RED and a bird

I quite like the bird. And I love that she's messing with our minds by writing RED in green letters. Also the apple tree and the spider with a web, so much cool in one little picture.

It's a Beaver.

(Clearly)

Daddy having Surgery

I had to mess with the contrast to make the doctor show up since she chose to draw him in yellow. The green one in the upper right is Fina crying. (After she drew this, she drew a bunch more surgery pictures and the knife just keeps getting progressively bigger because John pretended to be scared of the huge knife in this one. They're both laughing hysterically. Maybe it's therapeutic. ) 

Yellowstone park 6-2-12

It was rainy and we had a fairly miserable day because Daddy decided it would be fun to put us all in the car and not stop anywhere and just drive around for hours and hours. But that didn't stop Fi from taking 197 pictures. Here's my favorites:

Every time we saw some bison with babies, both kids would squeal "BABIES!"

Foot in a puddle

Ok, we did get out and hike one trail but it was disappointing because we had the stroller so we couldn't go up the stairs and it's probably way cooler if you manage to go up high and look. The landscape

Milky white water

Self-portrait of sorts

Pretty landscape and colorful water

She loved that fallen tree

Hole in the orange water :)

Obligatory wild flower shot

The clouds and some cool trees

A rooty stump and more impressive sky

We took this drive which is my favorite side drive in the park because you get to drive right across the edge of the lake (and there's actually a little pond on the other side of the road so you're surrounded by water) I love how it looks like the water is even with Eloise's window

And finally some bison with a flash glare on the window but I still thought it was cool.

Pictures from Yellowstone

Bison, grazing in the wild untamed west.

Eloise waiting for Old Faithful to erupt.

Some wildflowers

When she was taking this picture I was standing there judgementally thinking "why the heck is she taking a picture of a dandelion? We see hundreds of dandelions every day."  I'm glad I didn't say it to her, this is my favorite picture she took.

Another flower close-up.

Eloise and me relaxing after a long day.

Princesses on her backpack. She took about a million pictures of her backpack and I was impressed with how she framed the princesses into different groupings. There are some of individual, some where she took it down to a grouping of 2. When she pays attention to what she's doing, she takes some really nice pictures.

Bear and Wolf Discovery Center

When we got there the car was covered with this armor of dirty ice "scales". It was cooler looking in person than the photo suggests.

They had just fed the bears and they said they'll get bored if you don't challenge them sometimes so they gave them this cooler that was padlocked shut to work on busting into. She was very determined, and eventually her brother came and took the cooler away and took a turn trying to tear it open, but by the time we left 45 minutes later they hadn't managed to open it. They actually test bear proof containers there, they put them out in the pens and if none of their bears can open them then they're certified bear proof.

We spent more time than I would have liked just chilling in this room with the fireplace because it was warm and it was windy outside. You could see the wolves out the windows, but Fina didn't care to watch the real live wolves when there was a totally awesome wolf statue right there.

John told her to stop running for a second so he could try taking her picture and she thought it was the HEIGHT of comedy that she pulled out her camera and took his picture while he took hers.

This is her favorite picture that she took, because it has the elk head AND the "fox" statue.

Sticker people

She had a sheet of stickers that was a paper doll the other day. She couldn't let the spare outfits go to waste!

Eye Eye Captain

She had a magazine or something rolled into a spyglass and she took this picture of her eye through it. I thought it was pretty cool looking. Unfortunately someone was messing with the settings on her camera so this is all  the bigger any of the pictures she took recently are. Too bad, because there's a really nice one of me and Eloise that could just use a little cropping.

Should I be worried?

 Fina has checked out this book called "PINK" from the library. It's all about Penny whose favorite color is pink and she only likes pink things. Fina "reads" it to her toys about a million times a day (although hilariously she has changed the ending from "I like pink but I suppose I'll tolerate my baby brother" to "Not everything has to be pink, Penny. It's nice that we live in a world with many colors.") This morning she told me she was going to write a book like it, not copying it, but similar.

So she sat down on the floor, and after about half an hour, she brought me her book. Text on one side, picture on the other

If you can't read little kid handwriting, it says "My name is penny and I love PINK! BLU! I [would even] love a blue world."

And the artwork:

Certainly not a copy mom. Just fanfic.

John's birthday card

I helped Fina sign the card "love, Serafina" and then I put it in the envelope and told her to decorate the envelope however she wanted. I just think it's so sweet, I wish it was my birthday card. (Well, not really, because for one thing my name isn't "Daddy", and for another thing I picked out the card that's inside.)

One more for today

I found a notebook while we were cleaning the living room and I was paging through it. I got to this page and held it up to John and said, "What do you think this is supposed to be?"

Of course being John he looked at it seriously for a minute and said, "I don't know, a bird?"

It took him a few minutes to figure out why I was laughing at him.

fina's homework