School has started!

Alex and Andrew started school a few weeks ago. Daily homework, exams and quizzes to study for, washing uniforms - it all starts over again. I love Fridays - no homework! This year, Alex will actually be getting graded with A's, B's etc. In K-2nd grade, they only have stuff like "E" for Excellent, "N" for Needs Improvement etc. So it should be interesting this year. So far, she's doing fine. She really doesn't like Science, so it's a little frustrating trying to help her study for an exam in that subject. I write up a lot of practice tests for the kids, which seems to help. Andrew joined the school's Cross Country team again. He's also still taking tae kwon do; he got his blue stripe on his white belt last week. Yay! In less than 2 weeks, his instructor said he'll be ready to test for his yellow belt. That's awesome. :) Alex is still doing her weekly singing lessons, which she LOVES. They practice being on stage, and at one point, during a session, her teacher said, "Alex! Stop wiggling so much!" One of the parents said to me she kinda liked the wiggling. Alex just has a tendency to move her hips a lot; if you can imagine a model going through various poses in front of a camera, that's what she does. :)

Lucas turned 3 last month. We didn't really do much, but he knew it was his birthday and kept telling us so. His latest phrase is "What s/he say?" If someone's talking to me or if he hears a line in a song, he'll say, "Mommy, what s/he say?" It's really cute. I need to get a more up-to-date camcorder so I can upload videos easily. Speaking of videos, my talented brother put together this video of visiting the Botanical Gardens with Katie in Chicago. It's beautiful, and it makes me feel relaxed. I don't know why he's not a famous movie director yet. Here's the video: http://www.vimeo.com/1398185

Tomorrow's Andrew's 7th birthday. All he wants to do is go to Chuck E Cheese's. So simple at this age. Of course, it has to be at the Chuck E Cheese that's 30mins instead of 5mins away from us!

I've started submitting some images to some stock photography sites. So far I have images on http://us.fotolia.com/. If you search for the following numbers, you'll see my images: 9018181 9018179 9150092 9233366

I recently bought a polarizer for my 17-40mm lens to use for landscapes and water reflections. I haven't been able to use it much yet, but here's a pic I took of Lucas with the polarizer on my lens. Remember when it was fun blowing bubbles in your drink? Good times...