Summer Vacation 2007: Road Trip Moments

Things we enjoyed about our road trip back to Texas...

• When we turned on the radio for the first time in Texas, the first three songs we heard were all about Texas! I bet there is no other state where you would have that happen!
• On that same radio station they announced a contest in the area, and the prizes were a hunting trip, a fishing trip, or a gun. Sounds like Texas to me!
• We loved this... there is a creek east of San Antonio called "Hollering Woman Creek." We wondered how it got it's name.
• This one we saw in Oklahoma and we give it the "Best Sign That You Are in Tornado Alley Award." There was a motel in Eastern Oklahoma that advertised a storm shelter as one of ts amenities. Don't you want to stay there?
• Back to Texas now. Sometime when you are driving you get rained on by...

BUGS! Ewwwww! Gross!

And now for some more fun moments on the road trip...

A self portrait by Little Robby.

Oh no, Jenna's tied up!

Oh good, she managed to break free!
Just relaxing in the back seat.

And lastly some fun moments in the car with Jenna and Robby.

Summer Vacation 2007: Petrified National Forest

Okay, so I stalled on getting these vacation posts finished. Really what happen was that Robby and I got caught up in job applications. Yes, the time has finally arrived and Robby is selecting schools to which he wishes to apply to be a professor. It's strange because it seemed like we would never get to this point! We have been married for 10 years this December! If you had told me that he would STILL be in school when we had our tenth anniversary I would have thought you were crazy! And now here we are... If you are curious about which schools he is applying to give us a call and we will tell you. Many of the applications are for schools along the east coast, so we may be in for a BIG change soon. We'll see...



Now let me catch you up on the end of our vacation. On our drive home, our last stop was to see the Petrified National Forest and Painted Desert in northeastern Arizona. I must say that I thought this was going to be a little more spectacular. It was one of those places that you can see once and be satisfied that you have "been there, done that." Unfortunately, the petrified rocks at the park have been plundered over the years, and most of the original petrified wood has been removed. I think things would have been more impressive if we had seen it decades ago before people had walked off with so many samples. One interesting thing I learned there was that petrified wood found in every state. Let me get on to the pics...

Here we have Little Robby and Jenna posing in front of the painted desert. It was really neat seeing the variety of colors in the landscape here. These pictures don't do it justice.

While there we got to see some pictographs from the people that dwelt in the area hundreds years before. We liked this one... A large bird carrying a baby (or is it a man.) We wondered was this a stork bringing a baby, or did someone lose a baby to a large bird. Or, did some big brother wish that his baby sister was snatched by a big bird and taken away. Okay, maybe not the third idea. (You can tell us what you think in your comment.)

Robby liked the colors at this particular lookout called the Blue Mesa. Although things look grey in this picture they really weren't that grey. They did have some bluish tones.

Here we are sitting in front of "Old Faithful," the largest petrified tree in the park.

And lastly, Jenna is standing in front of a large polished piece of petrified wood. It is neat seeing all of the colors that come out in the the rocks.

Summer Vacation 2007: A Visit to Oklahoma

The day we visited with everyone was also my Birthday! It was a wonderful birthday gift to be able to see a lot of our old friends, reminisce about great times together, and catch up with what's new. Here are some cute pics of the kids from that day...

Jenna really had fun running around with Haley and Kiersten. While we were at the splash pad Jenna was a little unsure about getting completely wet.

Robby and his friends Daniel and Timothy used to have a great time playing together when we lived in Oklahoma. They would often pretend to be fighter pilots, firemen, chimmney sweeps from Mary Poppins, and on this day they pretended to be pirates.

Here I am sitting with one of my best friends from Oklahoma, Linda and her son Gideon. Jenna is sitting between us looking very Babushka like. (Babushkas are old Russian grandmothers.)
This is my favorite picture from the day... most all of the kids (Sade and Talon arrived later). From left to right we have Jenna, Issac, Rachel, Timothy, Daniel, Robby, Haley, and Kiersten.

The kids ate lunch at the park and then played on the playground. Robby was a great swing pusher!

And here we have a clip of Robby, Daniel, and Timothy playing around on the playground that day. They sure had fun being together again!

Here we have a bunch of the kids again this time with Sade (Talon opted not to be in the picture, but was there).

And here are the former Three Musketeers... When Linda, Shawna, and I were in school while these three were young we had a babysitting swap organized so that we could attend classes and not have to pay for babysitting. It worked out great and these three had a wonderful time together!

I just had to include a flashback to our three babies together at the old institute (I miss that old place!) What cuties!

Finally we have a picture of Robby, Jenna, Haley, and Kiersten. We stayed with their family and had a great time. Alen and Marilyn are some of our best friends. We loved talking and laughing with them late into the night. Thank you so much for having us Alen, Marilyn, Haley, Kiersten, and Emma! You guys are the best! I hope we get to live in the same town again someday!

As we were leaving, Jenna decided that she liked boots! So here is our little cowgirl! All she needs is a hat!

We want everyone in Oklahoma to know we love them and miss living near them! Thanks for letting us visit, and thanks for helping me have a great birthday!

Summer Vacation 2007: Star Wars Exhibit

On our last day in Texas Robby found out about an exhibit at the science museum in Fort Worth that was all about the making of the Star Wars movies. Since Little Robby is a huge Star Wars Lego fan we knew he would think that it was totally awesome. And we were right! We also had the fun of going to the museum with Logan, Wendy, Molly, and baby Will.

Robby and Uncle Logan are standing by their mag-lev Lego cars. Some parts of the exhibit were about how some of the technology ideas used in Star Wars are actually used today. This one was all about using legos and magnets to create a car that levitated and moved by magnetism.
Aunt Wendy had to help Jenna remove her thumb so we could see her smile.

Little Robby is developing the "My parents take to many pictures of me" complex, which explains why he looks so happy in this one.

If you saw Wendy's blog then you saw Molly playing with one of these. Well, I think Jenna was following suit by playing with this audible exhibit reader just like Molly. (They were for the visually impaired so that they could have a voice read the exhibit explanations.)

Many of models that we saw in the exhibit were actually used in making the films. This X-wing was one of Little Robby's favorites, especially since he has his own Legos X-wing at home.

Here they are examining the Y-wing.

We are standing in front of the Millenium Falcon. It was really cool seeing the details the creators put into the models. (This lego set would be the ulitmate for Little Robby, but he'll have to save up his money till he's an adult for it since a Millenium Falcon set cost $500!)

We all thought the Millenium Falcon was cool! Here's Uncle Logan standing with it, too.

One thing I didn't realize about wookies was that they were 2 meters tall! And here's our favorite wookie, Chewbacca!

Okay, so Robby thought this one was cool... It was a remote controlled tree cutter by John Deere. You'll have to ask him about it!

One of the later parts of the exhibit let the kids build their own robot and then give it a simple program to tell it where to go. Little Robby thought this was cool because the concept was exactly like his Lego Mindstorms set.

Jenna wanted part in the building fun too!

Okay, this is totally ridiculous so I had to include it. Since Molly decided that she wanted to ride in Jenna's stroller, Jenna decided that she wanted to ride in baby Will's stroller. So here she is crammed into Will's baby car seat!

I think she overflows it, don't you?!

And lastly, we have a trip to the pretend grocery store. When we first arrived Jenna was determined to stuff her basket full of produce.

She worked hard place each produce item she found into her basket.

She was so thorough that she almost cleaned the produce shelves off single-handedly.

But, what I liked best was the item she balanced carefully on the top of all of her healthy produce! It's okay to eat some, but only after you have your vegetables!

And now a highlights video for your viewing pleasure! (Correction: See Logan's blog to watch him juggle.)

Summer Vacation 2007: Baby Will's Blessing

We were really happy to have the opportunity to attend our new nephew Will's blessing the last weekend we were in Texas. It is so much fun getting together with the family to attend special events like this. Will is Robby's sister Wendy's second child.

Wendy and Jon provided a delicious lunch for everyone after church. It was at that lunch that I got this picture of our other nephew Eli puzzling over Robby's face. Eli is Robby's brother Forrest's first child. Robby and Forrest have a strong resemblance, in fact they look enough alike that Eli seemed confused everytime he saw Robby. We started joking that Robby was Eli's fake dad. Eli's not the only one with confusion issues though, whenever Jenna sees pictures of Uncle Forrest on the blogs, she always says, "Daddy!"

Here we all are celebrating Will's blessing. (I did a little photo magic with this one... I will explain in the next blog.)

Will's happy family.

Molly didn't really want to cooperate with the photo session, so Jon had to do some persuading.

Here are all of the cousins (with the exception of Andra's three - wish you could have been there, too, Andra!)

Fun with Photoshop - Molly Magic!

Okay, so I had a little bit of fun with this one... When we took the big group shot of the family Molly did not want to participate. I am sure that she sensed that the special event of the day centered on Will. So we all took the picture without her (she was there in spirit). Afterward we got her to participate in a few other photos so we joked that we could edit her in. And I had a great time doing just that! I will show you what I did below:

After Photoshop:

As you can see Molly is in the picture... but was she really there?

Original #1 (no photoshop):

Not so, this was the base picture that I worked with. I will show you the picture that I pulled her from in a moment. Now if you study this picture and the one above closely you will notice that I make a couple more changes too. In this one, Will is in the middle of a yawn, and I didn't want the star of the day to have his mouth wide open for this important picture, so I edited him, too, using the picture below. The other edit I made was that I wanted Eli to be looking more towards the camera, so...

Original #2 (no photoshop): I took baby Will's head from this picture to use in the finished product because in this one he was looking more in the direction of the camera.

Original #3 (no photoshop): And finally I took Eli's head from this one and pasted it into the finished product as well. I did have one challenge in doing this though because I had to reconstruct some of Forrest's neck and shirt collar to have Eli's head facing this direction. And now for Molly...

Original #4 (no photoshop):

Pasting in Molly was the biggest challenge, because the best picture I had of her from that day was from this picture above. There were a couple problems though, first in this picture the camera was zoomed in closer which made Molly to big for simply pasting into the other image, and second, her right arm was hidden by me in this picture. So in the end I had to cut her out, resize her, reconstruct her right arm, and place her appropriately in the picture above. Sounds fun doesn't it?! I am pretty satisfied with the final product. I realize that now that you know my secret you will probably always look at this picture and see the slightly pasted in appearance she has, but I think that if you don't tell people they probably wouldn't notice.

Now I'm not done with my editing fun... Take a look at the picture above. We took about three shots of the cousins together, and of all the ones on my camera there were closed eyes or children looking away, so I had to do some more photoshop magic. In the image above, Robby's eyes are closed, and Jenna and Eli are looking away.

Original #5 (no photoshop):

In the one above I have Molly with her hand near her mouth and looking away and Will looking away, but Robby and Jenna are looking at the camera and Eli is turned a little more to the camera.

After Photoshop:And Voila! Here we have all of the children looking generally in the direction of the camera! All I did was take Robby's and Jenna's eyes and Eli's head from "Original #5" and paste them appropriately in "Original #4" to create the finished product above.

Robby was telling me I shouldn't photoshop too many pictures or else people will start thinking we were never actually there, and that I just photoshopped us in.

You wouldn't think that would you?!