A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

This and That

// June 4th, 2010 // family

Wow, it’s been forever since I’ve posted any update on the family and the latest pictures of our little Lyla Grace. Every now and then I get a question from someone along the lines of “When is the next ‘This and That’ blog post coming?”

It’s usually a way for them to guilt me into doing one. And I guess it worked this time! Thanks Tyler!

So sprinkled throughout this update are some of the more recent photos of Lyla in case some of the family hasn’t seen them!

Life is going well for us. We sold the house, but are in an amazingly long wait to hear if the bank is going to approve the short sale. We have no idea how long it’s going to take, but we should have had a negotiator assigned to us back on May 15th and that deadline was missed awhile ago.

Because of that, we haven’t even bothered to look for a place to rent yet.

Jina is busy with work, Lyla and her new side project: Hey Little Birdie. If you haven’t seen it yet, or visited, or bookmarked it, I suggest you do. She and two friends of hers pass on some great products to buy online, all for extraordinarily inexpensive prices. They don’t SELL them themselves, they just pass along cool items that they think you’ll like.

Visit it by clicking here: HeyLittleBirdie.com.

For myself, work is busy and the photography business is picking up. If you aren’t following along on my photography site, you can find it at MikeOlbinski.com.

I’ve had quite a few photoshoots in the last month, including a birthday party, three kids, a family of four, an engagement shoot. I have a baby shower party to photograph on Saturday and then a maternity shoot in a week and a half for the same girl.

My regular job is plugging along like normal…in fact, I may have to go to Holland in July for a big test on a project I’m working on. A great place to snap some photos I’m sure, but it’s hard to be away from my girls for the 10 days or so I need to be there.

What can be said about Lyla? She is just growing up faster than can be. She’s so close to putting together a phrase that I feel like it’s coming in a matter of weeks. She’s been getting better at various words and have now learned “Hello!” as opposed to just “Hi!” and is using it out in the world when we see people.

She’s become quite the climber and enjoys getting on chairs, tables and our bed.

The photo just above and below were taken on our bathroom counter as she watched Jina get ready. Our wonderful babysitter Shanna painted her toenails the day before so I wanted to snap a few shots of ‘em.

So she’s over 18 months old, a year and a half and it’s been an amazing ride. She just makes us laugh on a daily basis. Her love of Mickey Mouse is a big thing now…not just the TV show, but also some little dominoes, a Mickey book and some little candies that she gobbles up. She just loves to run around going “MIMI!!” for Mickey…

In fact, she’ll crawl up on our bed, grab the remote control, hand it to me and go “MiMi?”

So funny.

For breakfast sometimes we go to Chick-Fil-A, mostly because it’s kind of quiet in the mornings and there is a play area for her. She loves to see the big cut-out Cow in the lobby and goes “Mooo!” when she sees it. Then she waves and says Hi! to everyone in the place, then we eat, then she runs to the playground when we’re all done.

Just the other day she went down the slide in there for the very first time, which turned into about 10 times and we finally had to drag her away

So that’s about all that’s going on with us. Our 12th wedding anniversary is coming up on June 19th, so that’s kind of a big deal. We’re probably going to look for a night away together, because we realized the other day that while we’ve both been away from Lyla on vacations and work trips, it’s never been together.

We’ve never BOTH been away from her overnight. That kind of shocked us. Going to try and make that happen for our anniversary.