Milestones

This past week marked...

...AND...

(due THIS SUNDAY!)

And then here's a bunch more photos.

 

I hope Baby gets his antennae.

 

...Just practicing being the World's Most Embarrassing Parents.

Couldn't resist posting some vacation photos

Alternately titled "Two Matthews-ers, Swimsuit edition."

My sister & I just got back from a week in the Southern California sunshine! (So sorry ladies, no Handsome Hubster in this one). 

Our sweet grandma bought us some tickets to come visit her & the rest of our family near LA (yes, I'm yet another California-Oregon transplant kid).

We drove to the airport in true Pacific Northwest fashion-- windshield wipers battling the rain at top speed, bags packed optimistically with shorts & sandals, and pale legs coated in blotchy self-tanner.

Then we enjoyed six long, sunny days of:

-- boogey-boarding for hours (and the resulting traumatic sunburns),

(look! apparently I run like a raptor too) & (I hope Kelsey's okay with her butt on my blog) ('cause I know YOU guys are) (wink wink)

-- visiting with our uncle's family and soaking up all the cousin love we possibly could absorb,

got to see our awesome grandad on Father's day! Schweet. (In other news, B.F. meter has bumped up to a 6.25)

-- doing rascally things like taking a tour of all the nearby In-n-Outs at 1AM, and inventing a suuuuper mature "game" with my grandma's bathroom scale: how much weight can you lose by going to the bathroom? Kelsey won, with 4 POUNDS LOST in one... "sitting" (her strategy involved lots of water, then lots of coffee).
(Sorry. There's another "TMI" tag & "things that happen in the bathroom" tag for the tally.)
(My grandma didn't know we were playing this game. Now she does... Hi, Grandmom.)

-- and last but not least, somehow convincing our 70-year-old grandma to try boogey boarding.

Have I mentioned that summer is my favorite thing in the universe? Just the smell of sunscreen makes me giddy.


(Next up: part two of The Story of Hubster & Me, as told by Mr. Matthews-er himself!)

Phone personality test

Do you ever wonder how people would judge you if they went through your phone photos? For instance, what kind of person do you think would snap pictures of:

Creepy figurines?

My favorite part is that they capitalized "Special."

Friendly pink balloons?

A very mysterious mystery girl, who appears to be so hungry that she wants to lick her dino tattoo and then eat the phone?

A dirty Easter card?!

Wait... is that a pile of...... CPR PRACTICE BABIES?

 
And then this handsome fella who appears quite concerned about the whole situation?

Yeah, I have no idea who would want to document all those 'special moments' either. Noooo idea.
(Care to share yours?)

Stalking bees

Nature is on crack right now, and I'm totally getting a second-hand high off of it. I love it.

This weekend was so beautiful I had no choice but to go outside and play with my camera. Nothing like documenting plants in all their flamboyant reproductive glory!

OBSCENE, isn't it?

And then they've got all these bees up in their business:

(Awarding myself 10 points for not saying buzziness.)

Soon I'd become obsessed with photographing bees. This was only made possible with the help of my zoom lens, because bees make me scream like a little girl.

Nothing like being wayyy zoomed in on a little bee, and then having it fly STRAIGHT TOWARDS YOUR FACE and shrieking like a seventh-grader on helium and almost dropping the camera and startling an old couple walking by hand-in-hand.

(Although this artsy abstract shot came from one of those instances:)

One more mouse-eye-view photo just for good measure: 

And since it's started pouring rain in the time it took me to load these photos, looks that will have to do for now. Oh, Oregon.

Surf & Snow

First of all: Want every phone picture you take to look EPICAL? There's an app for that.
Should I feel bad that this Hipstamatic app was 50% of why I replaced my old dead phone with an iPhone? Meh. Bygones.

Anyhoo, welcome to Hipstamatic-opolis (AKA the first post after I've become totally addicted to taking pictures with my phone).

{click to zooooom}

The little sister & I road-tripped ourselves to the coast on a last minute whim. Luckily, all the hotels we tried calling (minutes before we left) were booked, and I say "luckily" because we ended up finding this awesome little bed & breakfast!

Not only was it slightly cheaper than the hotels we'd been looking at, but the owner Eileen offered that we could come downstairs into the kitchen and eat the ice cream in the freezer whenever we felt like it.

Never again, Best Western. Never again.



There were plenty of classy books in our room, but we found the juicy stuff:

I stayed up to 3AM reading that entire damn Elvis book.

The next morning, our homegirl Eileen cooked us this DAAANK breakfast. And by daaank I mean poached eggs, bacon, extra-crunchy hashbrowns, coffee, juice, and two pieces of french toast each. Can I just say:

We made it fit.

And, as promised:
HIPSTAMATICOPOLIS!
(You may have previously heard it called Newport, Oregon.)

To make this day even better, we randomly ran into Jason's sister, Sammie! What a happy coincidence. (At first I tried to write koinky-dink coweenky-deenk cowinky-dink but as you can see, there's just no way to spell that correctly. I'll keep working on it and get back to you.)

And where was Jason this whole time, might you ask? Happily skiing with our pal Kody, with whom he has a flourishing bromance. Seriously, they have a history. Our wedding photographer snapped this shot of Kody trying to steal him away before the ceremony.

Sure enough, at about 3PM Kelsey got a text from Kody saying,

"By the way, I'm taking a nap with Jason right now.

Tell April." 

Apparently they laid down in a corner of the ski lodge, on the floor, and used their boots as pillows. Those two and their curly-haired camaraderie... it's pretty cute.

Thrift Therapy

I recently made a discovery that changed my life.

Goodwill sells randomly-colored coat hangers for 99¢ a dozen.

(And I realize they're just going to get reshuffled, but I couldn't help myself:

...then I re-randomized them, because I couldn't figure out how to get rainbow-organized hangers to mesh with a rainbow-organized closet.)

While my pal Kanette and I were at Goodwill, the coat hangers (and the atypical Oregon sunshine outdoors) inspired me to go on a spring-colored frenzy:

These three things were my sister's birthday presents (lucky shmuck). As far as I can tell, everything is serious vintage status. The shirt's tag is yellowed and totally faded, the cutesey drink coasters (6 of them) were still in their original packaging, and the rainbow lace belt has $*#% glitter on it. Enough said.

And the rest was mine. Damn, I love that soy-sauce spoon thing. This super-lucky Goodwill trip has me seriously considering opening an Etsy shop...

P.S. Jason was totally cool with me bringing home twenty plastic pink poppies. He rocks. However, when I texted him a shot of this mustard velvet chair, I found the limit to his tacky tolerance. The way he oh-so-delicately tried to tell me that it made him gag was pretty hilarious.

It's my baby sister's birthday.

Except, not so baby. Eighteen?!

She means the world to me, and it broke my heart to move off to college and leave her at home five years ago. Now that she's a UO Duck, we finally get to live in the same city again! It's such a trip living here together, without our parents, as adults-- it's like a sleepover on steroids.

She's grown from a red-headed, stubborn, adorable, prodigal grade-skipping genius kid who HATED to have her picture taken...

...to a red-headed (with platinum and pink streaks), stunningly gorgeous, go-getting, super-talented woman (woman!!) who's totally up for letting me do two-hour photoshoots in the park.

I'm so proud of her. She's a loyal and supportive therapist to all her friends, a busy little bookworm, a bold & brazen fashionista, and a total weirdo who can crack me up like no other.

I love you beebsh!!

Well, color me amazed.

A tiny piece of heaven snuck out last night.
Threw quite the little party.

{You know the drill-- click to zoom.}

People were literally pulling their cars over to the side of the road to just sit and look at it. A man saw me taking pictures, and handed me his business card so I could email them to him.

I couldn't decide whether I should keep taking pictures, or just plop down in the muddy grass and take it all in. So I did a little bit of both.

     Dear Heaven,

        Applause.

        Love, 

        Eugene, OR

SNÖ!!

I'd be a bad, bad blogger if I didn't share some Sveedish Snö pictures with you guys. (Yes, that's really how they say 'snow.' We saw it written in a snowdrift on one of our walks and I almost peed from excitement over the Nordic-ness of it all.) (No, it wasn't written with pee.) (Although making the 'ö' dots would have required some serious talent.) (Way to start off a blog post, April.)

Apparently, snow rarely sticks in Southern Sweden... so when it dumped powder for twelve days straight, HOLEEE SNOTSICLES. It thrilled our socks off.

I'm refraining from typing a ': )' as the caption for every single image below.

{click to zoooom}

Snögåsbord.

Snow is one of my favorite foods. Seriously. It doesn't quite beat out peas or salsa, but it's up there. This has been limiting how long I stay outside because I CAN'T NOT EAT IT. I've been stuffing myself silly, and then running inside, shivering with bright red hands. It's worth it.

I just want to plop down on one of these benches and bury my face in the table.



Those of you who know Jason can imagine he's up to his ears in excitement over this wintry weather. When we're walking somewhere, about every ten minutes he'll kick up some powdery snow off the side of street, chuckling, "It's so FLUFFY!!" He says those exact three words, every time. (Alllllmost makes me want to move to Colorado, just so I can see this more often. Almost.)

Also: The cathedral produced some WICKED, SEVEN-FOOT ICICLES. There's warning tape strung up all around its perimeter to prevent human ice-kabobs.

WARNING: STAY CLEAR, LEST YE BE SMOTE BY CHURCHSICLES (translation)

Crypts & Christmas Carols

We have only four days left in Sweden! It's making me feel very nostalgic about our stay here, so I feel like I owe 'our' little town of Lund some airtime. I was flipping through all the pictures we've taken, and one building showed up over & over.

(cheater alert! My camera couldn't 'zoom out' enough to capture the first picture, so I snagged it from here.)

(click to zoom)

Lund Cathedral is the oldest church in Sweden; built in 1100 AD! Even the Vikings were still around at that time, amigos. Although, it was at the very end of their era. (Huh, I wonder if those two things correspond.) (Turns out, they do. I looked it up.) (Can you imagine Vikings in church?!) (But... who else could have lifted all the huge stones to build it?) (GACK. Parenthetical thought overload.)

Jason & I had a good chuckle over how tiny its windows are. Even with eight foot thick walls, there were no windows wider than about one foot. In other words, they had zero faith in their engineering skills in 1100. And that's probably a good thing.



When you go inside, there's about as much light as you'd expect from 12-inch windows, but thanks to all the candles it smells like a giant birthday party. Nice planning, 1100 A.D. designers.

No ancient Cathedral would be complete without a crypt, and Lund Cathedral didn't disappoint. You can see Jason on the steps below, descending into its crypty depths... and check out the weird, sunken-eyes-in-the-back-of-its-head column guy! Fabulous.

Last Sunday, Jason & I went to a small party at his professor's house. He made us some hot "gluhwein," which is the German version of glögg!! (Exactly the same thing, only without any sugar added). Afterwards, we traveled through the snow to the cathedral and listened to the University choir sing Swedish Christmas carols. It was a very pleasant (if not slightly heretical) thing to do with a belly full of gluhwein. The hard stone walls gave their voices a beautiful echo, and when the organ chimed in for a few songs it just filled my soul right up. A lot of places in Europe have a 'timeless' feel to them, but for me, that night took the cake.