HELLO

Hi. I'm Amanda...a happy wife and mom to three awesome guys. We've lived here in Fort Collins for more than 20 years and are proud to call it home. Before moving to CO, I worked at a city attorney's office, making use of my law and Master's degrees from Duke. After settling in Fort Collins, I homeschooled my three (now teenage and older) sons and was delighted to experience music classes, soccer, karate, swim team, archery, Science Olympiad, First Lego League, parkour, and climbing (not all at the same time!). From 2005-10, I was also a contributing editor for a national scrapbooking magazine, authoring a book and a couple of monthly columns. From 2009-10, I founded and ran the Good Grief Blog. I enjoy learning new things, spending time with my family, volunteering with The Matthews House, traveling and indoor rock climbing.

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Sunday
May132007

Happy Mother's Day!

Just a quick Happy Mother's Day to all! I'm off to enjoy it with my boys and will update later but thought I'd share with you this pic...my Noah has been daily going out to our front yard, to the bushes I hope someday to remove. :) He loves to pick the little blooms off of it and bring them to me. He waited anxiously for them to actually flower and was so delighted when they did. Such a sweetheart!

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Saturday
May122007

Whoa. Scary lot of pictures!

So, I'm signed up to take Ali's "Week in the Life" album class at CKU in Anaheim this June.  (YAY!) For the "homework," we're supposed to take at least 30 pictures a day for a week and journal various things and all that. I decided to start documenting my week today. Dude. We've still got another 5-6 hours of my day to go yet and I've already taken 104 pictures...yes, just today. I'd have taken more but all three boys are currently asleep (unprecedented) and have been for more than an hour now. Look at 'em...

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Aren't they just the sweetest boys with their heads all knocked to the side like that? (Don't worry. I totally pulled off the road to take this picture.) :) 

I can already tell this is going to be so much fun...documenting my week. Also, I just know that I'm going to have too much to say. I'm gonna have to start a computer document just to keep my thoughts for each day because I ran out of space on the form that came with the homework. Cool.

Friday
May112007

A Spoon with Salt in it?

Just moments ago, Noah came into the kitchen to ask Nathan and I if we would get him a spoon with salt in it. (He and Asher had been playing upstairs.) Being as we've had these boys for awhile now and are at least a little bit wise to their ways, we obviously asked him "why?" His response? (You're gonna love this.) He wanted to see how well the killer shark bath toy (a new addition to the bath family) would swim and figured that it needed salt water to be most like the ocean. Really.

Of course, this led to a quick discussion of why he didn't need salt and an inquiry as to *what* exactly he'd been putting in the sink...followed by Nathan and Noah trudging upstairs to unclog whatever it was the boys had put in the sink to "challenge" the shark. Boys. :)

Oh well. At least they were having fun. Actually, the boys and I had a very nice day today. I've been sick the past couple days so we've been mostly home doing a whole lot of nothing. I'm finally feeling better and we *needed* to get out of the house. As a treat, we headed briefly to my local scrapbook store (I had a coupon and it would be wrong not to use it, right?) then to Old Town (the very cool renovated downtown area)...where we hit a toy store, returned some Crocs, got Ben & Jerry's (which we ate outside in the sunshine), made wishes in the big fountain and stopped in a few other stores for some brief window shopping.

Then we returned home and played with some sidewalk chalk and water (Noah loves using the sprayer on the hose) in the driveway...having fun experimenting with how the colors changed when wet and how quickly they disappeared when sprayed directly and how fast you must run to escape being sprayed by a crazy 6 year old with a hose.  

Sigh. Good day.  

Friday
May112007

Kooky.

As you may or may not know, my Asher (who will be 5 this summer) says some of the freakin' funniest things. There will be many here. At the moment, just wanted to share this little gem from the other night. He and Noah were goofing around (as usual). Totally straight face. Ash says matter-of-factly, "Kooky is the Spanish word for funny." Oh my gosh. It's a good thing I was in my office and not right next to him because I think he would have been hurt by how hard I was laughing. I didn't have the heart to tell him anything otherwise so he still thinks it's true. No idea at all where that one came from. Wow.

Thursday
May102007

Imp.

As I'm figuring this all out and thinking of stuff to say, here's a fun little picture I took the other day. IMG_4685-1.JPG Caught this little one getting into mischief as usual but he was just so adorable I ran for the camera rather than stopping him from trying to eat whatever it was he was after. (Most of Micah's mischief, by the way, involves food...he's a food machine, I tell ya...but that's another story.) In this instance, he actually used the step stool as intended...not like the many other times when he's used it as a starting point to climb onto the counters. :) Sorry it's not the best pic. As it was, I only got off a shot or two before he was away again. Love this guy...and look at those cute little green Crocs standing on tip toe. Such a little imp.