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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Distracted

Right now I should be cleaning my bathroom.  Right now I should be finishing the brownies for work tomorrow.  Right now I should be putting the sheets on my bed.  Right now I should be getting ready for bed!  But this is what I'm doing...

Having fun eating all kinds of new things!

More swimming today!

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Is it wrong?

Is it wrong that I am in love with something I have only known for a few hours?  Is it wrong that it is my new lens?  Is it wrong that I want to kiss it?  Ok, I guess it is wrong.  But I'm totally crushing on my new lovely, the nifty fifty.  I ordered it on Mother's day weekend.  It was released from Nikon 2 weeks ago.  I finally went and picked it up from Camera Corner today.  And I'm officially obsessed.  Goodness me...I have been saying that a lot lately.  I just can't even tell you how stinking excited I am with all this photography stuff.  I hope if I'm terrible at it you lovely readers will be frank and honest with me, because I feel like I'm starting to get comfortable with the idea that I'm not half bad....ehh?
Anyhoo, I only got to play with my new lens a little and only had time to edit three pictures tonight, and if you're friends with me on Facebook, you've probably already seen these, BUT...here are some fun shots of the Porkchop I took today with my new lens.  I did some slight artistic enhancements in Photoshop on the images to the right.  Can I also just mention that all the photos on the left are COMPLETELY untouched!!  I didn't even lighten them up or anything.  Straight outta the camera.  On manual mode.  Not too shabby, if I do say so myself....

He's eating Cheerios here...not picking his nose.  In case you weren't sure.  :)

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Cousins

Brody and Owen got to play together today.  Here are some pictures from our visit.  I have a few more but it's late and I'm tired so I only have these few to post.

CHEESE!

Best smile ever.

I entered this photo into a Photo Assignment contest today. 
The category was funny faces. 
I think this should win!

Love this!

This one is for you Gobgaw.

I would never actually buy these jeans diapers.
But Jeff's aunt dropped over a box the other night.
HILARIOUS.  Look at those chunky thighs!
Sorry Brody...that seems to be one of the few
traits you inherited from your momma. 

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Just for fun

Played around with an old picture of Brody tonight to practice some new things I learned on Photoshop.  This is still probably my favorite picture of him.  He's about 5 months old here.

The Before and After

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's day to all you daddy's out there.  :)
Here are a few pictures of the highlights of our weekend...

We had dinner at our house with Jeff's parents, my parents, and Jeff's sisters family.
This was the only pic I took and there's not even a father in it!
Oh well, it's still a cute shot of Grandma V and the B-man.


The yummy dessert I made.  DELISH!

Hangin' out at home.





Brody got a new swimming pool today!


Needless to say...he loved it!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Playing Around

Sorry I haven't posted much lately.  It's not because I haven't been at the computer.  I have.  I spend WAY too much time here.  Seriously.  It's an addiction...it needs to stop.  But I am OBSESSED with learning and practicing photography and photo editing.  I'm  having so much fun.  My laundry and house cleaning are being neglected, however.  And that's not a good thing.  Anyway...I'm rambling now.  I would like to say that I am now officially taking pictures on FULL MANUAL MODE people.  That probably doesn't mean much to many of you, but I'm super proud of myself for FINALLY learning it.  I started taking pictures with my new camera in February and I was always on auto mode.  The pictures were still pretty good, but I know that any great photographer will tell you to get the heck off of auto!  Pictures are so much better, crisper, sharper, everything on manual mode.  So, I took a baby step and changed the dial to A for Aperature priority.  Which basically means, I tell the camera what f-stop to be at and the camera does the rest.  That helped but I knew I didn't want to always depend on the camera to choose my ISO and white balance.  So, I took the plunge a week or two ago and just went for it.  Went for full manual mode.  Which means I tell the camera what white balance setting to be at, what ISO to be at, what shutter speed to be at, and what aperature (f-stop) to be at.  I'm in full control!  I know I'm not perfect at it yet, I'll be the first to admit.  But practice makes perfect, right?  So, practice I will!
I'm also having a grand ole time playing around with Photoshop.  Have I mentioned yet how lucky I am that Randi got this bad boy for me?  I'm seriously having so. much. fun. with it.  I am in luuuuuuuurve!  Here are some fun shots I took today of the B-man.
I know my ISO was set a notch too high, but I liked this shot anyway.
I applied a "Velvet Cream" PS action I downloaded.

With "Velvet Truffle" PS Action

With "Old West" PS Action at a really low opacity %.

And a couple other randoms from the last week or two. 
These are SOOC, by the way, didn't have time to really do much editing with them yet...

Ceiling fans are awesome!


Loved this shot even though his arm is all crazy blurred.
In order to not use a flash (wich I refuse to use), I have to slow
my shutter speed down a lot when I'm indoors at night.  That results
in too blurry of photos, like this one.  Unless on the rare chance, B is
sitting VERY still....and that just doesn't happen anymore!
Can't wait for my new lens to come in so I can take better low-light photos.
It has a really low f-stop of 1.4, woo hoo!


Hopefully this post made sense to someone....but even if it didn't, that's ok.  I'm kind of trying to document things as I learn them in case I ever need or want to go back and see what I did.  ;)

Also, I found this list on pinterest one night and I think I might give it a go.  Not sure when yet, but soon, I hope!

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

8 Months

Brody is 8 Months old!

No stats this time, although we do have an update on the cross-eyed issue, which I talked about here.  Brody saw the Pediatric Opthamologist, who was very very nice, and said "Your baby is perfectly healthy!".  Which, of course, I believed all along.  I actually wasn't concerned about this issue at all because I believed in my heart that he wasn't cross eyed.  And the doc confirmed that to be true.  Yay!

Brody is one wiggle wiggle wiggle worm lately!  He is all over the place.  Seriously.  I can't keep this kid still for two seconds anymore.  Hence the lack of good pics in this post.  I am not even crazy about the official 8 Month photo above.  I may retake it, in fact.  It just doesn't do Brody justice.  But I have (so far) been taking all his monthly photos on his actual exact monthly birthday, so I hate to break that streak now, but just might have to anyway. 

Here are a couple other cute ones from that shoot, but they weren't the best for adding the text to his onesie...




Brody can crawl!  Sort of.  I kind of missed the exact start of this milestone actually.  It wasn't until my sister pointed  it out to me, that I even realized he was crawling.  Because he has been so good about getting himself up on all fours and attempting to take "steps" like that, that I have just been waiting for him to actually do that to consider it "crawling".  But Mary was over the other night and he was on the floor scooting himself around to get to all his toys and she said "He's crawling!".  I guess she's right.  He gets himself where he wants to go and can move across the floor all over the place, but it's more of a scoot/slither move.  He sorta Army crawls, I guess.  So, that counts.......right?  He still attempts to take crawling steps every day, but has only gone one "step" so far before rolling over or switching back to his scoot/slither.  Anyway, like I said though...he MOVES!  Never. Sits. Still.

This is what happens about two seconds after we smooth out the fabric
 and lay him down for his pics!
He has two new teeth!  The two top front teeth popped in a couple weeks ago.  He was such a trooper.  He went straight from being sick and having diarrhea into teething, so he had a rough week.  But other than some slight crabbiness and a wakening in the night a couple times, you hardly even noticed anything was happening in that cute little mouth!  :)  We gave him some Tylenol before bed a couple of nights, along with a teething strip, and that seemed to help him (at least I think it did...do you ever really know?).  Two nights he woke up crying at about 3 AM, but after some soothing, he was quickly back to sleep.

You can kinda see his top teeth in this pic.
I guess he's been doing this for a while now, but forgot to make note that he grabs for his pacifier on his own and knows how to put it in his mouth by himself.  It seems silly to even note this at 8 months, but I suppose that's a milestone to note, and I never did.  He inevitably will find his pacifier in the mornings after babbling in his crib for a while.  It's cute to go in there and see him grinning his giant grin at you behind the pacifier.


He knows how to say Dada!  Which you already saw on video in a past post.  

He is still a screamer!  LOVES to scream. And is SO loud. 
Where on earth do you think he learned to be such a loud baby??  Hmmm...



He's getting very good at eating finger foods!  This is a very recent milestone.  He actually hated them before.  Hated.  I was getting a little worried actually, because I thought he would never open up to eating them.  But, he did!  He eats his Gerber puffs, Little Crunchies, and Cheerios.  And sometimes bananas and itty bitty bites of anything soft we are eating.  He still also gets his 4 bottles a day and 2 meals a day.  I think I may need to cut down on the amount of pureed baby foods we give him at meal time now though, since we've added the finger foods.  The other night he actually vomited.  Not just baby spit up.  It was puke.  For realsies.  Gross.  Poor guy.  So, anyway, I think I may have just over fed him and his tummy was too full. 

B still does fantastic at daycare and Pam says he just LOVES to play with the other kids.  She even said she has to kind of coax him away for naps now, since he just has so much fun.  I love that.  I love that he loves the other kids so much.  I love that he is going to grow up learning how to play with others.  And that he will always have playmates to learn and grow with.  But I especially love that he is so loved over there.  Sure, I'm jealous of all the time Pam gets to share with my son.  But I know she loves him.  Dare I say, even almost as much as one of her own children??   Perhaps.  But loved, none the less.  And really...that is all I could ask for.  And it comforts me to know that.


Ok, enough about that.  What else?  Hmm.....
Oh!  Brody took his first "big boy" bath the other night. 


He loved it.  I didn't.  Gosh those babies are slippery little suckers!  I might even switch back over to his little bathtub for a while longer.  I just don't know if I trust myself to be able to bathe him fully AND keep my hand on him at all times so he doesn't tip over.  Who put me in charge anyway?  Oh wait, that would be God.  I guess he knows what he's doing, right?  Seriously though.  How on earth are you supposed to lather the soap while still trying to keep one hand on your baby?  He sits perfectly fine on his own.  So, it's not that.  It's just the paranoia of him toppling over when he kicks his legs to splash around and lunges forward to get a toy that floated away.  I'm not gonna lie...I should probably have BOTH hands on him at all times.  But how can you do that and still properly bathe a child?  I'm baffled.


Brody loves to be outside.  We go for lots of short walks and we sit outside on the patio a lot.  Brody also really loves sitting in the grass. He moves his feet around to feel the blades on his toes and he picks pieces of grass out with his hands. 
He went swimming for the first time the other weekend.  And he went to his first car show on Saturday night!

Playing with Auntie Rae in the pool!


One of B's favorite things to do!

Brody with daddy and Grandpa Wayne at the car show!

Three Generations in front of the "Green Machine".

I just love this picture!


In case you were wondering why it's called the "Green Machine"!!


And check out these next pics...as if you needed additional proof that Brody is Jeff's son!...
Brody's "annoyed" look at mommy.

Daddy's "annoyed" look at mommy.