Career Toddler

Goodness, it's been forever since you've seen pictures of Joseph. (Deep down, I know that's the best part of my blog, so sorry for all the reminiscing and philosophizing in between.) He's grown up quite a bit since you last saw him, and he's actually started thinking about future careers. Like his mom, he finds it difficult to decide on just one, so here's a smattering he's considered.

• Yoga instructor

• Scout master

• Demolition crew man

• Stuntman/unicorn (he decided to launch himself off the couch and land on the hardwood. This picture is a month old so it's finally faded but there is a scar.)

• Mountain climber

• Fireman

• Birdwatcher

• Philosopher

• Cab driver

• Iditarod racer

• Pie maker (actually that's mine. Just wanted to show my first apple pie ever.)

• Food tester

• Food destroyer. Luckily we put enough frosting on Kevin's birthday cake to hide the damage.

• Playground designer

• Music critic

• Electrician. He moved the chair over by himself and started flipping the lights.

• Bear wrestler/mess maker

• Artist. Not even sure why I own crayons.

Whatever he is, I bet he'll be a good one!

What we've been up to

So, I made it through the month of October without really talking about what we've been up to. (Actually, that's most every month. Sorry.) 

Anyway, we've had a wonderful fall and I'm sad to see that it's fading away. In six (or so) word snippets (just like here), here's what we've enjoyed this past month.

Cider Mill -- animals, cider, donuts, tractors, wet slides.

Corn maze -- more donuts, Kevin's-got-mad-navigational-skills, wagon-rides-are-lame, hurray-for-free-engineering-socials, pumpkins.

Teething -- hate it hate it hate it.

(insert picture of major drooling, much sadness, and much screaming at night. Three molars down, one to go.)

Early morning photo shoot -- sober Joseph, will share more later.

Apples -- Honeycrisp=heaven, lotsa little apples, pink applesauce.

(and I still have a bag of apples in the fridge that I need to use up somehow. Time to learn how to make apple pie.)

Columbus Day -- Brendan, Megan, giant pumpkins, Killer Bunnies.

Rainbows on the way down to Ohio

That's a lot of pumpkin pie

These pumpkins were grown in a mold.

(it was actually the Friday and Saturday after Columbus Day, and some of it was spent in Circleville, not Columbus, but works well enough. Also, the traffic by Bowling Green was the worst.)

Fall colors -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.

I'm loving this magenta tree in our backyard. 

 (On Sunday we went on a walk by the river and I made a conscious choice to leave the camera behind so that I'd have to remember it with my eyes. It was exquisite, especially the reflections of the trees in the water. Bad conscious decision.)

Halloween -- up, down, touch the ground, in the mood for food.

I made about twenty movies trying to catch him doing downward dog to the exercise song from Winnie the Pooh, but it never worked. But here is a picture which sums it up just as well in 1/100 the megabytes

He only wore the hat for trick-or-treating, not photo shoots. Also oatmeal boxes make great toys.

Honorable mentions: craft pumpkins, blurry pictures, almost decent haircuts, pre-Halloween fun, rainy Halloween adventures, . . .

okay, I have to share a few more pictures just because.

One man's trash is another man's modern art. This piece is called "An Exhibition on Calcium."

I think this was the time he tried drinking the soapy water. I would not count this as helpful.

I finally figured out why we say "cheese" for pictures. This is literally the face he makes when he says cheese.

And, that was our October!

Happy family

Welcome back to PhPhPhPh (or whatever the family photo thing was called). Sorry I haven't been doing a ton with this (or with anything else Proclamation related, come to think of it. I had ideas at the beginning of the month but never wrote them down, and now they sound silly/too deep for me to tackle right now). Plus this round of teething has been especially brutal this past week (especially since we had colds just the week before).

But enough excuses! Here is a picture of us looking our best back in 2006!

Observations/Trivia:

• We all had different interpretations of what it meant to frown.
• For earlier family pictures, all we could ever get Spencer to do was frown, if he showed his face at all. By this point he was a bit more cooperative, but I still think this was the easiest picture we took.
• Although it doesn't show up in this picture, Jennie is actually the only one not in cream-colored clothes. The idea was that some of us would be wearing brown and some would wear cream, but actually only Jennie showed up in the brown. So with her blond hair and brown shirt, she stood out in other pictures we took that day. If we were mean siblings, we could have made a compelling case that she was adopted based on these pictures.
• Since this picture isn't funny enough as is, sometimes we would mess around with in Paint and switch each other's faces around. I would show one of these but I imagine all copies have been destroyed (as well they should be to protect your gentle eyes).

Until next time, this has been Phamily Phroclamation Photo Phun!

Science!

Welcome back to Phamily Photo Phroclamation Phiesta! We're going to jump ahead to 2012 now and visit the Rytting boys in Zions. This is a picture of them seeing if spit floats if it's hot enough.

Observations:

. . . well, actually I think this one speaks for itself.

Vintage

Welcome back to Phamily Phroclamation Photo Phun! Okay, I just made that up, and it looks kind of gross. I'm keeping it though because alliteration.

Also, congrats to Dani for both guessing who the famous person was in last time's photo (David O. McKay -- he's the one on the far right . . . you can see it in his eyes), and who my great-great grandpa was (front row, next to the woman on the left). As your prize, I'm sending you a metaphorical toaster oven!

For the next picture, we're going to hop ahead half a century to the 1950s! Nostalgia was invented because of pictures like this one:

Observations:

• You know how we try so hard today to get pictures to look vintage? Yeah, this was just normal for them. And real.
• My grandma reminds me of Heidi from the old Shirley Temple movie. I love it.
• It looks like Provo's always been an awesome place to celebrate the 4th of July. I mean, the banner says "BEHOLD AMERICA" -- can't get more patriotic than that! (Also, "behold America" sounds like a campaign slogan in Utah County these days.)

I suppose I should have asked this before posting, but what else do you remember about this picture, Grandma?

Thanks to everyone who's been sending me pictures! Keep them coming!

Blueberries!

All my life, I've wanted to like blueberries. I remember trying a stray blueberry once when we were making muffins for Achievement Days that tasted like it came straight from heaven. Sweet and flavorful and healthy and wonderful . . .

And I could never find more like it. Every time I've gotten blueberries, I've just had to hide them in pancakes or muffins because they were just too sour or bland for my liking.

So when I learned that Michigan has farms where you can pick your own blueberries, I didn't see what the big deal was. Now strawberries, ooh, those would have been good if we had been around during the first weeks of June.

But blueberries? Meh. We buy them because they are in season and healthy, but I just never wanted to eat them plain.

Luckily for us, we heard from friends that blueberries were actually amazing when you picked them yourself. So we decided to put it to the test. We invited the Roberts, who barely got a chance to breathe after driving here from our old ward in Provo before I called them and invited them to partake in a true "Michigan experience."

And, oh, it was worth it. We found a patch down in Milan* less than 15 minutes from their place and began our adventure.

I love Michigan

The fun started as we drove up to the house. A bunny scurried past us, and chickens and little dogs surrounded our car. Our favorite was the duck that thought it was a chicken. And of course Joseph had to chase all of them around. Luckily they were the kind that ran instead of pecked.

After getting some instructions from the owner (or the owner's son? never figured that out), we drove a few hundred yards over to the blueberry patch in the middle of the woods.

We grabbed some buckets, and then for the next few hours . . . we picked blueberries!

I never knew that dark, shiny blueberries could taste so much better than the weak sauce light blue ones at the store.

Pretty sure he's dropping a stick into the bucket

Kelsie and her haul

Kevin at work

Dropping a beautiful berry in

The weather was beautiful, the company was great, the blueberries were delicious . . . everything was perfect except for one small detail -- Joseph was tired.

What kind of mean parents keep a child up through a morning nap, even if he skips it every now and then?

That said, he still was pretty pleasant through it all. However, he got mad when I wouldn't let him squish my blueberries with a stick.

Then he helped me pick for a while, but he wanted to squish all of them with another bucket and I wouldn't let him. So that was sad.

He wasn't as selective about his blueberries as the rest of us.

But we eventually found a way to keep him happy.

This trick also works at church sometimes.

Dropping sticks and grass through the cracks

Once Kevin and I had a 6-pint bucket full of blueberries and Kelsie had half a bucket full, we felt like we had accomplished enough for one morning and were ready to come home with our spoils.

Jared, Kelsie, and Kevin (and Joseph)

yummmmmmmmm

Tired boy

Jared made it a point to only pick the darkest, biggest, shiniest blueberries. This was his haul.
 

We went back to the owners' house, paid for our berries, and got to listen to a delightful 87-year-old woman reminisce about WWII for several minutes. And Joseph got to chase more chickens. And then we went home.

And that is the story of how I now love to eat blueberries plain and have done so in abundance the past few days. The end.

*For my Ann Arbor friends who read this, we recommend it. I know there's one up near Dexter that's forever away, but this one is so close and a bit cheaper and the blueberries are divine. They don't have much info online, but there is this.