To get it over with.

I have been in a weird sort of funk lately.  It’s like this little cloud of gloom has settled on my brain, darkening my moods and making me a real treasure to be around.  I’ve been letting external forces push and pull me around, and I don’t like it.  I don’t like it!  I am trying to slog my way out of it, but gloom is so tricky!  The thing about a crappy situation is this: being sad is easy.  It doesn’t take any effort; in fact, it inflicts itself upon you all smotheringly.  Have you noticed?  More to the point, being happy in a difficult situation is hard. And I don’t mean faking happiness, rather counting blessings and realizing that DESPITE when something sucks, there is a lot to rejoice about.  Even though that challenging thing is still lurking in the corner over there.  And I have about a billion things to thank my lucky stars for, so Sad can go cry in his car and listen to emo music in the rain without me (because that’s totalllly something he would do, you know?).

Ok, so today we are just going to roll every picture and movie that I’ve been meaning to post for the last month into this one post.  I have been delaying blogging because I was feeling overwhelmed about all of them, so we’re just laying them out!  It’s about to get crazy, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

We went out for Alisha’s birthday on Friday (hooray!), and Olivia wrote her name for the very first time ever, ever, EVER:

It is a little meandering, sure.  And she maybe wrote the ‘a’ at the end backwards, then filled it in, but I still love it.

In case it is a little confusing:

And I love the semi-alternating colors with the red dot over the blue ‘i’.

Then, later that day, she did it again with sidewalk chalk:

And this time she started writing the ‘o’ and the ‘l’ going downwards,  then changed her mind and did the ‘ivia’ side-by-side.  Hence the ‘l’ that looks the same as the ‘v’.

My parents had to cut down the big tree in their backyard recently.  I am still mourning its loss!  No more of this or this either come autumn.  And that just makes me sad.  In other news, it’s the end of May.  And we’re still in winter coats.  Also, those clouds are totally covering up the big, gorgeous mountains back there.

We have had some warm days though.  Behold, a game which Olivia invented all by herself and almost gave me a heart attack:

And another one:

Only, it didn’t always work out so well:

These look a little weird on my computer when I play them, the colors go crazy for a second and the sound is maybe off a bit, but Isaac promises if I put them on here, they won’t do that.  “The problem is your computer!”  he says.  So, if they’re weird for you, too?  Sorry.  And sad!  Because they’re fun.

What we do on the warm(er) days:

This face is the greatest.

Well, hello.

Last Friday, Emily and I decided to take Olivia on a canyon adventure.

There were maybe 19,000 dandelions everywhere.  It was Olivia’s heaven.  Plus!  There was a large gushing river in which to throw decapitated dandelions!  And that, my friends, is pure perfection to a 3 year old. 

Her little pink cheeks!  It was kind of gloriously hot (for once).

I went to kiss her, but then she moved.  So I ended up looking like I’m mauling her.  Which is maybe more accurate, anyway.

Ok, just get this.  THEN the dandelion heaven yielded an enormous stash of teeny, tiny balls, too!  They were everywhere!  (Somehow these little things are at every park we’ve ever been to, and then Olivia collects them and demands I put them in my pockets.  Then they end up in my laundry every week and bounce around in the dryer.)  She could have spent the rest of the night finding these and hoarding them.

We’d told my parents what part of the canyon we were heading to before we left.  At one point in our little adventure, I turned around and saw them striding towards us.  Hoorah!  Canyon party!

Emily, my mom, and me.

My dad took over being the photographer with his vastly superior camera.

An Olivia Glamour Shot Original.

My 2nd favorite.

My 1st favorite.

Well, that was cathartic.