What baby elephants do in their spare time

In their free time (and sometimes in disguise), baby elephants can be found at the library reading a book:

At the mall (winning 50 dollar gift certificates by taking 1st place in the Macy's Department Store Costume Contest)

Fussing over their cruel fate (let's face it, being a fat elephant is hard, hot work):

Playing with sticks (and moving too quickly for nature photographers to get crisp photos):

Trying to go down slides (it's hard with a backside that wide):

Hanging out with Dr. Kunz after a long hard night grabbing candy out of bowls:

Hanging out with their friends, the gnomes (this one's name is Avery, and he's ADORABLE):

Getting pictures taken with Gandalf:

At the park boldly feeding fearless nutria and ducks:

Getting their faces painted:


And overall having an awesome halloween:) All photos can be found at our October album.

Autumn days at the park(s)

Sorry this post is so picture heavy, but I FINALLY found my camera charger. So at long last it's cooled down enough to go to local parks during the day. For a while there every time we tried, Daniel burned himself on a playground toy.
A few weeks ago we went to the Mercer Arboretum- basically, an outdoor plant museum. We saw some pretty cool things. Some mario-esque mushrooms:

A big ol butterfly:

Hundreds of tiny lizards:

One very large water snake (you can't tell from the pic, but I'm guessing he was about 3 feet long):

And a wild elephant:

K, I made that last one up. That's just D in his halloween costume.

Then earleir this week I took Daniel to a new park- it was fun, but not worth the 75 minutes it took me to get unlost and get back home. Here are some pics:





Thanks to Becky for the ADORABLE cookie monster sweatshirt.

And my favorite little progression of Daniel going down a slide:




He does great sliding by himself, but needs to work on the dismount;)

He may not talk much, but...

Daniel just successfully won his first argument. He was coming out of timeout and, as usual, I grabbed his hand and walked him back to the thing that got him in trouble- in this case, he was playing the dog food. I said "this is off limits, you don't play with the dog food." He then points at the dog food and waggles his finger in a "bad dog food" way. I think "great, he understands!" He went on to waggle his finger at the dog food bowl (also off limits), then the water bowl (off limits)... he proceeds to walk around the downstairs and waggle his finger at everything that is "off limits": the towel rack, the stove, the dishwasher, the cupboards, the wall that he banged up with my hairbrush, the washing machine, the computer, the filing cabinet, the stroller, the toy mallet I took away because he banged it on stuff... then finally turns to me and raises his hands with his palms facing the ceiling and yells at me in gibberish as if to say "so what AM I supposed to play with?"

Poor Lucy

First, as you may have noticed, I gave up on creating my own blog backgrounds for now. Apparently creating them myself means I never change them because I'm too busy. So I'll go the lazy route.

Anyways... there is a rather comcial thing happening in our house these days. Poor Lucy is getting attacked by Daniel ALL THE TIME. Daniel giggles, lucy groans, daniel cuddles, Lucy silently plots his demise... all in good fun.
I look into her kennel and see this:

Now that Daniel can climb onto the couch (the only piece of furniture in the house that lucy is allowed on) with ease, this is a regular sight:

As is this:

And this (note the outfit change- this was taken the following but really could have been taken any day this week because it's a common sight to see)


Oh, I wish you could hear the sound effects involved. The giggles, the commands from kenny- "Daniel, be soft!", and best of all , the deep-down grumbling of a dog who, a short while ago, had the rule of everything 3 feet and down. But she is SO gentle, patient and tolerant, though she lets her annoyance be known I have never once worried that he would hurt Daniel in any way. Usually I'm much more worried the other way around, that Daniel will poke an eye out and pull an ear off or in some other way maim our dear, sweet Lucy.

Let's go ride bikes.

October hasn't proven to be a whole lot better than september, but things are looking up.
The biggest problem is the *&%@! honda civic. When we bought it, it had around 100k miles on it- which for a honda, usually means it's not even halfway through its life. I always figured the 110k dodge would give us more trouble- sad to say but I have very little faith in american-made cars. But no, the honda has been the one to give us all the trouble. But this is what we get for buying a car on craigslist. This is its third major break down since we bought it just over a year ago.

We were pulling out of our development on a saturday to run errands when all the sudden the engine died, as if it had no gas. In the middle of turning onto a very busy 45 mph street. We took up 3 lanes, just drifting... Fortunately no one was coming at the moment. We got out, pushed it back into our development, called a friend to help push it back to our house down the street, and called the tow truck. Turns out the honda doesn't have the right kind of coverage- only our durango gets free tows. So we agree to pay 80 bucks and wait for the tow truck. For 2 hours. Give up, call the tow company, they forgot to put our info into their queue. So we call another tow company. Wait an hour. They show up but it turns out they only take cash and we're 20 bucks short. By now the mechanic is only open for another 30 minutes, so we give up.
Monday (meaning Kenny is at work, and I'm in charge of the car situation even though I am clueless about cars, and the mechanic knows it), some friends in the ward help tow our car in. The mechanic (who replaced our whole radiator a few months ago) lets us know (and forgive me if I get this wrong, its all greek to me) the distributor cap, ignition coils and spark plugs all need replacing. On top of it the radiator reserve needed flushing, the timing belt was about to spontaneously combust, and the back tires are bare.
*sigh*
1400 dollars later... the mechanic promises us there is nothing else in that engine that could possibly need replacing. The next day, I get a call while kenny is on his way home from work. "Bad news". What could possibly go wrong now? Turns out the power window was stuck all the way down and would need a new regulator and motor (good thing we don't live somewhere that randomly pours rain every few days). But my wonderful husband decided he could take it on- and he did. 9 hours later (and he didn't swear once!) and we have a working window again.

So the civic can't possibly have anything wrong with it, right? Right, for now. No, it's the dang durango now- the latch on the trunk won't open without finagling. Then yesterday the check engine light came on it. I'm pretending I didn't notice it cause I honestly will break if we have one more car problem.

Things could have been much worse. We were lucky to not have been pulling out onto the road at a busier time (like school hours- we live across from a bus barn), and that we weren't going anywhere important. We're SO lucky to have very helpful family and friends without whom we probably would have pushed the civic off a cliff (unfortunately there aren't many cliffs in Houston, so maybe an alligator-infested swamp instead). And hooray for my wonderful husband who has had a crash course in cars this month and who saved us a lot of money by getting heavily involved.

If anyone wants to contribute to our "save morgan" fund, gifts will be accepted through paypal.;)

*morgan is the name of our civic, because he's an old black man like someone else we know and love.

And for getting through my rant, here is a picture of Daniel playing with his new sidewalk chalk:

Spring Harpist

I did it! I played my first harp gig Thursday night for a Breast Cancer Survivor benefit and fundraiser at Memorial Hermann Hospital, for $200! A month ago, my harp sat unloved and unplayed in the corner, and now I practice hours every day, and have a brand new website (still working on content for it though) and a business card:


The card is nothing exciting, but I'm thrilled with how the logo turned out, if I do say so myself.

(PS, I live in Spring, Texas- hence the title "Spring Harpist". It was better than something lame like "dancing strings" or boring like "Jennifer Kunz".)

The gig went well, I think- I'd give myself a 7 out of 10. I have about 45 minutes of non-religious music I can play and went through that whole repertoire 3 or 4 times. I made a few mistakes here and there, but nothing hugely noticeable- imagine playing a dozen songs (on any instrument) through 3 or 4 times each without errors. My back was ACHING, but I made some contacts and handed out quite a few business cards. At the end of the night they sent me home with a gorgeous flower arrangement of lilies.

Unfortunately, my camera's battery charger is missing. A professional photographer took some pics and hopefully will send them to me when he can so I can post them.

We had to shell out some money for an amp to make my harp loud enough for a room with 100+ people, so in the end I'm still in a little bit of "harp debt"- which I will get out of with my next gig October 29th (for a Breast cancer fundraiser luncheon).

I'm really excited to have found a way to bring in a little extra money, and to have something that will MAKE me keep playing the harp regularly. I actually have callouses on my fingers from my folk harp- I don't think I EVER played enough before now to have big ol callouses just from the folk harp, so this is a great sign.

Almost cut my hair

First, for those who caught the song reference in the title, Kenny and I got to go see Crosby, Stills and Nash a week ago at the Woodlands pavilion (for those who don't know, CSN was a huge folk rock group in the 60s/70s). It was wonderful! It's an outdoor, covered venue, and there was a kicking lightning storm in the background- practically a strobe light. They all preformed wonderfully, I fell a bit in love with Stephen Stills... AND they did a few songs that made me really happy (like Cathedrals, which is not one of their more well known songs but definitely a favorite of mine, PLUS a cover of Grateful Dead's Uncle John's Band, which was AWESOME). So yeah, happy me. Then in a few weeks we go see Jason Mraz. I'm so excited!

Also pertaining to the title of the post, I gave Kenny his first haircut-by-wife. It had gotten really long (some curls were 6 inches if pulled straight) and we decided we could save a lot of money if I learned how to cut his wild curly hair- it's very different than using a 3 and buzzing up the back. Here's the "before":

The "during":

And the "after":


I think I did decent for a first time, though definitely not perfect. I'm exciting to do it again, I learned a lot, and next time I can do it more even and not quite so short. Fortunately hair grows back quickly.

Also related to hair, Daniel's hair is coming in nicely. He may be getting a REAL haircut this week (his first real one, if you don't count his mullet trim).
It's finally coming in on the top:

And we're getting some decent curls!

(By the way, that last pic is Daniel showing me how he "prays". He mostly does it when he wants food.)
And, here's my latest favorite picture of Daniel, even if it is way too dark:

The pre-edit is here if anyone wants to try at prettifying it better than I did.