School Days

Like many families around the northern hemisphere, we've been consumed with the start of the school year.  We got the traditional shots of off to school:












Bela left while still darkish - on the first day!  She's on her way by 7:30 am, and her back-breaking pack is heavy stuff.  She seems to think the only benefit to the early start is being home for an hour before Xavi.  Read about middle school exploits on her blog.  There should be some good stuff from her team building overnight camp experience at Camp Pendalouan, I would hope.

Xavier is seen here sporting the current superhero backpack, Iron Man, which is a little counter to the Batman phase.  But he has plenty of Marvel shirts to go with it, so no worries.  He has Bela's teacher from last year, so it's nice to know a bit of what to expect.

In other news, parents continue to get older.  The good news is that it sometimes comes with swag, like two copies of the Elspeth vs Tezzerret decks.  Nice!

So far looks like Tezzeret takes Elspeth in a fair fight, but loses to Xavi's souped up Garruk deck.

There have been requests for shots of Ysabela's purse, made under the guidance of Aunt Jill.  Shown here with her favorite complementary dress, the purse features alternating squares of day and night with a moon button clasp.  As always, click on the picture for full size.

Allergy Free Recipes

Karen just put some our favorite allergy friendly recipes together for friends with newly found allergies.  Thought I'd share them here.  They are all egg-dairy-soy-nut free or have her notes for making them so.

Lard makes some of this possible, and we've already posted all of our rendering secrets.

Of course, like most of Karen's stuff, these things aren't just good -ifyouhaveallergiesandcan'thavetherealthing; they're just good.







Egg Dairy Nut Soy Free

Butterflies and Broken Boards

Happy September!  John is back to school and the kids are just around the corner from it.  Ysabela in middle school (!) and Xavier in his last year of elementary.  Zoinks.

There was a weird happening a few days ago when suddenly a crowd of at least 25 monarch butterflies showed up in the ysabela tree (actually a hydrangea).  I have a new appreciation for those butterfly photos you see because it was really hard to try to capture it.

While I was out there trying to shoot the butterflies, I met the daughter of the mayor who brought the Coast Guard to Grand Haven.  She grew up in the big house up the hill when there were no little houses down below on Slayton.  Pretty neat local history.

More relevant and exciting was Xavier's belt test.  After all our conflicts and miscues, he tested for his Blue Belt.  Did a great job on the form, is ahead of the game on his Korean, and broke a thick board on the first try with a spinning back kick.  Wow!  Nearly as tough to capture as butterfly action.