squeaky clean

squeaky clean

so maybe not squeaky clean, but at least we can walk through emma's room now. she is so her mother's daughter! by stan's orders (hee hee) it was room cleaning day at our house today... which means i spend all day telling emma to keep working. brings back a flood of memories for me with my parents struggles to get me to clean my room as a kid. heck, or stan's struggles to get me to clean our room now. lol. anyway, since it's always a very long process to get the room done, there was plenty of opportunity to snap a pic of the day.

poor emma's eczema is back in force again with the cold dry weather. poor little sweetie.

on a side note, project 365 is one month old today. hurray! i made it a whole month without forgetting one day. i'm loving that it's capturing the little moments in the every day. i'm thinking it would be pretty cool to make a blurb book on the 365 project at the end of the year. i had one made for my inlaws and grandma at christmas, it was so cool i had to order one for us too!

the new unwrecked car

the new {unwrecked} car

we've made another dent in the post-accident checklist... the replacement car. we braved used car salesman after used car salesman, and walked out with a nice deal on a '98 bmw. stan did a lot of research on what exactly he wanted, and after playing a little hardball... he got it. now if we can just get him all healed up we'll be in good shape. :)

it was sports dress up day at the girls' school. their cousin let them borrow his lacrosse jerseys for the occasion. they were showing off their big tough sporty muscles before school this morning. i was bummed that i clipped part muscle making arm off, but oh well. they're too funny.

got another shot of the mountains and the fog from the deck this morning at sunrise. just about as close to heaven as one can get.

oh and just to clarify... the new watermark on the pics is just for online copying purposes. no exciting photography studio plans. :)

a man in uniform

a man in uniform

who doesn't dig a man in uniform? well, i'm sure there are those out there, but i know i dig my man in uniform! there's just something about that american flag on his shoulder that always sends a surge of love for God & country whenever i see it. just one more thing to add to the list of a million reasons why i love my husband!

pruney

pruney, originally uploaded by noel.culbertson.

one more pic to share today. i got this one of torrey tonight after she got out of the tub. they'd been playing in there for quite awhile, and she came to show me how pruney her hands were. just thought it looked really cool. :)

school days

028/365

i'm feeling pretty proud of myself for making it almost a month of not forgetting to take a pic a day. maybe that's a small feat, and i haven't even actually made it a whole month yet... but nonetheless i'm feelin' good! :)

i volunteer pretty much every week in my girls' classes. cutting, pasting, correcting, hanging and all of that good stuff. anyway, i figured it would be a good opportunity to get some pics in emma's class. thank goodness for scrapbooking teachers (they seem to take the freakish picture taking in stride... thanks julie!)

the sock dance

the sock dance

027/365

torrey's class earned a sock dance at school today. what is a sock dance, you ask. well, when a class has perfect attendance 17 times (consequently the same number of letters in "perfect attendance") their class gets to do the sock dance. still you say, what is a sock dance? well, they have a giant bag of funky socks that the kids put on their hands and dance around like a bunch of crazies to the preselected sock dance song.

i thought this was such a fun thing when my girls told me about it at the beginning of the year. however, they seemed to have a hard time telling me when their class earned the sock dance. (you know i was dying for a pic of this!) anyway, i decided to go above their heads, and ask the teacher to let me know when they earned it. lo & behold, it worked. got the note yesterday, and the pic today! :) although i could totally kick myself for having my iso set wrong on my camera. so very few of the pics turned out well... or even ok'ish. so guess i'll have to get more on the next go-round.

just me

just me

didn't have anyone to rope into having their picture taken, so it's just me today. a bit of snow on the ground from last night and lots of cold in the air, but the sun was shining! beautiful winter day. i'm lucky enough to have lunch with my sister after work most mondays, so maybe i'll get her next week. :)

025/365 snow day

025/365
snow day

it snowed againg last night and today. not too much to show for it now at the end of the day, but this afternoon we had a nice little dusting. we have this beautifully sage colored bush in the backyard. it looked so pretty against the snow.

twirly whirly

twirly whirly

the pic of the day was kind of a last minute fluke today. emma wanted to get some pics in her twirly whirly skirt today for the pic of the day. (the girls are really getting into this whole pic of the day thing!) and we got a bunch of fun shots, but then right before she headed to the kitchen to bake a cake in her easy bake oven... she peeked through our fake house plant thingy and i caught this cool shot for 024/365.


and a sampling of some of the pettiskrit pics we'd taken before the funky fake house plant shot. and we found another excellent use for scrapbook products today. we took several paper flowers and put them together with a brad, then took a twist tie.. wrapped it around the back of the brad, and stuck a bobby pin through it. so maybe it's not the most high tech hair do-dad ever, but it looked pretty darn cute! :)

and just a funny shot of emma all shlumped out on the floor in a mass of pettiskirt goodness.

023/365 warm beach

spent the morning out at warm beach camp this morning for a women's retreat planning meeting. i worked at warm beach for 7 years about 10 years ago. now my kids get to go to camp there. it's a place filled with so many memories for me. so i figured while i was out at the meeting and dropping off a disk of pics for them, i'd sneak a quick pic of the front entrance sign for the pic of the day. :)

cover girl - but not really

cover girl - but not really

i got a really exciting opportunity recently to design one of the cover options for creating keepsakes magazine's february cover. needless to say i was thrilled for the offer and opportunity. i designed this candy box, and was really happy with how it turned out. it didn't end up on the cover, but you can see it on ck's website here. thanks for the opportunity ck! :D


this was a hybrid project. pulled up a digital paper in photoshop elements, and typed the text right justified to align with my picture. i have a standard sized printer, so i printed the paper off onto two 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper and hid the seam under the elements.


the template for the box came from martha stewart's site here. once i picked out the paper it went together a little quicker than i'd thought, although it really isn't a project for mass production! lol. definitely more of a project for that one special someone. :)

happy friday!

morning pot - er, cup - of coffee

morning pot - er, cup - of coffee

it was another socked in foggy morning... so i enjoyed my morning cup of coffee cozied up under my american flag blanket. so my pic of the day had to be my coffee cup from my despair.com coffee mug collection. coffee always makes a dreary day bright!

morning fog

morning fog
021/365

we've spent a lot of time lately blanketed in fog. lots and lots of fog... the kind that sticks around all day that the sun just can't seem to break through. so i brought my camera out to the bus stop this morning while we were waiting. got a few of the fog then the girls running off to their bus.

misty memories...

i'm a lumberjack and i'm ok

i'm a lumberjack & i'm ok

it was another amazing morning by way of sunrises today. the clouds were amazingly colored and oh so bright. i love sunrises for their fleeting beauty. if you look away for only a moment everything is completely different. always reminds me to cherish the little moments since they pass so quickly.

and onto the picture of the day (and the goofy monty python reference of a title). we had a load of lumber delivered to the house today. a bunch of the *reject* pieces that they were selling, that we can use for firewood. anyway, when i got home this afternoon from lunch with my friend cami, there was the pallet of wood with "sold stan culbertson" spraypainted on the side. maybe it's odd, but i found that amusing. so that was what we went with for the picture of the day. and since the way i figure it, pretty much any picture benefits from having a precious little girl in it... and i'm lucky enough to have two of those on hand... torrey jumped in there too.




my other option for pic of the day was one of the girls cooking waffles for dinner. i cannot thank my sister enough for getting emma a cookbook & making her this apron for christmas. we have had breakfast in bed more times in the past few weeks than i have in my entire life!!! so tonight for dinner they asked if they could pull out the waffle irons and make dinner. to which i gleefully resonded, "of course!" so we dined on hello kitty and tweety bird waffles in high style tonight!

{not so} weird science

{not so}
weird science

stan & torrey have been talking for the past few weeks about ideas for a science experiment for the school science fair. there's been talk of weather experiments, wind tunnels, electricity, projectile motion... lots of science. today i think they pinned down that they'd do it on electicity. now it's just the decision of what part of electricity she's going to experiment with.

today stan showed her how to split water molecules with wires and a battery. i think thisone was with the sugar water. (they also did salt water and regular tap water). i think stan is just as excited about the science fair as torrey is. it's pretty darn cute! (i thought the reflection in the glass was kind of cool.)

the always novel trick of lighting a light bulb with a battery. i'm pretty sure none of our batteries are safe now!

and the final decision for the pic of the day 019.365. torrey decided this one was her favorite of the bunch.

seeing the sun

seeing the sun

we saw the sun and the sunrise for the first time in a couple of weeks this morning. no fog, no rain, no clouds! just beautiful clear skies and fog melting away from the mountains as the sun rose above them. it was beautiful! and that this is the view that we see from our house... like stan says, "i know i don't live in heaven but sometimes i think i can see it from my house."

this afternoon we got to visit with our friends mandy & josh, and i snapped a couple of pics of their youngest. he is such a sweet little doll-baby with the biggest eyes. i'm pretty sure i've seen his face on jars of gerber.

mama & baby

autism sings

autism sings
- it matters to this one -

jason & aaron

we were blessed on friday to go to a benefit put on a local high school student we know called, autism sings. she was able to raise over $4000 for the charity autism speaks on behalf of her brother noah. over 300 people from our community turned out for the concert. it was beautiful, heart wrenching and hopeful all at the same time.

our family has been blessed to have a precious piece of the autism puzzle in our lives. aaron is my sister's youngest (i guess he's my brother-in-law's youngest too... lol). he comes with all of the joys and trials and unanswered questions of knowing and loving someone with autism.

aaron stimming before the show

the concert included a bunch of people from our community singing, but one of the highlights of the evening was a comedy routine done by one of our great high school friends, andy. andy, another blessing with autism we and lucky enough to love, did a stand up comedy routine of chuck norris jokes. he makes me laugh until i'm in tears. i love it! the look on his face in this pic just makes my heart happy.

this is my brother-in-law, jason, singing a song he wrote for the benefit called, "it matters to this one" you can listen to it here and read the story and lyrics here. as soon as i can figure out how to do it, i'll get the acutal song set up to play here. jason is so talented and has such a great heart. he constantly amazes me, and so many others.



and this is tara (and her brother noah, in the picture behind her) who organized the entire autism sings benefit. to learn more about autism or to donate to autism speaks click here. thanks tara, and the stanwood/camano community for your heart, i'm so thankful to be a part of this community.

see a few more pics here.