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coach
Look what my mom-in-law gave me for Christmas :
Do you know how much I love purses? For some women it’s shoes ~ but for me it’s purses. And one can never have too many Coach purses as far as I’m concerned!
Roger’s mom got the exact right thing for me. 
Thanks, Mom!!
new driver, new car
We celebrated Sawyer’s 16th birthday on Sunday. He went to the DMV on Monday and traded in his learner’s permit for a driver’s license. And he bought himself a car. It has been a big week for Sawyer!
Here he is with his driver’s license and his new car (the car is new to him, it’s not a “new” car; but it’s his, and that’s all that matters to him! He used some of the money from his savings account to pay for the car and the repairs it needed to be in good drivable condition.)
first photos
Oh. my. goodness. I’m in love. L.O.V.E. love. Here are a few pictures I took yesterday morning with my new camera. These are straight from the camera ~ I’ve done absolutely no editing, touching up, or messing with them in any way:
I suppose it may depend on your monitor, but on my monitor the quality of these pictures is superb. I usually mess with the fillighting or the color or contrast before I post pictures. I didn’t this time, and to me these pics look better than any I have ever taken with my old digital camera.
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We have a family tradition of opening presents late in the evening of Christmas Eve, then we sleep in on Christmas morning. We started doing this when our boys were little; we didn’t “do” Santa, so it made no sense to us to wait until Christmas morning and get up super early because the kids couldn’t wait any longer to open their presents. We sleep IN on Christmas morning! LOL
Roger and I put goodies in everyone’s stockings before we go to bed on Christmas Eve ~ that way there’s a little something for everyone to wake up to on Christmas morning.
I will be taking pictures tomorrow night as everyone opens their presents. We’ll have a full house ~ Ashley will be here, as will her friend Mike and my dad. And since this is Attison’s first Christmas, you can bet this Nana will be taking lots and lots of photos!
new camera
Roger and I decided this year we were going to buy ourselves one gift rather than getting each other gifts. We narrowed the choices down to a new surround sound for the living room or a new digital camera. Today we went shopping.
All of the surround sound sets we found were wireless. That’s great ~ for a home that doesn’t already have a dozen wireless things competing for airtime. The wireless network we have set up for internet access is a bit finicky, and occasioally someone will get kicked off when the cordless phones ring. It’s a bit annoying. So, we decided it would be better to not add more wireless contraptions to the already overloaded system in our house.
That meant our choice was a digital camera. Roger did a little investigating ~ Consumer Reports and such. I’m a camera buff, so I pretty much already had my choices of digital cameras narrowed down to two. One was a Nikon, the other was the Canon EOS Rebel. I have always owned Canons ~ I still have and use my very first camera; a 1977 Canon AE Program. Yep, it’s film. But I use it and love it anyway.
I have been looking at the Nikons, but having been a dedicated Canon user since I was a kid, it was hard for me to imagine not owning another Canon. When Roger did his investigating, he learned that the EOS Rebel XSi was the best camera in our approximate price range.
Best Buy had the camera (body) and two lenses on sale this week. It’s a kit ~ you get the camera, the regular lens and a zoom lens. The zoom lens is usually a $350 lens. With the kit it was $200. I just couldn’t pass that one up.
So today we brought home our new baby ~ the Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I started playing around with it. Wow ~ the images it’s capturing are amazing. I was beginning to get frustrated with the digital camera I got from my dad ~ it was just too slow to catch the things I wanted to catch, and half the time even when I did catch something it turned out blurry! With the new Rebel I took a picture of the dog walking away ~ something in motion that should have turned out blurry ~ and the picture was as clear and sharp as it could possibly be. I’m SOOOOOOOO thrilled!
Say hello to my new baby! I can’t wait to start taking pictures with it. Roger even asked me if I would teach him some photography.
So far I love this camera…and I will be taking pictures Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and probably every single day for a while!
P.S. (Monday morning) I took pictures of Attison jumping up and down with my new camera ~ they were clear and focused! Amazing. And that was on the full auto setting, not even the sport setting! Man, am I going to have fun with this camera…
moved!
Thanks for stopping by Books & Book Reviews. I’ve consolidated all of my blogs into one which you will find here. Stop by A Joyful Heart to read my latest book reviews and posts!
my mom’s slides
Here are a few of my favorites:
My grandmother, Mickey
She was beautiful, wasn’t she?
Me with my grandfather, Pixie (I have no idea what was going on with my hair ~ you’d have to ask my mom. I think she may have tried to curl it or something, but it’s horrible!)
Me again
And me with my mom (again, not sure what was up with the poncho ~ you’d have to ask my mom!)
spying
This one cracks me up. It’s from my mom’s slide collection. Check out the doorway just to my mom’s right (your left)….
(That’s me hiding in the doorway. I don’t know when this was taken, but my guess would be that I was about 4 or 5 years old…)
new christmas stockings
I bought new Christmas stockings this year ~ I ended up buying 9; one each for Roger, me, Ashley, Patrick, Sawyer, Attison, Roger’s mom, Roger’s step-dad and my dad. I bought them from Pottery Barn Kids ~ they were on clearance, and they were so cute I just couldn’t resist. Since Roger’s mom and step-dad won’t be joining us for Christmas this year, I haven’t hung theirs up. I’m one stocking hanger short for my mantle, so my dad’s may have to go under the tree instead of on the mantle.
Ashley has a friend whose mom just bought a very expensive embroidery machine. She said she would embroider names on the stocking for me ~ I’ll send them to her after Christmas to do that since they’re so cute on my mantle even without names on them.
Here’s a photo:
treasure trove
Today I received a box from Glenda, my mom’s best friend and caregiver. My mom is now in a “care facility” for Alzheimer’s patients, and Glenda has been going through my mom’s belongings at her house in Powell, Wyoming.
My mom has deteriorated fairly rapidly over the past year or so. She now thinks she’s back in college, on the swim team and living in the dorms. She occasionally recognizes Glenda when Glenda visits her in the care facility ~ at other times my mom thinks Glenda is Mickey (my grandmother).
Glenda has sent me a couple of boxes of things that belong to my mom that Glenda is sure I would want to keep. Mostly sentimental stuff ~ my elementary school report cards, letters to my mom from my kids when they we little…just stuff like that. However, in today’s box from Glenda I hit the mother load (no pun intended)!!
Inside the big box was a smaller box ~ the kind the bank will ship new checks to you in. I opened it up and found it full of slides. Back when I was little, my dad used to have all if his film pictures made into slides. I have no idea why ~ but I’m glad he did. The slides have retained their original color. I have a box FULL of slides I didn’t even know existed. Slides of my grandmother when she was in her prime as a model and actress in Hollywood, slides of my grandmother and grandfather slightly after their “prime” but still looking great, when they had their dream home/retirement escape built in Texas…..slides of me with my grandfather (to my knowledge there are no prints of me with my grandfather, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to see those).
There are slides of my dad when he was the police chaplain where we lived in New York (state); slides of me with my parents that I had no idea existed, and all kinds of other amazing finds.
I’m thrilled. Of all of the things Glenda has sent me from my mom’s, this little box of slides is the greatest. Better than the little baby ring that contains an emerald and diamonds (I’m not sure who it belonged to, but I’m guessing it was either me, my mom or my grandmother), better than the sentimental jewelry that belonged to my grandmother and amazingly enough still actually smells like the powder she always wore, even better than the charm bracelet of my mom’s that had me and the kids laughing about some of the charms on it.
I still have my light box; my project for this evening is to start digitally photographing those slides, one by one, and transferring them to my computer. I can’t wait to share some of them with you!
a charlotte mason quote
I posted this quote over on The Homeschool Post for today’s “Thursday Thoughts.” It’s such a good quote that I thought I would post it here, too. If you’re not sure who Charlotte Mason was, google her name. She was a pioneer in educating children, and it’s her method we have used in our homeschool for 13 years now.
“Now, that work which is of most importance to society is the bringing-up and instruction of the children – in the school, certainly, but far more in the home, because it is more than anything else the home influences brought to bear upon the child that determine the character and career of the future man or woman. It is a great thing to be a parent : there is no promotion, no dignity, to compare with it. The parents of but one child may be cherishing what shall prove a blessing to the world. But then, entrusted with such a charge, they are not free to say ‘I may do as I will with mine own.’ The children are, in truth, to be regarded less as personal property than as public trusts, put into the hands of parents that they may make the very most of them for the good of society. And, this responsibility is not equally divided between the parents : it is upon the mothers of the present that the future of the world depends, in even a greater degree than upon the fathers, because it is the mothers who have the sole direction of the child’s early, most impressionable years. This is why we hear so frequently of great men who had good mothers – that is, mothers who brought up their children themselves, and did not make over their gravest duty to indifferent persons.” Charlotte Mason, 1893, “Home Education”, pages 1 & 2.