Remembering June

In June we celebrated my birthday.  Here's a picture of my dance friends helping me grow older (Amy, Kara, pregnant Christine, Sarah, Tascha, and pregnant me - we're missing Karen from the group).  After a few years of getting together, we finally realized all of us have Spring birthdays and we should just do one big birthday celebration for our Ladies Lunch.  Duh.  We'll get on that for next year.

Birthday cake with my family.  Look at all those candles!

Quality Time cuddling with Mama.

Claire being cute in this video.  Looking back I'm always surprised at how little she talks on camera or just how much younger her voice sounds, compared to where she's at a few months later when I'm adding posts to the blog.  Of course, she talks a lot more when she knows she's not being filmed.
Video translation: baba means pacifier.

I helped with a huge yard sale fundraiser and I walked in an American Cancer Society Relay for Life.  I think as a team we raised $6000.  Pretty amazing.  I made luminarias for both my mother and her mother and they lined the stadium track, lit up through the night.  My time slot was 5AM in honor of my mom's final hour of her life here on earth.  The caption on my mom's luminaria says: In Memory of Carla Blake Paul.  Beloved mother of 6.  We miss you.  We love you.  We wish you were here.  It's a BOY.  :)  Love, Richard, William, Robert, John, Kathryn, & Eileen.  

Doesn't Claire look like an angel?  She's my angel.

Also, I found out my friend, Eva, was taking a course to become a doula, and since I've thought of working in that field myself (and had several friends encourage me saying they could picture me as a doula), I decided what the heck, and joined her.  Rich's mom, Laura, came to town to watch Claire and the two of them had a wonderful time together.  I went to 4 days of classes and crammed a ton of information into my head.  By the end of the class, I wondered if my timing is off for working as a doula.  I'm not sure how I'd handle being on-call and feeling tied down so much - after you commit to a client, you need to be able to show up to their house within an hour of their phone call for the 5 weeks around their due date.  Kind of hard when I take long walks around the neighborhood, or we decide to go out of town at the last minute, or just bundling my errands so I get everything done in one trip - grocery shopping alone takes me longer than an hour.  That and how would I handle on-call childcare?  It would be one thing if I had lots of family living near me.  But, seeing as I don't, having toddlers and babies at home seems almost impossible.  It takes me long enough to get out the door when I feel like I planned my day well.  So, it was an inspiring course to take, but I may just need to put it on the back burner for now.  :(