Cabin fever

After our stop in Pittsburgh, we headed over and across PA to the Pocono mountains where my family has been diligently building a vacation "lake house." It's in an area that is almost a reasonable halfway point between my brother and his family up in Massachusetts and my parents who are in the southern most point of Maryland. It's also very close to where my grandmother (so, Miss A's GREAT-grandmother) lives with some of my extended family. The last time we were able to see my brother, sister-in-law, and grandmother was probably over a year ago so it was really nice to have time to spend with them during our last leg of the trip.

GG (as she is known on my side) came up with my mom and had a ball getting reacquainted with Miss A and all of her toddler-ness. Miss A entertained GG with all of her antics including telling her multiple times, "I'll be back!" and asking her "How ARE you?" but not waiting for a response. GG had a great time with it all.


In the midst of the week before my brother, sister-in-law, and the boy cousins showed up, we took in 18 holes of mini-golf. GG basically schooled us all with her amazing putting skills and never failed to put the ball exactly where she want it and in less strokes than we all did. I had no idea she was such a putt-putt shark!!! No wonder she was all ready to go when we pulled up to the place with intentions to only get some ice cream and insisted that we get out there and play!


Miss A was almost as much of a pro at the golfing except for the fact that after all of the work with the drivers and irons at Grammy and Grandpap's, I think her long game is a lot better than her short game. D tried to help her work on her swing...


...but ultimately? She insisted on just doing it HER way! *shrug* Can't say I blame her! I mean, three of my hits ended up going straight into the water and look at where hers end up!


Toward the end of the week, my brother and his family showed up and and we were able to round out things with doing the traditional Easter egg events. We colored eggs and Miss A diligently worked on doing one all. BY. HERSELF!!!


Coloring with crayons is more her kind of coloring than anything else but she even joined in on the egg dying process!


Of course, she also couldn't resist seeing if her crayons could be dyed like her eggs...


Ultimately she turned out a gorgeous piece of work and if eggs didn't do things like get old and rotten and stinky and gross, I would most definitely have saved hers forever and ever like the proud mom I am.


And just so you can see that I'm not biased or anything, everyone else there was just as enthralled by her skills as well and THEY thought she was the best egg decorator at the table!


The rest of the week and weekend we spent just hanging around, catching up, eating leftovers and enjoying the weather and each others' company.


The holidays are so nice if only because they make it possible for us to be able to get together with our favorite people in the world (our family!) no matter how far we have to travel.

First stop? Pittsburgh!

D and I are very fortunate to be teachers and what we lack in salary, we are well compensated in the way of paid-time-off (or as most people know it - vacation)!

As it so happened, both of our Spring breaks fell during the same time frame this year. Additionally, we were both greatly blessed by the fact that though we had a full week off because of the February snowstorm, the state granted everyone graces by not shortening the Spring break at all. We had about ten straight days off (including weekends) and it has been wonderfully refreshing for us all to be able to finally return to school/work/daycare tomorrow and finish out the school year.

Last year for Spring break we did not travel and stayed completely local. This year we took things to the opposite extreme and traveled all over creation with our first stop in Pittsburgh to see Grammy and Grandpap!

Surprisingly, I didn't take as many pictures as I thought I did. *shrug* Or at least the other pictures that I took somehow disappeared! [EDIT: I remember where they are! They are on my laptop and I will upload them here in a forthcoming batch/posting]

Anyway, one of our big and fun things from Pittsburgh was visiting the Phipps Conservatory. I've never been one for gardening or pictures of flora but after seeing the gardens? I might be a convert! Never before have I seen such an amazing display of plant life in one place before! It was extraordinary and only further convinces me that the first true visual artist of the world was God himself in the very beginning. I'll even go out on a limb here and say even the Phipps could hold a candle to the Garden of Eve!

Here is just a smattering of some of the beautiful sights that we saw...




And of course Miss A was delighted with the sights just as well. Her joy to partake in was more in the way of any kind of water though. Anything that she can get into and splash around in is her thing these days and there isn't a puddle or fountain that escapes her.


These days it's hard to get Miss A to be still for even a moment but we did at least make a valiant attempt at a quick family portrait...

Perhaps the real reason she was squirming was because she didn't want to be in a picture without Grandpap (who was unable to join us on the trip) and Mama (who is always behind the camera).

Oh well! Next time Grandpap will surely be along and Mama will finally get it together and use a remote shutter release. :)

Yes! I DO!!! (Again!)

I am not a jewelry kind of a gal. This isn't to say that D gets off scott-free from not "spoiling" me with beautiful luxuries since the luxuries that I prefer are far more extravagant since I prefer fine artwork. (Honestly though I'm way too practical of a person to bring myself to own any of the paintings that I'd really like!) Just the same, when I do wear jewelry, I'm very specific about its design and I don't like to take it off. This has posed as quite a problem with my wedding ring set though.

Way back when we got engaged and were planning our wedding and picking out all of those important details like what the rings would look like I was very upfront about it all and admitted that I wanted something unique and non-traditional. D and I designed my engagement ring together so that it was completely one of a kind and then (miracle of miracles!) we were blessed enough to find a ring to serve as a wedding band that was very complementary in design. As it turned out, I would have to wear each of the rings on separate hands (european style) and I was OK with that. Still? Our wonderfully unique and non-traditional idea has turned out to be not such a good idea in the long run.

Since I'm an art teacher and just generally a get-your-hands-dirty kind of a person I'm really hard on most any of the jewelry that I wear. You can just imagine how much of a beating my wedding set has taken by now after only a couple of years! Anyway, to make a long story even longer (but at least slightly shorter in the grand scheme of things), D and I made the decision to retire my original wedding set for something less delicate, more durable, and more (and less) traditional.

I found an artisan jeweler on Etsy.com and then D and I pored over pictures of what we liked and didn't like and then tweaked a design we found to our liking. The beautiful fruits of our labor was delivered to me just today and I'm happily wearing my first (EVER!) piece of custom-designed artisan jewelry. I only have two challenges now - 1) deciding if I should wear the center stone sandwiched...

... or perched on top of it all...


and 2) how I can now convince D that I NEED customized artisan jewelry WAY more often than fine art paintings (which is constantly now).

All fashion, all the time

Way back before marriage and Miss A, I devoted a huge portion of my personal budget to building up a whole wardrobe of purses. Why purses? Well, unlike shoes, I consider purses to be somewhat like wearable art. (Well, carryable but you know what I mean, right?) While some women had closets full of shoes, I had hooks full of purses. *shrug* I don't believe I ever had more than 20 purses ever at a time - that of which I fully acknowledge is a lot of purses - but I had a lot. I had a WHOLE LOT. And though my personal taste and "dream" purse wardrobe is composed entirely of YSL, in reality I was willing to buy from just about any place that had any purse that peaked and held my interest.

Some of my favorite purses happened to come from Singapore. In my quest for beautiful and interesting purses, I got myself hooked up with a fashion buyer who specialized in accessories and used to find the most amazing purses overseas. I've since lost contact with her and almost abandoned my quest for building an amazing purse wardrobe but I still have almost all of the ones that I originally bought from her.

Tonight, Miss A discovered some of my most prized purses and *God bless her!* she has perhaps discovered her own love affair with incredible purses that are indeed wearable art if anything is. *sigh* I wouldn't want to pass my fashion torch on to anyone more than I do to Miss A...

Practice makes perfect

When I was little it was pretty standard for me to wear my hair in either a pony tail or in piggy tails. I must have been quite the squirmer when it came time to put them in because it was pretty much the norm for me to have a very crooked part. Well? Not so with Miss A!!! This is the second day that I've been able to wrestle her into some piggy tails and it's looking pretty good if I do say so myself! I mean, the placement is definitely a little off but at least the part is reasonably even...


Whatever. Even if it's not perfect I'm thinking that she can make it work however it ends up with a face like that. :)