Maddle-Paddles

My sweet niece, Madeline, is at such a cute stage right now.  It's amazing how much personality a little two-year-old can have.  I've gone to my sister's house a couple nights this week for dinner and as soon as I walk in the door, Madeline says "Yara! I cah'd you on my ceh phone!"  She loves having pretend conversations on her phone and even includes the "uh-huh..." and "oh...really?" that she hears everyone else saying.

Last Sunday, Jared and I had brunch with their family and afterwards Mary Leigh and I decided to make beaded bracelets with memory wire.  Madeline plops down on the floor beside me, decides she's also going to make a bracelet, and promptly starts threading the beads onto the wire.  I was shocked.  (Note to self: never underestimate a two-year-old.)

She ended up making the bracelet (shown in the pic).  She's such a sweetheart - thinking about her makes me smile.



And this guy makes me smile, too.  Little Oliver was perfectly content shoveling handful after handful of sand into his mouth.  These were taken during our trip to San Diego this past summer.

Sweet Tunes...

I'm definitely out of the music loop these days, but as I've been driving to and from school I've caught pieces of songs that I love. Right now I'm addicted to these.

Since starting graduate school I feel really disconnected from a lot of things. I'm pining for the days that were completely mine -- the days that didn't involve hours and hours of studying. Recently I started skimming my blog and felt a little sad that I hadn't documented a lot of events that occurred over the last year. I don't typically read back over my old journals, but I found it sort of soothing to read old entries on this blog.

I decided I'm going to start updating this regularly -- partly to keep in touch with family and friends, but mostly because I want to keep some type of journal.

We'll see though...I've recently discovered how consistently inconsistent I am.