Days 196-197/365: Ellie the Elephant

It was Rexy's turn to bring home the class teddy bear this weekend. In this case it was a soft elephant called Ellie. I am not entirely sure of the purpose of this exercise, but on the whole I would have to say that it does not result in a particularly positive experience. After the initial excitement of being the chosen one, the kids always lose interest pretty quickly. This means that I spend the weekend running around frantically taking pictures of the bear/elephant having the best weekend ever! I guess that I should consider myself lucky that it isn't a hamster or stick insect or something.  Rexy loves soft toys but poor old Ellie just didn't float his boat. It might have been because Ellie is a girl but he also complained about her being hard and not very cuddly. Poor Ellie. 

Here are the "happy couple" yesterday (day 196). Rexy went to football practice but didn't want to bring Ellie. We agreed on a couple of quick photos in the garden. 

Rexy humoured me with a couple of bedtime shots. Ellie doesn't look like she is loving the experience either. It's heartbreaking really. Perhaps the stick insect would have been better after all. 

Here she is meeting the rest of Rexy's soft toy collection. 

Rexy left Ellie to make some new friends. He looked much happier without her. 

We had some fun trying out some more selfie shots. This is the best of the bunch this time. I have air brushed myself to the max! This is as good as it gets people...

The boys have new watches. Learning how to tell time has been a bit of a struggle for them but the digital watches are helping.  

Today (day 197) the sugar crystals that we have been growing since Christmas were ready to be eaten. Everyone was delighted by how well they turned out. Roo in particular has a thing for crystals so these sugar versions were very exciting for him. 

Our very good friend Ellie joined us for swimming lessons. 

She is quite the fitness fanatic. 

We took our special guest out for Sunday dinner today. She will be returning to the school tomorrow. In some ways I will be sad to see her go, but mostly I will not. 

This girl has been a pickle this weekend - that is all I have to say about that!

So I got the photos of Ellie all printed up and Rexy did a beautiful job writing up how much fun we had with her. I was very proud of  him. I was however frustrated with how the pictures came out. I am always disappointed in how my pictures come out in print and can't help but wonder if a good old point n'shoot would do a better job. The colours are always very funky but the focus  and exposure is disappointing too. I didn't have time to edit the pictures today and just went to an instant print place but even editing and sending away doesn't give much better results. I will explore calibrating my monitor in the future but it might be a useful exercise to print more often as it is useful feedback. 

In other news, my husband is painting our bedroom. The house is upside down and we are camping on a sofa bed in the dining room for now. He is enjoying the adventure of it. Boys! I am very excited to finally get rid of our old yellow walls as it looked horrible in pictures and gives off an unpleasant colour cast. All of my decoration choices from now on will be based on how it will look in photographs. 

The theme for this week in the project 52 is Light. Were am I going to find light at this time of year? If only the rainbow had occurred this week....