80's Day!!!!

Thank goodness I saved such an awesome shirt from my past! I always knew being a bit of a pack rat would pay off!

Yes. It is 80's day at the middle school. And that pretty little number is from Contempo Casuals circa 1987! I've been waiting for one of my girls to realize it's awesome-ness. And I must say, considering my lack of Aussie Sprunching Spray, and being a little over 20 years out of practice... that hair looks pretty darn good!

Mean Crappy Ice!!

Poor Livie has had a cough so I kept her home from school yesterday. Last night she actually slept pretty well and had a minimum of coughing so I got her up for school. And then the violent hacking commenced. Poo. So I told her I didn't think she should go to school after all. To which she cried and begged to go. ??? How do you argue with a kid who WANTS to go?

So she and Sammi head out the door, I lock it and fall back into bed since I literally, and I do mean literally did not sleep even one wink last night. 5 minutes later I hear violent banging on the door. Grumble, grumble.. stumble, stumble...tripping while I put my pants back on.. BANG BANG BANG! I skip putting my glasses on since I know who it's got to be... I grumpily open the door to find a bloody mouthed Livie crying and Sammi all teary eyed trying to console her.

Apparently she slipped on the ice and smacked her mouth. Then as Sammi was bringing her home she slipped again! Poor kid.

I knew I should have kept her home today. How is it that we can always make it our fault?

Crazy Hair Day!

Today was Crazy Hair Day at school and we had some good hair-dos planned. Sadly Livie got sick last night and couldn't go. She cried and cried this morning because she really wanted to go have crazy hair. But I promised her we could make her hair crazy on Friday, which is School Spirit Day.

So Sammi wanted a Mohawk or spikes. Thus we opted for the spiked Mohawk! I think I need more practice since some of the spikes fell. But all in all I was excited that half of them worked. Those were some pretty high spikes! She also got a kick out of trying to get in and out of the car with them. She couldn't really sit up at all, luckily the school is only a block away.

Then of course I had to mess with pre-sets a little and found a really cool one that makes it look more Punk.

Fun With Pre-sets

I never think I have anything good to blog about, but then I remembered some cool pictures I was messing with a while back.

We were at Jordanelle and the sun had gone down behind the mountain so the lighting was no bueno. I took a few pictures of Riley. (she's usually the only one willing to pose for me) They were not spectacular because of the lighting, but I started messing with them in Lightroom and ended up with some pretty cool looking photos.

Before: (she didn't pose for this one, I just snapped it.) After:
These were fun because she was flipping her hair around and we were trying to catch good shots mid-action.

Before:
After:
It's always great when I can get an awesome shot straight out of the camera, but I loved how cool I could make these so-so shots look.

Dance Party USA

I have a bunch of old light strings in the Christmas decorations so the girls decided to put some up in their rooms. They each picked colored lights with a little box that controls how fast they blink.

After we put Olivia's up in her room she turned off her light, set the Christmas lights to a fast twinkle and turned on her Pink CD. She was dancing around and having a party all by herself. A little later she asked me to come in and open her blinds, but first she said, "It's ok right? Because the police will know it's just Christmas lights?"

Deck the Halls.... FAIL!!!

I'm feeling very happy and proud because the whole family pitched in on Sunday and decorated the tree and put up most of the Christmas decorations.

We even managed to do this with only 2 reprimands and one "If you bug her again you will NOT be getting back on that computer today!" .... All the while I'm thinking to myself, 'You are going to sit here and join in with the family and you are GOING to enjoy it OR ELSE!' Luckily I realized that actually voicing that sentiment might be counter productive... but I was thinking it.

So these are now some of the sights in our house...

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Why the post title?" Well, because we had a huge snowfall last night that covered everything.. well almost everything. It did however highlight some things that I'd kind of missed before.

As I pulled into the driveway this morning after running the carpool I noticed six of these little babies popping out of the snow in the front flower bed.

Happy Halloween!

Well the day came and went... and I got the costumes finished. Just barely.

Sammi's actually didn't require much, she found a costume to buy. We just had to spray her hair orange and curl it, then Riley did her fabulous Mad Hatter make-up. I only got a couple pictures of Sammi because it was kind of a hectic day and she spent most of it at her friend's house. So she missed a lot of the picture taking. Which if you know Sammi... is fine by her. She's usually avoiding the cameras.
I only got a couple of shots before she started pulling the "that's enough mom" face.
For Olivia we pulled out the old Lara Croft cosutme. It only needed a few tweaks. AND... she has enough hair that we didn't need to use extensions! She had a great time posing and doing action poses on the trampoline. Most of those action poses ended up with her tongue poked in her cheek.
Cute little stinker.

Riley was Alice from Resident Evil. If you don't know who that is... she basically kills zombies that are infected with the T-virus that was engineered by the evil Umbrella Corporation. Duh!
Her vest and holsters were a lot of work, but it was kind of fun to see if I could do it. We even temp dyed her hair for the occasion.

For my sake you've got to click the picture below so you can see a close-up of all the work I did on something that only got worn twice! I'm thinking Zombie killing might be a recurring costume around here just so I can feel like all the work was worth it.
Matt modified the 2 nerf shotguns for her. He had to saw off the stocks and the barrels. He also found a way to make them shoot farther on a youtube video. Then he had to paint the shotguns and pistols.

In a previous post I included a picture of the real Alice. So I couldn't help trying to re-create the movie poster with Riley in it. Not too bad if I don't say so myself. I think we got the costume pretty darn close!