10 on the 10th

Sprout is 10 months old. Can't believe it.

She has such a great personality. She's not interested in crawling or walking, yet, but that's okay. :o)  She is clapping, and (almost) waving...she kinda flaps both arms at the same time whenever we come into the room. :o)  I will get video. I promise!

She says "mama", but not always only at me. I know she knows I'm the mama, and that's good enough.

There's a million other things, and not enough time, so I hope to either add more pictures later, or create another post later.

For The Chronicles

(poor, neglected blog)

Here's a video for anyone still checking in!


I took it one night while I was getting ready to make dinner. Sprout didn't want to sit in her high chair, so I thought I'd try an old tried-and-true method of entertaining the baby...pots and pans!

These aren't really a pot or a pan, but the end result was the same. Loud baby = happy baby.

And here's a picture I took of Mookie this morning. I doctored it up with Flickr's Picnik CinemaScope tool, and I pretty much love it. :o)

Bright Eyes

A friend pointed me to this feature on Flickr's Picnik photo editing site. It's called CinemaScope and I LOVE it!
I'm sure there are ways I can brighten Mookie's eyes a bit more, but I am pretty excited about this effect! :o)
Don't expect to see me upload tons of photos just to CinemaScope them, but I just thought this was a pretty cool way to waste some time. (like I need more ways to waste time, right?

Let Me Be Your Etsy!

A few weeks ago, I agreed to go along with the crowd, and make a removable camera strap cover for my new fancy-pants camera.  Tinkerellen thought we'd all want to be like her and make some, too, (she was right), so she set up a kind of a craft-along and said that if we wanted to be super cool (and avoid her crafty wrath), we needed to complete our camera straps by March 31st, and blog about them by April 1st.

I was "do I have to commit to a deadline???" and my neighbor-friend, Kelly, was "in????" so we asked another friend, Emily, to join us for a sew-along at my house one day. Kelly brought (and used) her camera, and took some fun pictures (and one awful one of an unfortunate pregnant lady sitting near my daughter in front of a sewing machine, ahem). There were 3 toddlers, 1 baby, 3 mamas, and approximately 1,349,832 toys in the front room of our house. One sewing machine had never BEEN turned on (and, thus, the user didn't even know how to THREAD her machine!), one machine had some significant bobbin issues, and one sewing machine didn't have electricity run through it at all that day.

Oddly, the newby sewist (Emily) completed her goal (she scrapped the idea of making a camera strap and went with the much simpler bean-bag option) (which was not part of Tink's craft-along, but heck, she'd never even threaded her machine, so we can't fault her, right?).

And after our other neighbor-friend, Angie, fixed Kelly's bobbin malfunction, she was able to go home and complete her camera strap that afternoon (yay for naptime!).

Me? Well, I at least laid out my fabric that day! :o) And then I finished mine a few days later. Even though I followed the instructions (OH - here: removable camera strap tutorial), and I tried really really hard to keep my seam allowance at 1/4", somehow, my camera strap was REALLY snug.

It fits, hallelujah, but it doesn't feel very (tug, tug, shove, shove) "removable"!! :o)

I love love love the color combination of red and aqua, but I don't really love how the colors were combined here. I wish I'd added more reds to the patchwork side. Ah, well, lessons learned, right? Good thing it's removable, because, for all I know, next week I'll want one with blues and yellows! :o)

Honestly, it was a REALLY simple, and VERY completable craft. If I could sew quickly, I probably would have completed it (the sewing part, at least!) in an hour. :o) I know camera strap covers are the latest trend, and if you're looking to buy one on Etsy, but have your own sewing machine, you can TOTALLY make your own! And save about $23!! 

Or you can give ME the $25 and I'll make you one!  Let me be your Etsy, Baby! :o)

Seeing Red

Not that I DESERVE one, but I've been coveting an Epiphanie! camera bag since I first saw one on someone's blog (can't remember who).  If I came across enough spare coinage, I might splurge and buy one. But for now, I just covet.

See, they are LOVELY, and BEAUTIFUL, and NOT AT ALL camera bag-like. (you'll have to click on the link to see a picture). The designer, Maile Wilson, is a professional photographer who would take her camera and "traditional" camera bag to photo shoots, but very rarely with her on personal outings, resulting in a shameful few family photos. She just hated carrying her camera bag! Feeling guilty about so few personal pictures, she started looking around, but just couldn't find a bag that would protect her camera while still looking like a hot handbag.

So she set about to design her own. Three bags (and a few in the hopper) later, and they are hotter than the tarmac at Hartsfield in August!

As I said above, I don't deserve one of these lovely bags -- I barely ever take my camera off Auto, for Pete's sake!

...BUuuuT...

Beyond Snapshots is having a contest and giving away one Lola Epiphanie bag. It's the red one. That looks so soft. And supple. And fashionable. And hip. And trendy. Mmmmm.....yummmy....

The contest is to post a photo that represents "red" to me.  Well, I do love red. I enjoy red. I would like to decorate certain rooms in my house with red. (someday).

But for now, whenever I think of "red" I think of THIS shade of red:

The contest runs through April 2nd, with the winner announced April 3rd. And while I would SO totally love to win the bag for myself (thus, hesitating to tell you all about the contest, lest you win instead of me!), I decided to be a good girl and tell you about it, so you can hurry up and enter, too, and maybe someone I know will win the bag! Which would be almost as stupendous as winning it for myself. :o)

What's "red" to you?