Goofy Glasses

Jasmine will wear any glasses except the ones that have been prescribed for her. Here she works on her "smart chick" look or audition for the next J.K. Rowling movie.

Cap'n Kai, Pirate of the High Plains

Kai posed on every tent spike wearing his new eye patch.

Fraternal Battles

This is again at the "Fight A Scot" booth. The boys both have a Scottish middle name ("Drummond") so I guess this worked out. I heard the tapping of wooden swords and loud battle cries, "CRASH", "BANG", "WOOSH", "I HIT YOU!", "NUH UH! MY SWORD MAGICALLY BLOCKS YOURS!", "UUUGH! I'M DEAD AGAIN!"

Warrior Princess

Jasmine's taken to calling herself a "princess". If it weren't for her sword fighting prowess, I'd be worried. Here she is at the "Fight A Scot" booth with an accomodating young man.

Though the sword is bamboo, it doesn't hide the blood lust in her eyes.

My Monsters

We went to the Highland Games to experience authentic Scottish culture.

Ward Meets the Children

Ward is obviously ready to be a father (you can see his little four month old baby Sammy in the bouncy car in the lower right corner). The reason I say this? He's obviously quite okay having children walk all over him. He, Kelly and little Sammy came over for dinner. Theo really out did himself with a feast of tomato soup, turkey, apricot chutney, crispy rosemary sausage potatoes, and chocolate pie a la mode. MMmmmmmm. The boys had couscous and turkey. :)

This is Jasmine's latest trick inspired by Cirque de Soleil. She also is trying to stand on her guitar (a la Dralion clowns) and climb up the curtains. The kitchen curtain rod has already been pulled off the wall. I need to install a climbing rope that's in a weight bearing beam.

Funky NOAH Dancers

A few pictures from the dance floor. These most best illustrate just how much Jazz and Kai got into it. Rowan had an early night due to a little worry about potential food allergen exposure. I think I was the only one really worried, but I didn't want to have wished I'd gotten him benadryl faster.

Jasmine in Weird Lighting

This was a picture I liked from the NOAH conference, but endlessly cursed the lighting. Software can only do so much. I did manage to fix my flash's major red-eye production and used a little fill-in light and color cast fix and upped the contrast. GRRRRRR....

NOAH Series

I've been on a little posting hiatus. I wasn't super happy about my NOAH pictures. I'm really crappy at taking indoor photos, my lighting technique sucks and my timing is generally off. Part of the added problem was that I wasn't taking very many photos. That makes it harder to find the few gems in the muck. I took a lot of muck shots that weekend.

It is a shame that I don't have more pictures. We had an incredible time at our first NOAH conference. Jasmine was over the moon meeting all these people. I don't think she'd ever met any adults with albinism before. She also met many, many xiǎo péng you (little friends).

One of her friends, Natalie, spent quite a long time with Jasmine racing back and forth in the grand ballroom. Natalie is five years old and ran so much that she even had Jasmine out of breath. Quite a feat.

These pictures came out great in terms of capturing movement, but the colors were massively funky. Very yellow, orange. Part of this was definitely due to the fact that the carpeting was a very ugly brown, yellow, orange, and part I think was the incandescent lighting. Combine this with my flash and I achieved some color casting that was truely appalling and unfixable. I don't know, maybe I'm being too critical. Anyway, here are the running pictures in black and white.

Jump!

At first Jasmine hadn't thought about walking on the log, then she saw Kai doing it. So she wanted to stand, holding someone's hand. After a couple tries she could handle that pretty well, then she decided it was time to jump. I think it took three or four hand holding jumps before she was ready to climb up and jump off by herself. I was pretty impressed, since she can't see most of it. Jasmine has an awesome spacial memory.

 
 

 

 

 

 

Hanging on the Log

The cormorant says to the painted turtle, "I wouldn't go over there, he already snapped at me."



The cormorant is between 28" - 35" high, and I'd estimate the snapping turtle was about the same in length. Not a turtle I'd want to mess around with. Enlarge the picture and check out those massive claws. At first, I didn't even see the little painted turtle.



You can see in the picture below, everyone was giving it a wide berth.

Yeti in High Contrast

Yeti's favorite spot in the morning is the sunny rectangle in our front room. The rest of the room is very bright also, just not in comparison.

Happy 4th of July

We had a great day yesterday blowing up a ton of money -- I mean fireworks. I'm still working on my fireworks photographic techniques, but I'm getting better. I think I just need to blow more stuff up, just for practice you understand. It's all in the name of art. Really.

The sparklers were a big hit with Jasmine. I'm afraid she got a little too excited, but Rowan has very good reflexes. Kai thought her exuberance (or near alighting of their brother) was very funny. Once we got her calmed down we were able to start the real fireworks. Unfortunately, this year the booms frightened her and she wanted to go inside for the majority of the explosions.

I didn't expect her reaction since last year the pretty lights overcame the negative aspects of the sudden noise. She's been a lot more sensitive about her environment this year than last. She's still changing at high speed; I suppose it's all part of catching up to her chronological age.

Cormorants

It seems the other birds weren't impressed by Cory's exaggerated estimation of his last fish catch.

Birthday Fun

I took the boys out tadpole fishing on my birthday. Definitely a fun way to spend the day. It was very hot though, so we were only out for about an hour and a half.

We caught tadpoles, crawdads and baby trout and or bass. Hard to tell at this age.

The second picture shows our early progess. Eventually we had about fifteen tadpoles... which were the only things we were really counting.

The boys were frustrated at first because all the critters were swimming away. I gave them an impromtu lesson in redirection, the sneak attack and the net and grab.

After all our fun, we released our catch, which was almost as much fun as catching them in the first place.