how alana prefers to watch tv:

Well, Rich and Amber have been safely in Stockholm, Sweden since yesterday evening and are adjusting to the 6 hour time difference. They decided to jump right in and acclimate as quickly as possible by keeping themselves awake until 10pm local time after a very long travel night. So, today they seem to be on Stockholm time, hooray for them!

Mom, Alana and I are loving our time together, although today was a huge bummer for me with yucky dental work. We have enjoyed relaxing, shopping, eating out, playing, and crafting.

I feel completely photographically disabled because naturally, Rich and Amber have all 3 of our professional camera bodies and ALL of our lenses in Sweden. So other than mom’s point and shoot camera and our iPhones, we are not really going to have much to show from our week together. This makes me sad.:)

As a random side note (and because I hate posting a blog without a photo), this is how Alana has been watching TV lately. She has loved umbrellas for a long time now, and so we have slowly collected them and received them as gifts. I snuck in the room and grabbed a photo a few days ago and thought it would be fun to post:)

happy birthday, little sis!

Today is my little sister’s birthday.

I say little because she is 3.5 years younger than me.

I don’t need to mention the fact that she’s taller and more beautiful than I am. We will just skip over those facts:)

Since Amber and Rich are leaving on Saturday for Sweden (Rich booked a wedding in Stockholm a while back!), we knew that today would not be an ideal day to celebrate because of travel prep. So we decided to throw an early birthday party last Thursday. I am glad we did, because we were able to relax and enjoy the evening rather than rush through the festivities to pack! We enjoyed a yummy southwestern taco salad recipe (thank you to Bri and Heidi for the amazing recipe!), awesome cake, and several games.

I am soooo excited and insanely jealous of the experience Rich and Amber are about to have in Sweden, but I had decided to stay here with Alana even before I found out I was pregnant. Now I’m certain it was the right decision since I simply don’t feel well enough to travel, and certainly not well enough to do a Swedish wedding justice! I cannot WAIT to see the imagery they come home with!

But without further ado, here are a few fun photos of our birthday celebration for Amber (Alana’s “Aunt Pixie”):

Amber is a chocolate lover (especially dark chocolate) so I made sure to provide plenty of it:)

Favor boxes:

A Kahlua chocolate cake from the Bread Basket. Their cakes AMAZE. They. Are. So. Delicious.

The gift table. I brought gifts home from my parents in Florida as well, so Amber had quite the opening ceremony:)Part of the present fun: new outfits for her Sweden trip. She’s gonna be sylin’.

Oh, and I should mention that Alana picked out the party colors while we were shopping for favor boxes and wrapping paper:)

Our parents and little brother even helped us celebrate via Skype on our iMac. Gotta love it! Amber opened presents while they participated:

And we sang happy birthday together and cut into the amazing cake while they WATCHED. Haha! I don’t have any sympathy, though, because every time they are at Cheesecake Factory in Fort Lauderdale, they send us photos of their scrumptious cheesecake so that we can be totally jealous:)

Alana helping to clean the candles. All 26 of them:)

A cute, fun interaction. LOVE THESE TWO!!!

Alana getting a little ahead of the game. Pinching off pieces of cake to eat before it was even cut:)Love Amber’s reaction. She’s the best aunt!!!

Cute birthday self-portrait! We love you Amber and Nick!

Happy, happy birthday sister! I love you so much. You are the reason I want another girl this time – I would be so ecstatic for Alana to share the kind of relationship with a sister that you and I have!

Muah!

Sad, sad blog update

Hey everyone. Hope you’re having a great day!

I am having a really AWFUL day for several reasons.

The most upsetting one is the fact that we found out through a kind Flickr stranger that people were stealing my photos and using them as their own identity, and as their own photography work. As a result, we have made ALL of our photos on Flickr private, which changes the unique URL to each image, which in turn causes my blog to completely MESS UP because the links to the photos have been broken.

What this means for me is that my blog is going to look really bad for a while as I slowly but surely rebuild it. Some blog posts still contain photos, but most have to be totally repopulated with images. It’s going to take a long time, and it’s not something I can sit down and work on for a week straight, so it will have to be gradual.

I’m pretty sad about the amazing thoughtlessness that allows some people to steal images, and the resulting MAJOR inconvenience it will be for me, but my blog is really important to me so I insist on rebuilding it. Then I’ll probably use blurb.com to print out hardcopy books – maybe one per year that I’ve blogged or something like that. Then at least I’d have a tangible memory of all my work online.

Anyway, thanks for your patience. I’m going to begin repopulating my most recent posts and work my way back. Fun times. Ugh.

Hope you all have a great week!

Heather