Easiest pop quiz ever

We went to school for Meet the Teacher last night. One kid ran right up to his teacher and gave her a great big hug. One kid hid behind the parent and shyly hid face when meeting his teacher. Who was who?

PS. Heading to the beach this weekend to celebrate kindergarten starting TUESDAY.

37 on the outside, basically a giggling teenager on the inside

So You Think You Can Dance is my favorite show every year (#2 when Lost was on the air). It is ironic because I am a terrible terrible dancer. The only thing worse than my dancing is my singing (which has probably gotten worse since I lost my hearing in my right ear). Here's what I love:

• Every dancer is super amazingly talented.
  
• The variety of choreography means you may learn you like a style of dance you've never seen before.
• The costumes, music, lighting. WOW. They do an amazing job with the production of the show.
  

This year I have a CRAZY INSANE GIRL CRUSH on Melanie. I could watch her dance anything. Everything she does is so beautiful. I get goose bumps every time she dances.

But what I like best about her is the short hair. I feel it sums her up perfectly. It takes an amazing amount of confidence to rock short hair as a woman. I feel like her short hair says - this is who I am. You can feel her realness in every interview, every dance, and every movement.

That's what I want for my boys. I want them to feel comfortable being themselves, and have confidence that who they are is beautiful.

Normally I would link my favorite dance of hers but I seriously love every single thing she's done this season, even things I normally think are boring (waltz). Instead I will link to all of her SYTYCD videos.

And I am most definitely going to the tour this year. Not sure which city (probably Charlotte) but I'm buying tickets tomorrow, who's in???

My #1 pet peeve of all time, ever, hands down, #1

I am feeling extremely stressed right now as life is busy busy busy (kindergarten starts in SIX DAYS), so I'm going to relieve some of that stress by complaining about my number #1 pet peeve. The thing that drives me CRAZY. The thing that *almost* makes me say butting-in things to parents.

If you are using a chemical sunscreen (not titanium dioxide based) you are supposed to apply it 20-30 minutes before sun exposure.

Don't trust me. Or the directions on the bottle. Trust the Mayo Clinic. Trust the CDC. Or trust science. Since it is a chemical that is providing protection, the chemical needs time to react with your skin cells.

If you go to the pool and apply sunscreen right before your kid hops in the water, you are doing it wrong.

If you go to the beach and wait until you unload the towels and chairs and toys then apply it to your kid, you are doing it wrong.

This leads me to pet peeve #2, which is directly related to pet peeve #1:

Sunscreen should be reapplied after swimming, sweating, or within a 2-4 hour time period (depending on the skin type and sunscreen type).

WOW I feel so much better. Tell me your pet peeves!

PS. We use a face stick to apply sunscreen to the face then a lotion for the body. Very easy for kids and no sunscreen gets in their eyes! We apply (to everyone) before we even leave the house.

July is a pretty rocking month

The last four days have been a little tiny bit insane, both in good ways and bad ways.

Friday I took Alex to the doctor to check on a nagging sore throat. No strep but they did find a heart murmur, which I have been assured by many many people is very common and normal but OMG it's MY BABY. We go back next month for a recheck.

Saturday and Sunday were still insanely hot so we just spent as much time in the pool as possible. Basically the same as every other summer in the south ever.

Sunday night my grandma Gladys arrived with my dad's three sisters. They were driving back from a week in Florida and it was so super great to have family in our house, swimming with the kids, playing cards, and hanging out.




Nate and Alex were both sad when everyone left this morning, and I'm sure we'll hear all about Aunt Rose, Aunt Deb, and Aunt Ang for quite some time around the house. The toughest part about not living near any family is how quiet and empty the house feels when everyone is gone. Please come back soon!

One more jumping shot

I think the most exciting part (to me) of this whole Nate-cape photo thing is that I didn't take that many shots. Alex took a few shots, Nate watched and then this was his first shot:





I showed Nate the back of my screen, then told him I needed him to jump farther and put his arms out to the front instead of the side. Two shots later, I took the cape one.

This whole experience made me think of the fearlessness of my boys. They started jumping and climbing shortly after they could walk, and we let them learn what not to do by getting hurt. The older they get, they more adventurous they get in what they will do to their bodies. Sometimes I wince but then I watch shows like So You Think You Can Dance and I want the boys growing up USING their bodies.

Age 37 has been a weird tipping point for me, where I have started to feel my age. I've started to slow down a little and my recovery time is longer after strenuous exercise. I continue to push myself for many reasons. After months of bed rest, I NEVER want to be sedentary again. I want to be healthy to live a long life with my boys. I feel better when I am physically active. And most importantly, I want to set an example for my boys that our bodies are wonderous things that can do so many different things.

Like be super heroes.

22 years of friendship

I'm at the point in my life where I am done saying my life is busy. Instead I am going to say my life is very full. And I am happy it is full because the alternative is empty. I've had empty years and it is not good.

To add to the fullness of our summer, my friend Kaylyn and her family came to visit yesterday. Kaylyn and I became friends in high school and have kept in touch ever since. Her husband is in the Air Force so they move around a lot, and we randomly see each other when we are relatively geographically close. Super long term readers might remember that Kaylyn also twin girls (now 12!) and when the boys were 6 weeks old, she came to stay with us for a week to help out. I HIGHLY recommend all twin moms get another twin mom to stay with them for a week because it was The Best Thing Ever.

Right after she stayed with us, their family moved to Japan. And yesterday they visited en route to a flight that will take them to Germany for three years.




I think it is so important to have these long-term friendships. They turn more into family-like relationships than friends, and we can pick up easily where we left off. Even though we haven't seen each other in five years, these five years have been less of a separation since we have blogs, facebook, and email to keep us connected.

The boys were too small for us to want to travel to Japan but something tells me Nate and Alex are going to get to see Germany soon!

Being a parent = sometimes spirit crushing

Yesterday was an insanely awesome spirit lifting day. The first picture of Nate with a cape made Flickr Explore yesterday. This is huge for me. HUGE. Getting a photo in Flickr Explore WAS on my Mondo list. CHECK!!!!

(If you don't know what Flickr Explore is, they pick 200 photos each day to be featured. The pictures are always AMAZING and inspiring and incredible.)

It was a gift from the universe to get such positive feedback. This whole experience morphing from engineer to artiste has been difficult for me lately. I'm so used to a black and white world where things are right or wrong. Photography is subjective, and people are so condescending of "moms with cameras" that I often worry I am a huge photography hack and just don't see it. So I was super duper happy to not only check an item off my Mondo list but to get a little sign that I am following the correct path.

Then I picked the boys up from school and one of the boys had punched a classmate. We had an insanely long "come to Jesus meeting" (for lack of a better phrase) that ended with someone getting sent to bed right after dinner, which started a two hour crying jag. He also got in trouble for lying to me about it, another wonderful aspect of age 5. This is when it sucks to be the parent, because I needed him to get this upset to truly understand why violence is absolutely not tolerated, but FOR REALS, two freaking hours of non-stop crying can really bring you down from a super high.

Fortunately I bitched and complained with my Ladies' Night ladies, had a glass of wine and a peanut butter cup cookie, and when the boys went to bed, I jumped back on Flickr to see the very nice comments.

PS. Anyone who wants to judge the puncher needs to zip it. If day care has taught me anything, it is that sometimes kids are the punchers and sometimes they are the punchees. I think kids learn best by understanding boundaries and now the puncher knows our family boundaries.

Good bye Laura Case engineer, rule follower

Single momming it last night, I decided to pack dinner for the boys in their new lunchboxes to dine al fresco at the pool. Pool, closed due to broken gate. I was so impressed the boys didn't cry or whine about it that I said - let's have a crazy indoor picnic wherever you want! They picked my office. It's all about tone of voice peoples.




I am taking Andrea Scher's Superhero Photo class and one of the assignments is to work self portraits jumping on a bed (super hero like). As I ate my picnic dinner in my office, I couldn't help but notice the nice light streaming into my office, the one I had dreamed would be a studio.

I decided to become Laura Case artiste, rule breaker. Breaking the homework rules, I decided to let the boys be the super heroes for a bit. They liked it, a little.




For realz they could have done this all night. Shizz got super awesome when I convinced them to get out their capes.




MY TWINS NEVER DO ANYTHING THE SAME, not even jumping styles.




I decided to take Superhero Photo because I wanted to infuse more fun into my photography. This is exactly what all three of us needed, my two constant models. And boy did we have FUN.




I've written tons about my photography relationship with Nate, how he negotiates and bickers with me over every shot. As he waited his turn, he hid behind the office door laughing and I quickly snapped this. It is the most NATE photo I have ever taken. I will treasure this one forever. Hope you like it because you're going to see it super huge in my house:




Unfortunately the light faded (we were already pushing it as you can tell from the out of focus photos!) and we had to stop. But before we stopped, we learned a valuable lesson about how we might break our necks jumping certain ways.




This whole evening made me think about how I can, in the future, focus on turning lemons into lemonade. Also I need a mothereffing cape!!!

I need a do-over

A recipe for a not-great weekend:

• Take one vomiting kid
• Add one kid who is INSANELY whiny because he was woken up an hour early
• Add in a 9 day vacation where the entire family was together 24/7
• Add in FIVE YEARS of being in the same classroom together with the light at the end of the tunnel SO CLOSE
  

And you get this:



I am so so so so so so so ready for kindergarten to start. Not just because we will be done with double day care payments. Not just because they will finally stop napping. But because Nate and Alex (and Jon and Laura) NEEEEEEEEEEEEEED the boys to have time apart. No matter how much one-on-one time give them, every time they are back together it is WW3.

Two things saved the weekend.
1. the easiest and most delicious cookies of all time. Peanut butter cookies with peanut butter cups. Another hit from Julie at Joys Hope.

2. The boys have asked to listen to this approximately 4,567,246 times in the last two weeks. They saw the performance on So You Think You Can Dance. I'm happy because I love the song and hello HOK from SYTYCD!

Hooky Friday

For today's Hooky Friday, I reserved tickets on Amtrak for me and the boys to take the train to Greensboro. We were going to hit the Greensboro Children's Museum, Chick-fil-A, then take the train home in time for a late afternoon pool session. The only glitch in the plan was that I had to wake up the boys an hour early. Never good.

Nate woke up even earlier than that, complaining of a hurting stomach. Alex was SUPER grumpy when I woke him up. Everyone rallied after a run through Biscuitville and Starbucks.

Then Nate threw up in the car on the way to the train station. Hooky Friday will now be watching TV all day while resting on the couch.

Can I tell you how THANKFUL I am that Nate threw up before we got on the train??? (Don't worry, I had extra clothes in my day bag just in case.)

Five years in, we are still rookies

One of the major downsides of being first-time parents to twins is that we will always be rookies at every stage. Jon and I have learned tons and tons of valuable lessons about caring for children with different personalities at every age that we will never, ever reuse. Each stage comes along once and then it's gone.

This is the reason I still read Rookie Moms, a website where I have gotten tips since before the boys were born. And I am happy to report they asked me to write an article for Twins Week this week about when things get better! Please go check it out later today.

On our way home from vacation, one of the boys fell asleep on the Fargo-Chicago leg and had an accident. For FIVE YEARS, every time we have traveled, I pack at least one change of clothing for the boys in our carry-ons. In five years of travel, we've never once used that change of clothing so OF COURSE I made the decision to not pack any extra clothes for this trip.

Fortunately since Jon and I lived in Chicago for years, we knew there was an awesome play area in the airport. Please enjoy an iphone picture from two years ago of the boys playing there, pretending to gas up the plane (utilizing the twin mom travel tip of dressing your twins in adorable clothing to ensure everyone is happy to see you):




Our plan was that I would take the boys to the play area while Jon went to buy new pants and underwear. It turns out Traveler Services is right next to the play area so Jon went there. Unfortunately he learned there is NO PLACE in O'Hare to buy pants or underwear. Anywhere.

FORTUNATELY he learned Traveler Services maintains an entire closet of donated clothes in every size, which can be procured for a small donation to maintain their closet. One used pair of 4T sweatpants later (they do not carry underwear), everyone was happy:

• Jon and Laura were happy neither one needed to endure a multi-hour layover with a pee-soaked boy.
• Non-pee boy was happy to get such an extended time at the play area.
• Pee boy was happy to spend the rest of the trip commando in sweatpants.

So.... my rookie tip of the day: no matter how many times you have traveled without incident, the time you don't pack extra clothing is the time you will need it.

The importance of QA

In software, before code changes are released, they are tested to ensure everything is correct and the changes didn't break anything. The general term for this is QA, Quality Assurance. Right before we move code to production at my job, even though we have fully tested the code, we do some last minute checks of the most important functionality to make sure everything looks good. We ALWAYS have different people look at the major functionality because sometimes you have looked at something so many times you miss obvious glaring defects. However humans make mistakes and that is how defects end up in products. And how websites go down.

I just received my 6th blogbook in the mail. Every time I feel like quitting blogging, I just walk over to my awesome shelf of blogbooks and I find myself re-motivated:




Each year I get a little better and faster at formatting and publishing it to look exactly how I want it to look:




But in my rush to get this completed before vacation, I didn't spend the time on QA that I should have. I'm almost too ashamed to post this picture publicly. QA FAIL.

2011 Summer Theme

One of the most common things we hear this summer is that Nate and Alex are so fearless in water and love it. We also hear that we are lucky to get two kids who love water. In the nicest way possible, I want to refer them to the body of work know as "me blogging every weekday for the last 6 years."




Since the boys turned 1, Every.Single.Summer we have been at the pool 5-7 times per week. And we haven't just visited the pool, Jon and I have been IN the water with the boys. It's easy for us because our home (and our previous home) has a neighborhood pool within walking distance. But getting the kids this proficient in water wasn't easy, it didn't happen quickly, and it took a lot of effort.

For four summers, Jon and I played and played in the water with the boys, slowly getting them more comfortable. We fished toddlers off the bottom of the pool. We changed COUNTLESS wet poopy swim diapers. We got scratched and had our suits pulled off while the boys clung to us in deep water. We tread water for hours as the boys jumped off diving boards.




So perhaps you will understand when I say there was no luck involved. And you will also understand when, after five summers of more strenuous summer themes, our 2011 Summer Theme:

The Year Jon and Laura Reap the Rewards and Enjoy Cocktails Poolside While the Boys Exhaust Themselves Swimming All Day.

9 day weekend

For those of you relatively new to my blog, Jon is from Fargo, ND. Yes he's seen the movie. Yes people really talk like that there. Both of his parents still live there, and his mom still owns the family lake cabin in Minnesota where Jon and his siblings summered. With Jon's brother expecting twins and Jon's sister getting ready to move to England, this might be the last summer for a little bit where we could get all the grandkids together at The Lake.

I felt I had to explain why our family takes a vacation to Fargo. HA!

Actually, this post will easily explain why being at the lakes is awesome. There is swimming (and jumping) in the lake:




You can catch minnows with your cousins. And release. And catch again. And release again.




Not only are there boat rides, you can drive and captain the boat. (Adults get to participate in the booze cruise aspect of boating, highly recommended):




There are lots of outdoor sports and plenty of people to play baseball:




There are hammocks big enough for all the cousins:




At the lake, you can wear whatever you want.




At night, there are s'mores (graham cracker optional) and the smokes keeps the (crazy insane) mosquitos away.




In addition to cruising, there are water sports like tubing and water skiing. THAT IS NATE WATER SKIING.




But Laura, did he really water ski? YES.




By far, the best part of the lake is being with family. And the cousins had a blast together.




A super huge blast together.




Hopefully they will always remember this trip and the fun they had.




Thank you to Grandma Roxane for hosting us, feeding us, picking up after us, watching the kids, and making some lifelong memories!




Thank you Grandpa Lloyd for a grand 4th of July celebration and the boys' first camp out!




The first time I went to the lakes with Jon, we weren't even dating. (How did I not see I was in love with him? Who goes on vacation with "a friend"?!?!) Over 10 years later, the trips keep getting better and better.




And saving the best for last..... Jon and I asked Nate to snap a couple of photos of us together. This is my favorite. I might make it my new Facebook profile.

Recovering

We're avoiding the internet for a few more days despite being back from the lakes. It's been a nice break to be disconnected.

Btw, I am racking up the money. First Irene owes me a million dollars for her photo shoot. Now Jon's family owes me a million dollars for this shot of the Case cousins:





We are super duper sad to be back home, but have great memories I will share next week!

Boston, photo class, GOOD BYE!

After almost 6 years blogging, you guys know I generally do recaps quickly after an event. I delayed writing about the Boston trip because I wanted to do full justice to the family photos I took there, as well as full justice to the general awesomeness of the trip. Our BBC May 06 group wanted to plan their annual fall trip but with kindergarten coming up and photography business being crazy in the fall, I couldn't commit to anything past July. Half of us decided to meet for Warrior Dash New England and as the trip got closer, many people needed to bail for various reasons.

It ended up being me, Joanna, Maria, and Steph with visits to/with Liz. I think this ended up being the perfect number because we all got to spend quality time with each other. We bailed on Warrior Dash because it was 52, torrential rain, and none of us were prepared for that kind of weather. Instead we walked and talked and shopped and ate and laughed. It was GLORIOUS.

So glorious in fact, that I got a REAL SMILE out of Joanna at Public Garden.




I'd already met Joanna (many times and a bazillion emails) and Maria (and tons of texts) and Liz (at the Obama inauguration!)so Steph was the only new person to me. And she was just as sweet and kind and amazing as I expected. I think my favorite unexpected thing about her was this surprise tattoo of her kids' initials. I COVET!




I can't really do a recap of "we did this, we did that" because mostly we just hung out. And that was PERFECT. I came back refreshed and a little sad they all live far away.

While there, I also did family photos for Maria. The whole story is on my photography blog. I can not stress how much FUN this family is.




And I also did family photos for Liz. I can not stress how NICE this family is. Liz had us over for a BBQ and I could have stayed all day with her incredible family. Pictures also on my photography blog.




I've been feeling generally burned out the last couple of months as life moves at warp speed. You may have noticed my lack of energy in posts. Our vacation next week comes at a perfect time, huh? It will give me some time to reflect on my Mondo list and generally relax. I am in desperate need of relaxation.

I decided to give myself a gift when I get back. I am going to take Andrea Scher's Superhero Photo class. I had been looking for my next photography course when she announced this. I am beyond excited. You don't need a fancy pants camera to take it, so let me know if you decide to join.

One thing I realized that was missing lately was FUN in my own photographs with the boys. So with Jon out of town, I snapped a self portrait with the boys. This makes me unbelievably happy and is the perfect image to say good bye to you for a week.