here i am, not hiding my talents under a bushel

as a peace offering for not blogging for so long, i come to you with a slew full (you'd think that would be one word. it's not) of new talents that the fam's been working on these past few months: 

the babe
1. quincy has taken an interest in marine biology. when you hand your infant your phone to entertain her for a few minutes, you expect to get it back full of slobber and maybe some chewed up cheerios. instead, q somehow managed to opened the internet on my phone and pull up this page for me:




of course she wants to learn the ins and outs of bog turtles! what genius baby doesn't??

2. q has also indicated that she wants to be a farmer



here she is giving tips to farmers on what makes an apple great while sampling the local fare at our farmers market





3. we have a first word! it's "banana." of course it sounds more like "anananana" and she kind-of says it with regards to any piece of fruit in our fruit bowl and the boy doesn't think it counts, but i just think he knows that once she starts talking, it's one step closer to having to fend all the boys off with guns 

the boy
1. contrary to my last statement, the boy's new talent has nothing to do with guns. it has to do with lederhosen



2. and paintbrushes. we found this studio in denver where you go and they give you a blank canvas and paint. then you just paint whatever your heart desires for two straight hours. or so we thought (and hoped). instead, they had an instructor showing the class how to paint a specific painting. where's the creative liberty in that?? here was the painting she was teaching us how to paint:



i didn't actually take any pictures of what people's paintings looked like, but here are some pretty realistic mock examples...



and here's what me and the boy ended up with:


bella luna...


and the flying mustache

needless to say, we were not the teacher's pets. she stopped coming over to ask us if we needed any help about 5 minutes into the class starting. and i'm pretty sure she snapped a picture of us to hang on the "do not let back into my studio" board. 

me
1. i'm knitting now! because i mastered sewing so well (ahem...), i decided to step up my game and start knitting. to date, i've knitted one hat that actually FITS on my head,



one hat that actually DOESN'T fit on quincy's head (aka, one hat that we'll now be giving to our friends who just had a baby...)


she's pretty bummed that it doesn't fit

and one hand... yes, i stabbed myself in the hand with a knitting needle. bet you didn't think that was even possible, did ya? i was going to take a picture of it, but it's kind-of yucky and maybe not so happy-blog appropriate. and little did i know, up until very recently, you weren't allowed to take knitting needles on an airplane, so i guess other people have also experienced the danger that is knitting.

2. i had a dream the other night that we went to our local dinner theatre and they ended up hiring me on the spot to be one of the cast members because i was the only person in the entire place who knew all the lyrics to the "and the world will know" song from newsies. i woke up feeling very proud of myself and realizing that maybe there is a place for me at the dinner theatre since i do know an awful lot of song lyrics after all...

i also woke up with that song playing over and over again in my head. i went to listen to it on rhapsody to get it out of my head, but turns out, rhapsody doesn't have the rights to that album, so i queued whatever newsies songs i COULD get hold of, which turned out to be over a half an hour of the song "santa fe" replaying over and over again, only in different languages every time. which really works to my benefit because now i could get a job at our dinner theatre, OR a dinner theatre in france, germany or spain...