June 2010 Archives

Today the weather was so amazing that I could no longer put off a small project I have long wanted to embark on: finding family gravestones at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

A few comments from Jadzia about how she enjoyed "Beauty and the Beast," her first show at the Muny:

"I liked when the Beast gave her the library.

"When he turned back into a prince. The fireworks turned him into a prince.

"I liked every song that Belle sang.

"I liked the castle set and I liked how the Beast's costume looked.

"I liked seeing the Beast with the binoculars. He was the same size but he was better to see. I could see him really well."

We now has passports in hand for Josie and Joseph. I was surprised how fast they processed the applications. In fact, they did it so quickly, we may have enough time to apply for Bolivia visas for them.

So now my attention turns to other things, like how the heck we are going to survive travel in a plane with four children, two of whom will be on our laps.

Yeah, we are taking them as lap kids. I mean, there's really no way around it. The tickets are going to run about $1100-1200 apiece, and I am willing to endure 8 hours of insanity on a plane to save a couple grand.

Plus, there is a decent chance they will put us at the back of the plane with some empty seats, at least on the flight to Bolivia. If that happens, BONUS.

I came across a cool blog entry today about a clip toy a mom made for her toddler. This looks like something that's right up Josie's alley:

I think I'll try to make one myself.

Here's a collage of photos we took of Joseph, trying to find one we could submit with his passport application. These photos are taken from two different sessions, as you can tell by his clothes and the backgrounds.

Later this year we are planning to visit Bolivia. It has been two years -- and two babies! -- since our last trip there.

In the past we have always shot our own photos for passports. Heck, I did my own passport this way even before I met Yoli, sending in a (pretty bad) snapshot taken against a wall that I happened to have two of.

Taking photos of babies and toddlers can be pretty tricky. And each round of photos we took had some problem that made me decide to redo them. So we ended up with almost 100 photos of Joseph and Josie before all was said and done.

For the heck of it, I decided to grab six photos of each child and make a little collage. Josie's is maybe a little more interesting since she was making all sorts of faces.