NATALIE'S LAST DAY IN MISS-LOU, AUGUST 17, 2008

I don't have any images ready to add at this time. And I am sort of blank on any of the cute little stories that I want to add though I know I have several of them in mind. She is quite funny these days.

TODAY IS HER LAST FULL DAY TO LIVE HERE. TOMORROW SHE, HER DADDY AND MOMMY MOVE TO B.R. NATALIE WILL BE A LITTLE TIGER LIVING IN TIGER LAND!

I have photos from today (her last day) and I have photos from our simple, but fun day at the the lake (yesterday), but none of them are ready to post. Be looking for those soon.

It is here! That bitter-sweet day (day-before) where all thing in life change just as they should...though we know it is the right thing at the right time in life, our hearts don't always understand so easily. Please say a prayer for my family of three who will soon be living in Tiger Land.

~~Natalie's Mimi~~

P.S. Pray for the mimi too...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE DANNY!

I hope this works. I wanted to post a Happy Birthday wish to my brother, Danny, from Natalie. But I wanted to add some images to go with it. I don't really have time to convert them to low res files. Since it is only two files, maybe it will work. I see they are now here. So hopefully they will load okay each time it's opened.

I see I posted them in reverse order. I meant to have the one of Danny first since today, August 15th is his birthday. The other image is him and his wife, Maria. They were married when Cameron was 7 months olds. So Natalie feels like their grandchild/special niece...however you want to look at it, but they love and adore her too.

I have a little story about Natalie and her Uncle Danny and this would be a good time to include it:

• Natalie has the Leap Frog toy (that has lower case A,B,C's that her Aunt Jackie, my sister bought her). One of the many features of this toy is that certain letters play certain songs (w/o) lyrics. Natalie wants to sing them and since Randy is better at identifying them and singing them. He has taught her most of them.
• One of them is "Yankle Doodle Dandy". A few weeks ago, Natalie was singing the song...only it was..."Uncle Danny went to town riding on a pony..."
• When I realized what she saying I didn't bother correcting her. One day she realize it, but for now I just want to enjoy things her way!

Natalie loves you, Uncle Danny!

~~Natalie's Mimi~~

P.S. I have other photos of Natalie with Uncle Danny, but for some reason this was the first one that popped up in my mind.

NATALIE LOVES HER DORA/DIEGO BACKPACK

This is an image cropped close from yesterday. After a little ps enhancement, it was my favorite of the day day. Yes, I know it's a little cheesy, but you gotta love it too! Our morning started off quite early. Soon all Natalie's morning will be starting early with her new daycare/preschool. I had planned to pick Cari up around 8:45 since her appointment orthodontist appointment was 9:00. Timing of everything always takes so much longer when dealing with a 3-year old. Sometimes I do well calculation my time, but most of the times I don't and this was one of them. When I looked at my clock after I got in the car, it was 8:49...even if it is 5 minutes ahead, I was still running behind.

This is the full view of the first image that I cropped close.

Natalie wanted to bring her new Dora/Diego Backpack. This was suppose to be her one of her b'day gifts, but it didn't come in until while we were gone (over a week later). This image and the next one were recorded to show the backpack, but since she was walking down the steps and I was shooting down, neither angle really showed if off. But you get the idea. It is really hard to find Dora/Diego items. Dora is usually geared all toward girls and Diego; boys. So I was pleased to find the new backpack on ebay when I was shopping for b'day party items.

Looking back at Mimi...

I took Natalie to her parents after the I took Cari back to school after the appointment. They had both worked late the night before. Later in the day, while Brittany was at work Cameron and Natalie came over. After we had burgers and homemade fries, Natalie wanted to play with play dough...I usually tell her no because I want it to be organized play and nothing is organized around here these days. But I hate to disappoint her about anything these days since her days here are really numbered. So I cleaned her high chair up and gave her one color and some cookie cutters. She was tickled! (as you can see from this expression)

They left not long after this. Earlier she looked like she would fall asleep in the high chair. So we put p.j.'s and a pull up...just in case she was sacked by the time she got there.

I should be seeing in her in a few hours since both her parents work tonight. I am sure I will more new images after this weekend. But that's it for now.

~~Natalie's Mimi~~

FUN AT McDONALD'S PLAYLAND

CARI AND NATALIE AT McDONALD'S PLAYLAND

In less than a week my little sweetheart will be moving to B.R. with her parents just as she should. It makes me sad knowing that our time together will soon have to be quality time rather and quantity with lots of quality. All summer we have tried to make the most of our summer and do lots of fun things...you know...make lots of happy memories.

So when Natalie woke up from her nap, we headed to local McDonald's playland. But by the time we maded there, it was about time for one of us to leave to pick up Cari from church. So Randy left while I stayed and photographed Natalie.

Here she is having fun and running wild...

This cute little girl wanted to be photographed too. It's so funny. My kids (including Natalie) get tired of being photographed, but other people's children are begging to be photographed. Normally I would take a lot of the unknown children and just delete them later (since I dont' know them). But this time I purposely took only a small memory card (to avoid overshooting...Did you know I am a member of "Overshooters Anonymous"?) so that I would save hard drive space and only take a few. So I must admit when this little girl popped up every time I picked up my camera, I was frustrated. But I finally took a few of her too so that I could get some of Natalie. I didn't have much of choice since Natalie kept following her around.

There they both are again...

When she left, she played with this other group of 3 children. It was so cute. The older child (maybe about 6-8 yrs old) lead them all in a game of Simon Says. So Sweet!

When Cari and Randy were on their way back, I went to order food. Natalie spotted this with some other boys putting change in. So as soon as I finished my transaction, Natalie had her turn with my change.

watching the money go down...

Her expression of delight once it went down...

The coloring was a little off because I forgot to turn the flash back on and it was the last image on the card. So no more chances...so how about a black & white?
I am going to miss doing lot of little things like this during the week. I hope we make up for it with lots of fun weekends with Natalie.

~~Natalie's Mimi~~

AUGUST 10, 2007...NATALIE'S FIRST TEA SET

When Natalie's cousins came last year, it was after Natalie's birthday party. They didn't get to come because my cousin, their mommy, had to work that day. So they brought Natalie her birthday gift on this visit. The same visit that we went to the water park the next day. Remember I only had few images and I recently posted those.

Such a serious expression of concentration to open her gift.

At this point, she appears a little confused...like she's not so sure what it is.

Still confused?

I am sure by the title you know that the gift was a tea set. We had many tea parties with Natalie's First Tea Set. I think the first one was with Carlie, her mommy (Aunt Charlotte), and Mimi.


I actually had Charlotte take a few photos of me and Natalie after she opened this gift, but sorry they didn't make the blog....remember I wasn't feeling too well then and as you could guess I really don't want to remember the way I looked in those images. I didn't delete them, but I won't be showing them off. LOL

I have a few other folders of images that I would like to post that didn't make the blog last summer because they were taken just before I started the blog. My blog anniversary is coming up soon (08.29.07). When I started her blog, my intention was to post as often as possible to keep up with daily adventures of Natalie and her world from that day forward and all post images from the same time of year from her previous years...at that time only two since I started it exactly one month after she turned two. I wanted to go back and add birthday party images then, but since I was doing good to keep it with it like that I decided I would add last year's with this years. I did post a few and I intend to still post more.

I did good with her blog until the fall came and got really busy with work and then the holidays. I had intended after the holidays to go back and catch up. Well...I never really got a chance to do that. So maybe as I go back this year and pick up previous years since I won't see her quite as much this...though I will probably take more photos each time to make up for it...so who knows. These are my intentions...to maintain Natalie's World with images of the times we have and by re-capturing her first two-three years through images that haven't been blogged. So bare with me.

I hope you enjoyed these images. My friend, Nicki, commented on what a toddler Natalie was just a year ago when she saw the images that recently posted "major cutie"...I think photographed the same day as these. It really is amazing during that 3rd year (from 24 mos. to 36 mos.) that they lose that baby face at some point. I guess it is so gradual that we only really notice it when looking back.

~~Natalie's Mim~~

"JONAH SAYS THANK YOU"

Okay, I posted the first image twice because I wanted it to be the first one that appeared. This was the business-card-sized thank you card that was enclosed in Jonah's party favor bags. Natalie picked it up the other night and she was "reading it". I took the photos after the fact, but the moment was too cute. It needed to be documented with photos and the story behind it.

She was holding it and here's how it read to her.."jonah says...thank you for coming to my party--thank you for eating my cake". I wished I would have left her alone a little longer to see what else she "read" on this card. It was too cute. As I stated previously, I had to get my camera out and photograph her with this. She was sitting in my desk chair holding the card toward me in the first image. As you can see the ceiling fan light above her was casting a shadow over her face from the card.

Next image...a close-up of the card! It was very cute. Jonah had a very cute party with the most interesting party favors including these thank you cards.

Do you see her finger on the card where she is following the line of text as she "reads" it?

I wished that I had a camera (a good one) available and the time to capture all the little things in our lives like this memory that we won't forget now because I allowed to document it.

It's the little things like this that I know I will miss soooooo much when Natalie lives moves to Baton Rouge next week. I will just have to do my best to document as many of the moments like this when she is here to make up for less time.

I love this little girl so much!

~~Natalie's Mimi~~

LITTLE SHORT STORY...

THIS IS A LITTLE STORY ABOUT NATALIE AND HOW SHE THINKS SHE CAN AND SHOULD DO EVERYTHING WE DO...OR ACTUALLY IT WAS A LITTLE CONVERSATION THAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN THE TWO OF US A FEW DAYS AGO:

• NATALIE--"What are you doing, Mimi?"
• MIMI-- "I am changing the batteries." (I am referring to my cordless mouse.)
• NATALIE-- "I wanna do it."
• OKAY...HERE COMES THE CUTE/FUNNY PART:
• MIMI--"It's very hard to do."
• NATALIE--"It's soft for me."

What can you say but...LOL!

THE REST OF THE STORY...

• NATALE--(in reference to the batteries that I am removing) "Is that one yuck?"
• NATALIE-- (after the batteries have been changed) "It works now!" with her wonderful, typical Natalie enthusiasm. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!

And, of course, I did find a way to let her help me.

She has been going through the phase of what i call I-DO-IT-MYSELF for quite a while now...probably since she just before she turned two. But from time to time it has slacked off where it wasn't quite as important. I always try to encourage it or rather let her do it...that is when we aren't running behind or going to be late, etc. Because I believe that's how they learn to do it themselves and it is how they build confidence in themselves. Though sometimes you just do not have the time...like yesterday when she wanted to walk down the stairs. We just didn't have the time because we were trying to leave to take Cari to school. By the time we got in the car, she was crying about me scooping her up so that we could be on our way. So she was determined to do something herself....so then she wanted do her own seat belt...even on the best of days...she can only do parts of it, not all of it. Again, I had to take over, she cried again. She finally got content once she was settled into the car watching her DVD...though that didn't start out smooth either. She wanted a different show than what she had, but after a few minutes Cari and I could hear her back there laughing at Little Bill. Isn't it cute when they develop a since of humor and we can use it to ease her out of a bad mood?

Sometimes life can be quite complicated dealing with a toddler, but overall OH SO MUCH FUN!

~~Natalie's Mimi~~