kv0925

Amy! Though man-oh-man, you'd never have known she wasn't in the full grip of her Terrible Twos despite turning 3 yesterday. Heck, she even argued about it when we told her it was her birthday and she was turning 3! "It's NOT my birthday, it's YOUR birthday, and I'M TWO." Oy. I think it was a lack of sleep, but aside from a couple hours of her being good, she was pretty much a nightmare all day. She's just so stubborn when she gets something in her head. She'll misplace a toy or book, come ask us to find it for her, and then go nuclear when we can't find it or refuse to look. Or she'll get it into her head that she wants to do something, and raise the ceiling if we want her to do something else. And heaven help us if we ask her to do something she DOESN'T want to do. Sheesh. I'm glad these phases pass in time, but I'm pretty sure she's been the worst with this stuff. Hermione was perfect, always eager to please and not a complainer. Hallie was a little more vocal, but easy enough to distract or redirect or coerce somehow. Amy just will. not. have. it. I guess she'll be our Type A kid. ;)

Anyway, weekend was good otherwise. Heather's sister Stef came over Friday night, and we had fun watching some old home videos with her. Saturday we headed up to the zoo in Sanford, where they've recently added giraffes (though the feeding station for them doesn't open for a few more weeks). It's not a great zoo, but our main goal was to get our pass there since it's relatively cheap, and then we can use that to get discounted admission at lots of other zoos and aquariums. And the animals they have are pretty cool, though their enclosures tend to be on the small side which makes me feel bad for some of the critters.

After the zoo we got lunch and then headed home, and then I stayed home with Amy while everyone else went ice skating. Hallie finally got past a hurdle so she got a lot better, and Heather's apparently decided that rather than just take Hallie to her lesson and sitting around each week, she's going to sign up for lessons too. She already skates okay--well enough to stay upright, anyway--but she wouldn't mind getting better.

After the ice skating was dinner and then our walk and paddle down at the lake that I posted about before.

Sunday Stef headed home in the morning, which left us the day. I'd been wanting to head out to the big plant nursery we like to get some stuff, so we decided to make an outing of that, lunch, and checking out a city park we hadn't been to before. The park was first, and it wasn't as nice as I'd expected, but the girls had fun. Then we couldn't find a place for lunch, which caused some drama. And then the nursery, which hopefully redeemed the trip. I got a bunch of milkweed plants, and some dill and fennel, and a porterweed, all for the butterfly garden. Got some azaleas to replace a couple that died over the winter. And Heather was looking at the fruit trees and couldn't resist getting a peach tree, which will hopefully do well. The girls and I planted all of that when we got home, which is always fun.

Then I tried changing the oil on my car again. I'd tried a couple weeks ago and was frustrated because I couldn't get the damn drain plug out. It was clearly overtightened by whoever changed it last, and my tools weren't quite the right size so I ended up rounding the edges of the bolt a bit. Not good. Since then I got some new tools to hopefully fit better, but even so all I did was round off the bolt even more. Gonna have to take it in somewhere and hope they can get that off--I did order a new plug to replace that one, but first the old one's got to come off! Not happy about it, changing oil is not supposed to be an ordeal!

I also worked on my photography website a little. The home page has always been my blog, but I wanted to switch to a setup where there's an actual home/landing page, and a menu link to the blog instead. Finally got that working, though I still have work to do on the landing page, as well as my portfolio images which haven't been updated for a year or two. And I'm sure there are other changes I want to make to the text here and there. I'm always saying I'm happy as a part-timer and don't want too much business, but lately I've been getting hardly anything and it makes me feel out of practice, which is bad.

Oh, and I ordered my new lens, which should arrive around Thursday. Looking forward to playing with that! At the nursery I saw a guy who had that very lens on his Canon, so I asked him about it a little. He frankly seemed a bit clueless for a guy who dropped $1300 on a lens, but he said he mainly got it for video since it's stabilized and has been happy with it. We'll see!

Okay, enough rambling. Have some more photos instead.

The girls are big fans of petting zoos, of course!

Everyone else thought this alpaca was ugly because of its teeth. I thought it was adorable, though!

They have a pretty impressive collection of venomous snakes at this zoo. This is a cottonmouth water moccasin. As I like to tell people, there are 4 types of venomous snake in the US (rattlesnake, coral snake, copperheads and water moccasins) and here in Florida we have them all. :)

Banana spider, aka golden silk orb weaver. This is a female, but was a pretty young/small one, maybe an inch long.

The girls running to check out the dinosaur. Apparently it was a prop in Wilder Napalm, a film I recently learned was written by Vince Gilligan of X-Files and Breaking Bad fame. Might have to see it, especially with the local connection!