Casting Call

I was just testing my camera, trying to get some settings right.  Naomi, on the other hand, apparently thought it was an open call for auditions.

Midlife

My very own pill box.  Welcome to old.

Forty-One

We're not much on tradition, but one that we do seem to inadvertently hold to every year is the recycling of birthday cake candles. According to our cakes, Venesa and I usually turn some combination of ages from recent birthday cakes for the kids.  Whatever candles we find in the house will always trump the option of driving to the store to buy new ones. Sometimes it works (e..g, the four candle on my cake last year conveniently represented four decades)... and sometimes it doesn't. This year... a six candle for my 41st...  I've got nothing.

Independence

Big Deal.  Huge deal, actually. For anyone else, it would've just been a bike ride around the corner. But for Justin & Jasmine, it may as well have been a trip around the moon.  What it amounted to in reality was their first bike ride without a parent past the boundary of our driveway.  300 feet to the corner, left turn down the cul-de-sac, and back again.  One street to cross, one overlooked car (thank you, Jasmine, for saving your brother's life), about 5 roundtrips in total, and two kids that I'm finally starting to concede are growing up faster than lightning.