A new home.

One of my favorite friends has been a bit of a nomad. Though she's never actually moved further away than Oregon, because of her career I always thought it was just a matter of time. I hated the thought, especially since one of my other favorites has already gone. Well, she and her husband just bought a house! I'm thrilled for them and selfishly ecstatic that it means they're "stuck" here! :)

Today I got to spend the day with her helping to unpack a little. I put together a little housewarming basket but being the emotional, sentimental sap that I am, this is my favorite. I've loved this quote for some time and this was the perfect time for it. (H - I MAY have printed a copy for my house too!)

I made it in Publisher and just used basic shapes to create the house (a rectangle for the house, trapezoidal roof, and a rectangle and oval for the chimney). I saved it as a jpeg so it can be printed anywhere at any size. If you read my other blog you already know how much I like to do this.

If anyone (cough cough wink wink) needs "artwork" for a wee room I'm sure we could whip up some seriously un-baby like pics! ;)

MIA

I know I said it in the last post, but it's true...  I just can't bring myself to spend time sitting in front of the computer editing photos and writing posts!  I have tons to share too!

Jim was out of town for 6 LOOOONG nights (the longest by far we've been apart in our 14 years together) and I got to experience being a single Mama.  While I dreaded it for a while before he left, and it went much more smoothly than I feared, I'm still very grateful it's not my everyday life!  While he was away we completed several fun projects I'll share eventually.

We've been running around having a lot of fun too.  We've made one trip to Yakima so far to visit my grandparents, we've had lots of fun little day trips, explored new trails, and we just got back from our first camping trip with kids yesterday.  It was so fun, due in large part to the fact that we went with one of our favorite families.

Hopefully I'll get pictures of all of that posted soon.  For today I want to post pictures of our less than successful beach "photo shoot" from last week.  The photographer that we love and has taken all of our pictures has been posting pictures from evening shoots at the beach for a couple of weeks now and she's had me drooling over them.  I decided I wanted to try and gave Jim plenty of warning and reminders.  He's not a fan of my photo shoots. ;)  We headed out and were planning to try a new beach...  it was full.  When we finally decided where to go from there and arrived the parking lot was full.  The man on duty told us we could park in the "upper lot" and walk down to the beach. (1/8 mile doesn't sound bad at all does it?)

We gathered up all of our stuff (blankets, diaper bag, camera, and a light reflector I'd just bought) along with both girls and set out on the path.  It wasn't too bad and when we got down there there was hardly anybody there so we got a little spot all to ourselves.  By this time it was getting late and Little One was TIRED!  She wanted nothing to do with sitting prettily for my camera and was not happy when we took her pacifier.  Jim was embarrassed to hold up the light reflector, he felt bad for Lu and wanted to leave, Stella ran out of patience and we finally called it quits.

I was bummed that we hadn't gotten better pictures, but all was quickly forgotten as we started  back up the path to the UPPER parking lot carrying all of our stuff.  We pretty much got our butts kicked by that trail!  Luckily a trip to Menchies cooled us off!

Dancing

Dancing

Menchies had decent light too

None of them took my breathe away or brought me to tears like Rachel's pictures do, but there were a couple that turned out ok (though since I'm their Mama of course I love all of them - like the sequence of 5 I caught Lu yawning!)

We're here...

I never blog very much during the summer. (I don't clean enough either). We still haven't gotten a new computer so my pics are stuck and frankly, now that this amazing summer weather has arrived we're having far too much fun to clean or be on the computer!

We've been taking family walks, trips to the beach, meals outside... There are many more activities planned so I do need to get to documenting though!

A quick little post about phone pics

School's out for summer and we've already been keeping busy! I was on our computer a week or two ago and the screen suddenly went black. I'm going to see if we can get it fixed in expensively for now, but I think we're going to have to make some computer decisions here pretty soon. We'd like to get a Mac but their pretty expensive and even worse, my Photoshop and all if my actions are for the PC so I'd lose everything! :( So... Only phone/iPad posting for a while here.

Anyway, I've seen a couple of posts lately with tips for taking iPhone pictures. None of them have been too earth shattering but there was one that stuck out and prompted a little experiment this morning.

Because I'm posting from the app, all of the pictures will appear at the end which isn't ideal but we'll go with it.

Since there's no way to adjust exposure on your phone you have to trick your phone camera sometimes. The girls were coloring by the window this morning and I wanted to catch it. So often you go for a pic like this and whatever you're trying to get is much too dark. You can adjust by tapping the screen and telling your camera where to focus. In the first shot I touched the trees outside the window. My camera adjusted for the light on them and you can barely see my lovelies.

In the second picture I tapped the floor in the very bottom of my screen (which would be the darkest place in my picture). When my camera adjusted for that it let in too much light and the picture is blown out. You can barely see the girls.

For the final picture I tapped on Lu's feet under the table. I can work with the exposure on that picture!

Try it out, it's kind of fun/interesting! Have a great weekend!

Father's Day

Father's Day was much more relaxing than Mother's Day!  We did a whole lot of nothing but hanging out - just the way we like it.  I did want to share the gifts we made for Jim in case you missed them on Pinterest, I really liked them (I even shared the idea with a couple of my students and one of my girls made her dad one too).

Plus, we just discovered Apple TV with Netflix and OH. MY. HECK!  I don't know if I'll ever get to watch anything on the TV in the front room again - that thing is AMAAAAZING!  If they'd only stream HULU plus I think I could entirely cancel our cable.

First, I interviewed Stella about her Daddy and I typed it up.  I saved it as a jpeg file and had it printed as a 5 x 7.  I'd seen the picture of the shadow sign on Pinterest and knew I wanted to do it, but we should have started much earlier...  Luckily, the weather cooperated on Friday and there was enough sun for a good shadow.  Sometimes the PNW sucks!

We just got a simple double black frame and framed them thinking he can put them up in his office.  

On Saturday, I had a sample of perfume on the counter and Jim mentioned that he'd like some samples.  Luckily, my little bean-spiller waited until he left the room to say, "but wait.  Mom, didn't you get him some?"  Yep - I got him the guys version of the cologne sampler from Sephora.  It's more $ than the girls, but still a great gift!  Stella gave Jim his card on Saturday so it's not in the picture - she couldn't wait.  So much like her mama! 

The other idea we got from Pinterest was filling empty bottles.  We made him chug iced Starbucks drinks (BLECH) so that we could have the bottles. The printables are made for pop containers so they didn't fit as well as they could have, but still cute.  Both girls had fun helping to fill them.

 Best present of all, just laying low and getting lots of time to snuggle his girls. *Once again, a post with mostly garbage cell phone pics - I can't wait for the iPhone 5 to come out so at least those pictures are a bit better!

Hope you all had a great day!

Summer activity list

I made a list of activities to do with the girls (well, Stella) last summer to hang on our fridge.  I really liked having a list of ideas ready to go when we had a day that boredom threatened to make us grumps.  I tried really hard to spread things out over the 4 days a week that Jim worked.  Grocery store was usually one day and gymnastics another, so that left 2 days a week for me to plan something.  I think we checked most things off the list.

I decided to do it again this summer and our list is already posted on our fridge!

What do you do to beat boredom?  Do you have any fun activities planned?

The ugly duckling of the house...

UGH - I've been starring at this post for a week now.  I just can't seem to focus!  Well, that's not really true, I'm just focused on finishing up the year, summer vacation, Father's Day, and bracelets!

I started this post on Monday and had begun with the story of our house, but I think I'll save that for our House-iversary next month!  For now let's just say that our kitchen is by far the most hideous room in our house!  I'm DYING to gut it, but that's going to have to wait until either we save a LOT of penneys or the market takes a serious upswing!

Our cabinets are HIDEOUS!  I was going to post some pictures of them, but I'll save those for the other post too.  Anyway, the insides of our cabinets are all OUR fault - no fault of the house (except the fact that this house doesn't have a pantry which SUCKS!)

I was dropping the girls off one morning when I noticed Sheri's open shelves.  She had all of these great matching containers that stack really well.  She'd gotten them at Walmart which didn't thrill me, but I decided I'd get over my dislike and splurge on some containers.  I'll need more down the road, but this got us started.  Here are the before/afters of 3 of our cupboards.  I threw away a LOT of stuff... did you know that expired cake/pancake mix can make littles REALLY sick?  My mom said she'd heard of a little one die from it!  Needless to say we had a serious purge session!

L - cereal/pasta (before)  R - cereal/kiddo snacks (after) don't judge for our crap cereal... I'm working on that!

L - cake mix (expired), junk food, chips, bags of beans falling onto us, pasta... (before) R - AHHH...  beans, pasta, quinoa, rice all organized (after)

L - baby stuff, snacks, popcorn, brown bags for the popcorn (before) R - popcorn, condensed baby stuff, coconut oil (after) we even have a little bit of room for some adult beverages now that mama can pick it up with the groceries! (after)

Sorry if it's not too exciting, but I have to tell you it's SO very nice not to open a cupboard door and worry that bags of bulk beans are going to fall out on somebody!

Coming soon:  Father's Day and summer goodies!

* ETA: wouldn't it have been nice if I'd given you the info for the containers? They're Better Homes & Gardens and I think they're called flip tite or something. Here's a picture of the top which is part of the reason I like them. I had to go to two stores to get those and still haven't found the smaller size yet. They must be popular!