Bat-Girl

I keep calling her Cat-Woman for some reason, but here are a few pictures of Brenna dressed up as Bat-Girl for a birthday party we went too earlier today. Not pictured is me blowing up like Mrs. Puff from the dogs that were in the house and us having to leave an hour after we got there, which is a damned shame, as I'd been looking forward to going for the last week or so. The curse of animal allergies. I guess it could be worse.

Brenna enjoyed her costume so much that she kept it on when we went to Old Navy afterwards, calling the cart I was pushing her in her Batmobile (but of course).

Still Here

Sorry for the absence this week, although I guess considering my six months of no blogging at all, this has probably seemed like a blink of the eye.

After Emily and I returned from our overnighter to Tuscon, my sinuses started feeling like they were getting infected, I'm guessing from breathing in something in that seventy year old theatre. The combination of that, not getting much sleep while we were gone, and then stupidly working for too long in the front yard on Tuesday afternoon, I literally collapsed into bed that night, and proceeded to sleep around twenty hours from that point until Thursday morning. I finally started feeling better after another long night of sleep going into Friday. Heat exhaustion, perhaps, or a combination of things, I don't know, but I'm finally feeling better now.

Completely changing the subject, here are a few shots of Brenna in her pool a few weeks ago, practicing her synchronized swimming, or some such.

This is my favorite pose out of the bunch, priceless.

Before we took our little trip, last weekend we took the small child to get a backpack for school, which starts up in just a few short weeks now. Brenna went for the princess backpack and matching lunch sack, neither pictured here (but you can use your imagination).

Tucson

Emily and I left the small child with her favorite Aunt Beth on Sunday so we could drive down to Tucson to take in a Reverend Horton Heat show. While we were at it, we stayed the night.

The first thing we had planned when we arrived at the hotel on Sunday was to go swimming. The weather had other plans. Here is the view from our room. It was nasty. Good old monsoon season.

Here's where we took in the show, the Rialto, a seventy year old theater that's in the process of being renovated. Renovated meaning there were no seats at floor level. Those darned old pesky seats would have gotten in the way for the people in the mini-mosh pit near the front of the stage, anyway. Gabby, I love you, too.

The famous Hotel Congress is located across the street. We had dinner there and took advantage of their public facilities. TMI, sorry.



Swingin' Utters opened for the Reverend. Yep, Swingin' Utters. We'd never heard of them, and the lead singer looked to me to be about twenty, but apparently he's older than us. This was the only shot I took of them, testing my camera phone without the flash. We were on the rail right at the stage, and had a great view of this dude stomping around, whipping the mic cord around like a whip, and head butting the stand. What a character. The Reverend sure knows how to pick his opening acts.

I took a lot of blurry shots like this one. The camera took decent shots as long as no one was moving. Very unlikely that that's going to happen much during a show like this. The Reverend was up in our grill on numerous occasions such as this, and Emily got a wink or two from him.

Here's a slightly better shot of the infamous guitar solo whilst standing on Jimbo's bass. Superb, I never get tired of that trick.

And one more shot here for you. I took about sixty pictures, but most of them were a tad messy looking. Still, not bad for a camera phone.

We haven't sold our child to the gypsies, I promise some small fry pictures in the next post.

Introducing Shaky Jake

A while back Brenna went to vacation bible school (the first of two, she's attending another one this week). At the end of the week the wee little ones got on stage (or in front of it, as the case may be) and did their thing in front of the parents. Emily and I thought we were being smart hustling down to the front row so we could get some cute pictures of our child dancing, doing the hand motions, shaking their money maker, whatever.

What we ended up with were numerous pictures of Shaky Jake cutting a rug in between us and our child.

Seriously, the kid was breaking out so many fierce moves the camera wouldn't even focus on him. He was just THAT fast.

Almost seizure-like. Don't get me wrong, I dance like a 5 year old hopped up on too much sugar, too.




Not that I ever did this in my single days, but he almost reminds me of the drunk guy at the dance club that's dancing too close to the ladies because he's lost all concept of personal space. In this shot Brenna appears to be ignoring him, looking the other way despite his sweet rollin' on the river moves. Notice again that he's the only one out of the group that's not in focus.



I finally started leaning into the aisle to try and get a clear shot of our kid, and this was the best I could do.



Emily went so far as to get in front of the kids here. Brenna's waving at her.



After the performance, Brenna showed us one of the classrooms that had a dingy in it. She's sporting a cool newspaper hat here. And that's all I have to say about that.

When A Camera Isn't Handy

It's been a long time coming that I'd get a phone with a decent camera built into it. There have been many an occasion over the years, especially now that we have a small child, where something worth taking a picture would come up, and there'd be no camera on hand.

Not any longer. And now I can post damn near anything I feel like here because of the overflow of phone pictures that I have.

Here are some shots of Brenna's first swimming lesson. The small child is still getting used to going underwater, but after two lessons she's already getting the hang of it.

And how can you go wrong taking a picture of your small child posing with a plastic dog at Old Navy? I honestly would be embarrassed to whip out a real camera for such a thing, but here I can steathily pretend to be checking my messages on the phone and wham!

And finally, Brenna as a dog is priceless. Thank you cell camera.

No Explanation For My Deviation

I've finally transfered all of my pictures off the new phone to my email. What a pain, a USB cable transfer would have been much easier. Poop.

At least I have plenty of Brenna pictures to choose from to keep me busy here for a while.

Jumping back to June, here is a shot of Brenna with some sunflowers from the yard.

She gets a kick stomping around in the tree wells after they've been filled.

And presently the many faces of Brenna.

The used car salesman:

The agitated used car salesman:

Sensing that Mommy is coming in for a tickle attack:

Got her!



More to come, including pictures of her first swimming lesson, and vacation bible school.

Making Up For Lost Time

Although I have no complaints about my new free phone upgrade that I received last month, I'm quickly discovering why it was indeed gratis. Apparently Microsoft discontinued it over a year ago, but Verizon has brought it back from the dead, minus some of the features I was thinking were going to be on it. Nonetheless, for a free phone, the camera on this thing is pretty nice, 8 mega pixels to be exact. Below are four pictures I took on it of Brenna's recent haircut, and the quality is on par with what our normal digital takes. Unfortunately, since this phone used to upload photos automatically to a social network that Microsoft no longer supports, and it doesn't support upload via USB cable to the laptop, the only way I can get photos off of this thing is to email them to myself. Four photos down, 42 to go. One other really nice feature is being able to access the Internet where free wi-fi is available, and not have to pay Verizon for a data plan. You can't beat that with a cheap, obsolete phone.

Portraits By Brenna

Look! A cloud! First one since April!

As promised in yesterblog, here are some pictures our child took whilst at ye old family get together on Sunday (not Saturday, as indicated prior, thank you kind wife for the correction).

Here's Aunt Molly.

And there's Uncle John.



I spy a Grandma, no doubt enjoying some fabulous fluff.



One of our child's favorites, Aunt Beth.

And of course, Grandpa.

Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

I'm always torn when the monsoon season rolls around, and there's weather out to the east of us oozing in our direction to throw caution to the wind and stay up in the hopes of seeing a raindrop or two hit the driveway and evaporate almost instantly (run on sentence of the year, thank you very much). Before I had a four year old and a workload that requires that I roll out of bed at an insanely early hour in the morning, I would do this every summer. Now as I'm watching a green blob wander around drunkenly on the radar tonight, I'm inclined to hurry up and get this blog completed so I can catch some much desired sleep instead of going on storm watch.

Hey, I promised a few more short hair pictures, and here they are.

Here we are at the Arby's across the parking lot from the Cut'n Corral, rewarding our child for not clawing the eyes out of the hairdresser.





Here is Brenna wading around in a pool at the 4th of July thingy that we went to at the Church Mart down the road from us.




And finally, for your viewing pleasure, two fairies! Woo hoo!

Oh wait, and a shot of us taken by Brenna. More family head shots to come!

4th Shenanigans

I don't think we could have crammed any more into our three day holiday weekend, short of calling in twisted to work today. Since neither of us drink any more, that would have been plain silly, anyway. I may add a second blog with additional pictures, but here are a few of the highlights.

We went to Emily's aunt and uncle's on Saturday and looked at the corn. Brenna was enthralled to the point of wanting me to pick and ear and hit her over the head with it. Yeah, exactly, who wouldn't want to do that. Unfortunately I forgot to pull one off in my haste whilst leaving. On the way back to the house that night we got rained on, so that was novel. Oh yes, notice how long Brenna's hair is in this picture, it got a lot shorter by the end of the weekend.

That was a fairly lame segue, but here she is getting her hair washed on the 4th before losing eight or so inches of her hair. Finally fed up with tangles, and all of the other joys that come with long hair, the small child voluntarily went to the Cut'n Corral for this trim.

Bam! Where'd all the hair go? In a plastic baggie is where it went. If we can ever wrestle it out of our child's hands, it'll get donated to Locks Of Love, or some similar charity for children that aren't hair farmers like ours.

Here's another shot of the hair, or the lack thereof. I'm sure I have a better shot of her from the back end, but I'm too damn lazy and far into this blog to look for one. Stay tuned for additional short hair pictures.



On Monday night the immediate family came over. Introducing Lilly! This is Tyler's new lady friend (man, I sound old saying it that way). Tyler told me that she's an avid gardener like myself, and she was stuck with me for longer than she probably cared. See the sheer expression of glee on my face having found someone with this similar interest.

The best dressed individual at the party was adorned before the end of the night with a Belle Of The Ball crown. Congrats John!

Thanks to a dust storm that moved in at sunset, the fireworks we were intending on watching from our backyard never happened. Determined to not let the crowd down (and another reason for winning the crown), John broke out the sparklers, pondering here if it was such a good idea to spray gasoline on the flagstone before lighting one up for our child. Aha! Another short hair picture!

The ladies in the family laid down their Pabst Blue Ribbons and picked up some sparklers for this photo op. Nice job, ladies!

And finally, before I go, I have to admit to one of the better dumb ass moments on my part in recent memory. Earlier in the weekend while Lilly and Tyler were playing the new Super Mario Brothers game on their Wii, I couldn't help but notice how Mario was constantly having to stay back for his little mushroom panted sidekick to keep up, or continually work his magic to bring the little dude back from the dead. Not noticing that Lilly was actually playing tag team with him, and was said mushroom pants, I made some rather stupid comments about how worthless the mushroom panted guy was, and what was the point of him being in the game. Oops. Back in the Nintendo days, Mario ran rampant through the obstacle courses on his own. Oh well, I can guarantee that won't be the last dumb ass thing I have to say.

Short hair.