I am totally in love - and not with my husband or my children, although, they are definitely objects of my affection!  And my new love doesn't even live at Starbuck's or even Sonic, although I definitely have a relationship with their Caramel Apple Cider (thank you, Sister!) and Diet Dr. P with rabbit pellet ice.  Nope, my new love is my router, which, I somehow, after lots of searching for a lost installation disk (which I never found), and more then a bit of grumbling under my breath, used to setup a wirless network at the house - hooking up both my desktops and my laptop so they can all three access the Internet and each other's files.  Which means, drumroll here, I can work and play on my laptop from anywhere in the house (or the backyard!).  Which means I'll be a lot more productive.  Or as Steve says, I'll have more time to feed my scrapbooking addiction.  Well, probably.... Why, you may ask, does a family of four, two of whom are arguably not even old enough to use a computer, need three computers?  Well, the long answer is I need three different Office platforms and two different Operating System platforms for my contract jobs.  The short answer is I'm a geek - a big ol' pocket-protecting wearing, pencil stuck in my ponytail, glasses slipping down my nose geek.  I love fiddling with computers and more than that, I love writing computer code.  Really, the truth is, I am one of those people that loves my profession.  Which is why I say the following with more than I touch of sadness:  last week, I turned in my resignation at work.  No longer will I be Daphne, the full-time computer programmer.  On August 17th, I will officially enter the world of stay-at-home-motherhood.  Now, the truth is, I'll still be writing code, at least for my contract jobs, and possibly part-time at my current job, but I won't be spending 40 hours a week in the office.  Of course, if Abigail doesn't learn to sleep for more than two hours at a time pretty soon, I'll probably be begging to come back to work in about 48 hours - at least here, I could put my head on my desk at lunchtime and try and fool myself into thinking that a fifteen minute cat-nap added to the 4-5 hours of sleep I get constitutes a full night's rest.  How do I feel about this whole leaving work thing?  Scared out of my mind, actually.  I have a million thoughts going through my head, not the least of which is how in the heck am I going to keep up with Gracie's 10 billion questions a day?  But, mostly, I feel excited, and incredibly blessed that I have the opportunity to try this, and incredibly grateful to Steve that he's willing to give up some of his dreams to give this a shot....

Really, there's not a whole lot else going in my little world - Gracie had strep this weekend and Abbie's still sleeping like a newborn - which I'm convinced has to get better at some point.  We went to the water park yesterday and while Steve watched Abbie, I spent time with Gracie in the wave pool, teaching her how to put her hip into the crest of the wave so it doesn't knock her down.  Now that's a funny sight I'm sure - me sticking my more than ample hip into the wave while Gracie sticks her almost-non-existent bony little one in.  She had a ball and was still talking about it this morning!

So, I'll leave you with some of my latest favorite scrap pages - I'll just give these to you tonight instead of pictures:  -  Click on the pages to see full credits...

Here's Emmie jumping into the hotel pool - I just love how her tongue's sticking out while she's concentrating: