Something New

I’ve been busy working on something entirely new the past few weeks – I’ve been taking photos of the students at our martial arts studio.  This project required the use of lights and a green screen and digital backgrounds – all new stuff for me!  It’s kind of funny – the students get to choose their backgrounds and every single child (and even a few of the adults) choose Fire. :)

Here’s a little taste:

      

Thankful

My Favorite Sister is still living abroad in the Philippines but now she has a visitor - my mother!   We've all been missing Rene, but my mom couldn't stand it any longer and hopped on a plane for a ride around the world.  She's been having all sorts of grand adventures - hiking and riding around on motorcycles, helping in Rene's classroom and taking showers out of a cold bucket of water!  I'll miss being with them for Thanksgiving, but I'm thankful that they are together.

Between baking pies this week, I've been working on a required paper for my Black Belt Test.  We have to write a three page paper and read it out loud at our graduation.  I think I should do an interpretive dance instead.  ;)

Pharmaceutical Fun

I learned a thing or two about my son this week.  Apparently Master Munchkin is one of those kids who gets an awful itchy rash when taking the antibiotic, Amoxicillan.  The kind that keeps him up at night, scratching madly.  So, like any good mother, I treated his allergic reaction with Benedryl.  Ha!  I bet you didn't know that Benedryl  makes some children hyper instead of sleepy!  I had no idea until this week.  The Master was chirping around, all perky and taking non-stop, generally getting on my nerves. Finally I took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes.

Why aren't you getting sleepy?!! 

He stared back, his eyes widening.  "I'm immune!"  And then he laughed his evil scientist laugh.

Fall Family

Here are a few shots from a recent family photoshoot.  This time we hit the local train depot.

Black Belt Boot Camp

If you have followed my blog for awhile now, you know that my children and I have been training in mixed martial arts.  We’ve been taking classes for 3 years and this month we are starting to train for our final test!  There are 5 weeks of grueling classes that we have to go through and, at the end, we learn if we passed.  So I hopefully I will become a black belt in December!  Miss Munchkin will be testing with me.  Wish us luck!

Part of our test includes being able to do 100 situps and 70 pushups.  Uh oh! I can do about half those amounts right now, so I need to get busy!

Speaking of busy, I just finished coordinating our school’s Book Sale.  We’d been taking donations since the summer and about a bazillion books needed to be organized and, well, sold!  It was a lot of work but we made $600 for our little school library, which is more than its yearly budget.  Yea!