Mike and Calysta's Website

Cora just turned 3 months old on August 3rd. She has changed so much! She's such a smiley and lovable baby. So well-behaved too. She just started laughing recently -- and it's at the most unpredictable things. Sometimes she laughs when I tickle her fat little thighs or if I'm holding her hands and dance her body around along with some weird sounds. So I just keep being goofy in all different ways to see if it has that most adorable laughter effect.

Mike has been working a lot lately trying to get a project finished. We're hoping it will be over soon. When he comes home around 5 or 6 we're going to be pleasantly shocked with how much time we get with him. And hopefully our sleep schedules will become slightly more sane.

I've been scrapbooking up a storm. I got through our wedding, honeymoon and trip to St. Maarten in the first couple months of Cora's life. Now I'm working on her albums... yes, she has two. One is a very concise, mostly writing album and the other is a true scrapbook in which I can put as many pictures as I want. At the moment I'm out of printed pictures, so I might give it a rest for a while.

Marian is here working for the summer with Karla doing landscaping stuff. She's become quite brown in the process. It's been fun to get to know her in spite of the sisterly ragging we give each other on a very regular basis. She's so great with Cora, as you will see from the tons of pictures of them together. We have been thinking about where and how to take Marian's senior pictures. We have a photographer friend of Mike's lined up and so we need to narrow down a few locations and outfits and poses (groan). The poses are an issue because I have no idea what looks good and natural at the same time, and so we're going to have to work with that a bit. The pictures of Marian that are in the July 2008 folder (which hopefully you will see up soon) are some practice shots that we took in our backyard. So if anyone has opinions on what poses look good of those, leave comments.

Well we go see Susan in less than a week! She graduates on Friday, only 4 days away!! Then after we see her next weekend Dad will be coming down here for harvest. He might not be staying with us, and if he doesn't we probably won't see him at all. So maybe he'll stay with us a little. I'm a little bit sad that I can't go riding around in the tractor with him like I did a couple years ago. I don't think Cora would really go for it.

Well, that's all for now! The news from Moscow, Idaho, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.