which has been nice because I can feed him and have more time to do something else or I eat myself.

He can wave hi, I don't think he knows what it means but if you do it to him he will copy you.

He can say mom, so mom was his first word, but it's more like this: "mommmmooommm moooommmm" That first I thought maybe it was baby talk, but Dustin thinks he's saying mom as well, and when he's looking for me when I'm in the other room he keeps saying it until he finds me.

He loves to sing, he will sing with Thomas in the car, he will sing when we are singing at home, he really likes it. 

He loves to wrestle with Thomas, and already tries to attack Thomas if he get's mad at him, o boy! He gets into everything, and he will do whatever he wants to, and he is REALLY smart, I think I will have to watch him closely during the teenage years, I think he will be a good kid, but I think that sometimes he will try to out-smart me and get away with stuff. He's very adventurous and likes to be thrown around, he loves swings, and anything that's fun. Also this past month he has lost interest in the pacifier which has been nice because we don't need it to soothe him.

Him and Thomas get a long so well, they both love to climb under the kitchen table and goof around and chase each other, it is so fun to watch.

He is so much fun, he makes everyone happy and gives everyone plenty of love.

We love our little Oliver!

And... We Are Catching Up Again

I really don't like being behind on the blog and doing these collage things, especially this week when the pictures uploaded small... I like big pictures... anyway enough complaining.

AGAIN, the last few weeks have been busy. A good busy, some things we have been up to:

1. For an early birthday present I took Dustin to a Weezer concert, and it was AWESOME! It was my first real concert and I thought it was great! Pretty sure Rivers (the main singer) is the greatest thing after I saw him perform, and our next son is going to be called Rivers. I wished we had pictures but they said no cameras and I think we were the only ones that obeyed that rule. So we were going to take pictures afterwards with our Weezer shirts but it never happened... So you will just have to imagine how awesome it was!

2. I finished my art class, and I'm so sad, I loved it! And I will post my final homework assignment soon. It's nothing great, but it was fun. My teacher said I had progressed a lot and that I latched on all the techniques quickly and now to just refine it and fit it to my personal style and that I'm a great start for a young artist and he hopes to see me around and my artwork. 

3. If your friends with me on FB, the Harry Potter painting I did for fun for Thomas, well, I sold a print of it the next day! That's when being an artist is fun, when you do something for the heck of it and some one gives you money for it. And I'm currently working on some commissions and I did another photo shoot this weekend and have one coming up. So I'm staying pretty busy.

5. Dustin is getting the hang of things with his new job, he always has great stories. Man, 13-year olds can be jerks. I would say he has a harder job than me.

6. Oliver is learning so much and has some new tricks but I will talk more about that on his 8 month update. He's 8 months this week! So CRAZY!

7. Thomas and I have become pretty good buds since Dustin has been gone more often, He's a daddy's boy but we have bonded a little more this last little bit and I'm so glad because I thought we wouldn't have a close relationship but we have a lot of good chats together, and he's been a really sweet boy to me and has helped me a lot when I've needed help with Oliver.

8. And this week it started to get cold! YAY! It's still not that cold, crisp fall I grew up with but it did rain one day and it got me all excited for fall and Halloween so I started putting up the decorations, and got Thomas' costume, and boy was he excited. So here is a little preview of our theme for our Family costumes this year:

 

And some pictures of the last 2 weeks, sorry they are so small:

Snapshots of the Last Few Weeks

I'm not a fan of doing these collage pictures for blogging but we have been so busy that it's the only way to catch up on the blog.

We have been busy the last few weeks, and I'm not going to lie I have been somewhat overwhelmed with some of the craziness. I think part of it is lack of sleep, since the move the kids haven't slept as well and Oliver has been sick and will only stay asleep if one of us his holding him, which makes long nights and I have been a zombie this last week.

Dustin has been super busy with teaching. They say the first year is the hardest and I feel like we rarely get some alone time. Since we are a one car family he carpools with another teacher who is a coach that has practices in the morning so he leaves before the rest of us wake up, than he gets home we have dinner which is crazy between the 2 kids, than we put them to bed and we both end up falling asleep while doing that. Usually at night he's working on his lessons and I try to play catch up with homework, cleaning house, or whatever that needs to get done, and if I'm lucky go running. Than Saturday Dustin went to the school most of the day grading. So he is always working.

So not having him around to help has been hard. And I think I have a lot on my plate right now so I get a little overwhelmed and I feel like I rarely get down time to recharge so I have been running on empty for a while. I have finally become that mom that doesn't know the last time she has showered, lives in yoga pants, and is wearing ponytails.

Anyway... even though things have been rough we have had some fun too. On Labor Day we met up with some family and friends and went to a lake and had lunch. Thomas loved playing with his cousins and loved getting wet and muddy. It was a lot of fun. Also we have gone on a lot of walks, made and decorated paper airplanes and they were a hit! And at the moment Thomas is really into Harry Potter and I'm loving it so I'm probably have been feeding it a little. Couple of weeks ago Dustin was at his parents get some few last boxes  of our stuff and had Thomas watch the first 30 minutes of Harry Potter and ever since than he's been so excited about it, he most be my son. So in the car we play Harry Potter music and he sings with it {it's adorable} and he's pretty good at it. We sing the "Double Trouble" song from the third movie together, he calls it "mommy's song" because I told him it's my favorite. When I practice flute he asks me to play Harry Potter. He found a stick on one of our walks and he calls it his wand, but now that I have shown him the wands we got in Orlando he plays with those ones now. We have been drawing Harry Potter together which has been fun I hope to post pictures later. I will let watch the first movie and just skip the scary scenes and he's been liking that, so it's been fun sharing a common interest I can't wait till he's old enough to read the books!
Oliver had been good, so far he's been harder baby then Thomas. He's always on the move, so I have to constantly watch him. This past week he hates sitting on the high chair and it's nearly impossible to put him in it because he straightens like a stiff board and cries when we put him in it, but he likes to eat... so I don't get what the fuss is about, but we do it every time. He's been waking up as much as a new born and I usually have to hold him 2 hours during the night, this was before he's been sick, when he was sick I had to hold him to whole time, so hopefully now that he's better we can get into better sleeping patterns so I can function better. But he has a smile that warms your heart and loves to cuddle that it makes it all worth it!

Anyway a little update, I hope things settle down the next few weeks.

Art Homework

So here is some of my art homework from my online class, and I mean some... because I have a lot of drawings from this class; it's been so great drawing this much again, it's been very therapeutic for me while kicking my little behind at the same time. I wanted to show some of the homework because when I have mentioned to people I'm taking a class online they think it's an easy class with not that much work and I can do it my own time line, but it's far from that, I have hard assignments, I have dead lines, I have hour long lectures, I get video critiques, I research a lot, and I draw from life while wrestling with two kids. I have to rethink how I see the body while I work on my assignments that I have to turn off my music or movies to fully concentrate, when I usually watch a movie or two while working on art commissions, so it's been taking a lot of concentration and my drawings don't even look half as awesome as my teacher... somewhat frustrating, that's why he works at pixar and I don't ha ha. 

Anyway, so here are some of my home work this past month. These aren't finish drawings so they don't look so great, they are just exercises to help us push our drawings. This one we had to draw silhouettes of the figure, and we were to focus on visual communication, and if need to change positions of limbs or the whole body itself so you can read the silhouette better and know what's going on. Looking back on some of these assignments I see how bad I was on  some of them.

For this week we had to focus on space, or perspective so things don't look flat on the page, I really didn't execute that very well that week, ha ha now looking back on these, but for half of the assignment we had to draw with our subordinate hand, so that explains the squiggly lines. This first page was from life with my left hand.

This week was exaggeration, I'm getting better but I still play it "safe" with my drawings. One day I will get it....

Also that week we had to pick an animal to start studying so we knew the anatomy so well that we could short hand it, in other words know it so well that we could draw it in any position or angle and know it as well as the human body. So here are some of my deer studies.

This last assignment we had to look at the life model video and draw the model as the animal we were studying. And it couldn't look like a human pose, but how the animal would naturally would pose, if that makes sense... so no Mickey Mouse, where it's a mouse carrying a brief case like a human, but like Ratatouille where they move like a rat.

Anyway, super hard, I don't think I concentrated so hard on an assignment before. So the teacher basically did some elephant sketches while he watched the model than after 20 minutes he said it was our turn, ha ha I was pretty pathetic in 20 minutes I had 2 drawings and they didn't look like deer they looked look like a person in a deer costume, I just about died. I wondered what I was going to do since the homework was due in a few days, we had no internet for a week, so I didn't have a week and half like most assignments, so this last week I have been up very late, drawing, drawing, drawing, failing, drawing, drawing, failing again, watched some Bambi for inspiration, and finally things started clicking and finally my drawings started to look like deer. They are far from perfect but I'm proud of my deer drawings because earlier this week I couldn't do this, some of them still look too human but o well I'm still learning. 

That's what I love about art, it's such a humbling and spiritual experience. There have been so many times in college where we would have an assignment and I wouldn't know how I was going to do it, it seemed impossible but by the end of the week I produce the thing I thought I couldn't do. With hard work and prayer all things are possible. Many times I have prayed for help in my art, this week I did, and the Lord blessed me, I still had to work hard, I drew late hours of the night but I did it! So yes, I'm proud of these deers, but we will see if I will still be proud of them after my critique from my teacher.

Also this week, Thomas has been drawing as well. He blows my mind how awesome he is, this is a self portrait he did the other day, and the Harry Potter one I showed on Facebook already but he did another one, the face was way better but this one had the full body, anyway I'm curious to see if he will keep it up.

Anyway, probably boring post to most of you, so if you read all of it awesome!