apples to apples

 A few weeks ago we decided we needed a get-away/ mini-vacation, so we headed upstate NY to the Catskills for a weekend in a cabin with friends.

(This is not our cabin... just some quaint country side pics from our drive.)

 I can't express enough how crazy amazing it is for to have the luxury of riding in a car! It is so blissful to put the girls in their carseats (which we normally store in our closets) and drive down the road. I never knew I would miss that SO MUCH.

 I sadly don't have any photos from our cabin or the other two days we spent in the fabulous country side. However, I have 50 photos from the couple of hours we spent at the local orchard!! :)

 Our friends, Josh and Juli, drove in from Boston to meet us for the weekend. We were super excited to hang out with them (mostly because they are wonderful at entertaining our children for hours on end!!).

 Jason, Samanthe, and Samuel spent the weekend with us, too! So fun!

Here is Juli taking Audrie off for a little chat about life. (I'm sure she was convincing her to memorize the Dewey Decimal system or how knitting can change your life...)

Of course we ate a ton of apple cider donuts!

Here Annie is seeing if there is one more spot of sugar she can lick off her fingers.

Josh getting psyched up for the harvest...

They had sweet miniature horses to ride.

 Audrie did not hesitate and went for it!

Annie took a little more convincing, but luckily Josh is a child-whisperer so he was able to talk her into riding the horse. :)

At this orchard there was a little village of small houses to play in. Audrie saw this one and said "Grandma Cornett's house!" (it does look similar!).

Samanthe snapped a quick photo of the four of us...(thanks, Sam!)

But if you have crazy toddlers like ours then photos tend to look more like this:

Josh's turn to give the girl's some advice...

We did pick a TON of apples (and ate way too many along the way, too).

 Jason showing the girls how to use the apple picker.

The long rows in the orchard were just begging to be run in! Made me want to sing some Dixie Chicks... "wide open spaces!!!".

 At first I tried to convince the girls NOT to eat every apple they touched, but I quickly gave up on that.

Samuel, the little cutey pie!

Josh and Juli, the brave souls who don't have children but are crazy enough to hang out with us anyways!

Samanthe explaining to Samuel how she can sew a costume from these leaves. :)

RUN!!!

 Sweet girls!

The three musketeers headed for trouble.

 

 It really was such a wonderful weekend full of cliche happy moments!

 We cooked, baked, knitted, played board games, napped, played outside in the yard for hours, and had a merry time. (I have to admit that one of the highlights of the weekend for me was when I got to DRIVE in the car, by MYSELF, to WALMART... this was a big treat and I smiled the whole time.)

Thank you Josh, Juli, Jason, and Sam for an awesome weekend!

mama lowery

My mom came up for a visit last week and it was SO wonderful having her here. The girls had a blast hanging out with her. Jamie and I enjoyed her company and extra help!

My mom, always in teacher mode, was showing Annie how to use her Kindle.

Riding the subway with Audrie...

 My mom and I took the girls to an adorable little cafe called Alice's Teacup. It was just as magical as I hoped it would be. (When we walked in they sprinkled the girls with fairy dust and had them make a wish.)

 They served us a lovely pink raspberry tea and we ordered some tasty sandwiches and soup.

 Annie had a little trouble sipping from the fine china, so we let her use a spoon to drink her tea.

We visited the Statue of Liberty... ha!

 I had never been to the Highline Park so we walked a few million blocks but then found it.

Me and my mom at the Highline...

 Besides having my mom here to love on us, it was nice for Jamie and I get a chance to get away and spend some time together.

Audrie and Annie miss their Grandma Lowery so much already! Hurry back, mom!

paparazzi

Audrie loves to take pictures with my phone, but today I let her walk around our apartment and take photos with my Canon camera. She was excited! She took 94 pictures in about 10 minutes. 

Here are a few of them...

 (Audrie told me to pose for this next picture. After she snapped it, she peeked around the camera and said "You look great!" and gave me a thumbs up. Totally cracked me up.)

 Then I tried to show her how to hold the camera out to take a photo of herself.

And then the last picture on the roll....

Thanks, Audrie, for the fun photo session! :)

art lesson

So Audrie comes up to me last night and says "I got a good idea, mommy!" (She says that at least a hundred times a day.) She said that we should make a video of her teaching someone how to draw. I said sure and got my video camera out. And, oh my goodness, you might think that I had anything to do with this lesson, but I swear to you that all I did was sit there and hold the camera (and grin a lot). She is such a little teacher. Cracks me up!

And I had no clue that she knew how to draw a pumpkin. I just turned on the camera and this is what she did. I asked her later how she learned to draw that and she said "I made it up in my head"! Love her.

one more beach photo

I forgot to post my favorite picture from our beach vacation.

Maybe it's all the episodes of MadMen that Jamie and I watched on this vacation, but something about this picture makes me think of the 1950's.

The Audrie and Annie Show

It's been awhile since I've posted any videos of the girls. Tonight the girls and I were having a jam session so I thought I'd share a few of the videos I captured.

(I set the video camera on the edge of the couch and just let it run. A few times you hear me playing the guitar pretty badly and it's because Annie is trying to lick the guitar while I play. For real.)

Audrie told me she wanted to sing "Twinkle Little Star" but "her own way" (like Frank Sinatra- she does it 'my way'), so we hadn't worked on this- she just made it up on the spot.


Enjoy the show!




And then of course Annie wanted her time in the spotlight, too:

And some bonus footage of Audrie singing "Call me Maybe" and she improvises a bit at the end (my favorite is the last few seconds when Annie closes the show by picking her nose...!)