Baby news..

Not my baby news.... but my best friend Telah's. I know a lot of you that read my blog also read hers, so get over there and check out their new arrival. :)

Girls Day Out!

This week has been really busy, so I'm just now getting a chance to update about the weekend. On Saturday some of us gals took a road trip to the Nashville area for an all day crop with area SISters. I have been a member of this scrapbooking website since it's debut last May, and it was really cool to get to meet some people in real life that I've only known through the online scrapping community. We had so much fun and I'm already looking forward to the next one! The only downside was that we were there for 12 hours and I only got 5 pages done. How does that happen?? Anyway here's the rundown on my pages:

First two pager I've done in a LONG time. I'm gonna try to do more of these because I can get so many more pictures on them.

Found a new challenge blog called Scrappin' the Music. Every week they post a song as inspiration, and you use some or part of the lyrics to create a page. This one was based off of Bucky Covington's song, It's Good to be Us.

One of my favorite recent pictures of Natalie. The journaling reads: In 5 more months you will become the BIG SISTER, but you will always be my baby. love, Mom.

Another one of my favorite recent pics. While at the crop, we played a couple of games. One of them was a Round Robin. What this means is that you sit at a table with other people and pass your layouts around. You start out with your own layout for the first 5 minutes. Then when time is up, you pass it. Your layout spends 5 minutes in each persons possession to work on. So when you get it back, everybody at the table has contributed to the final result. Hopefully that made sense. Anyway, the girls in my group did a great job with this one!
I have one other layout I did in another game where someone else picked out 3-5 supplies from our own stash and then we got to choose ONE more thing and that was it. We had to create a layout using those few things. I like how it turned out, but it's still just so plain looking to me, so I'm gonna add a final touch and then post it later.

A couple more pics from the crop: My cutesy nametag for our table, and a group shot of us Alabama girls.


With a room full of scrappers, you know tons of pics were taken. If you'd like to see more, one of the other gals from TN posted a bunch here.

Tons of stuff going on at my house this week..new furniture arrived, and as soon as I get the final touches done in our room I'll share before and after pics. I can't believe how different everything looks but I am loving our new bed!

Today's Post

How's that for a title? A couple of pictures and a couple of layouts to share. So glad I've felt like scrappin' a little.

Baby #1 - Never a dull moment in this house these days. This week she got into a tube of my lipstick. Her first mischievous, big mess, mishap. It was all over her hands, her clothes, and various other cosmetics that she had smeared it all over. (and yes we took pics, but I had John grab the camera and I still had it in Manual mode from where I was experimenting, so they were all blurry.)

Baby #2 - I am 17 weeks pregnant and I keep getting comments that I don't look pregnant yet. I know they mean it as a compliment, but come on people, there's definitely a tummy there. ;)

And two pages I got done tonight. A fellow Alabamian is being jacked this time over at scrapjacked. The first one is my version of her page. And I really am liking the second one, "PattyCake Fun". The Red, Pink, and Black made a good combo.

Ice Skating Party

We spent part of the afternoon at the Ice Skating Rink, for my nephew's 6th birthday.. photo overload to follow..
















A fun time was had by all ;)

New Layouts

I started out this month with a goal of doing one layout a day for the month of January. That hasn't happened. I am feeling better now that I'm in the second trimester, but I'm having a lot of headaches and still more tired than usual, so my night's are sometimes better well spent in bed rather than scrapbooking. Last night I was feeling pretty good, so I got a few pages done.
The second one was for scrapjacked, and the third one is for the One Little Word challenge, using the word prompt, "steps".




Last night I also tried to get a bunch of pictures ordered so I have a good supply on hand of stuff to scrap. I haven't scrapbooked since October, so I have October, November, and December pictures to print. I have over 900 pictures for those 3 months. I'm obviously not going to print all of those and I certainly can't and won't scrapbook them all. I used to feel I should scrapbook every picture, but now in this day and age with digital photography, that is not even a reasonable expectation. Now I just have to sort through them all, pick out the best ones for printing, put them into regular photo albums and then pick my absolute favorites to scrap.
I'm hoping I can get in the habit of uploading for printing at least once a month.
900 pics.
Over 3 Months time.
I guess I need to classify photography as a favorite hobby. Ya' think?

My Beautiful Girl

Just had to share this pic from a few days ago. I love this girl so much, and I can't say it enough.

I've actually been scrapping tonight, so I'll have some pages to share tomorrow. I don't have the energy to take pics of them and upload tonight..it is WAY past my bedtime.

Photography

I've had several emails and comments asking for more details about the new lens I bought. First let me say that I am in no way an expert. Not even close. So if you're thinking about buying an SLR camera and/or a new lens make sure you do some research so that you get the best for your money. A lot of what I have learned, I learned from Karen Russell's blog, who teaches photography and works for Creating Keepsakes magazine. You can also browse photography message boards like on Flickr, to absorb all kinds of information. Or buy SLR photography for dummies if you're really interested in understanding just how an SLR camera and lens work. All that being said, I purchased the 50mm 1.4f lens.

I needed something that worked well for photographing people in indoor setting and low light situations. I also was very interested in achieving a clear, sharp image of my subject while blurring the background so that background stuff is not distracting and the focus remains on the subject. I've learned that these things in the photography world are referred to as depth of field and aperture. The aperture setting on your camera determines how much light is let in and it affects the depth of field. If you Google some of these terms you'll find stuff that explains it a lot better than I ever could.

After somewhat understanding all these things I realized that I needed a lens with a large aperture opening. These are represented by f-stops, hence the 1.4f in my lens description. Most lens that come with the camera only go down as far as 3.5f. The smaller the f-stop number the larger the aperture opening. I know that seems backwards and if you're really interested it's explained more here and here.

That may have been way more information than those inquiring wanted to know, but I have found any blogs that shed some light on the subject (no pun intended ha.) have been very helpful. Here are some shots I took this evening as Natalie learned how to climb on the coffee table for the first time. It was funny because she was so proud of herself, but will obviously be a no-no from now on.

All of these were taken with no flash. It was already dark outside, so the only light was from our lamps. You can tell a big difference between these and the ones I posted yesterday that had natural light from the windows coming in.

2008 and a new Lens.

2008 is here, and as I think about all that needs to be done over the next 6 months, I get a little overwhelmed. But, I know that if I take it a little at a time and set a good pace, it shouldn't be so bad.

Here's what's on our agenda for the next few months.

• Prepare our bedroom for new furniture. John and I's Christmas present to each other was a new bed and dresser. We have been sleeping on a full wave water bed since we got married. It wasn't easy to get in and out of during the last stages of my first pregnancy and wasn't possible while recovering from a C-section (so I slept on the couch for the first week home.) I've been ready for a new bed for a while, so we finally made up our mind to buy one and this (the bed and dresser): will arrive at our house in about a week. So we've got to clean out and purge dresser drawers, decide what furniture is going where, etc.
• Completely clean out and purge our junkroom aka Natalie's future bedroom. I would show you the before picture of that, but I think I'll wait til we have it done and decorated for Natalie, so it's not quite as embarrassing. There is mounds of paperwork and files to go through and lots and lots of other knick knack junk.
• Paint Natalie's new bedroom
• Find 1 or 2 tall bookcases and baskets/bins to organize all of Natalie's toys and books
• Move her new toddler bed and other furniture into her new room
• transition Natalie into the toddler bed
• Transfer "stuff" from the nursery to her new room
• Prepare nursery for new baby

It actually doesn't look too bad all written out, but knowing that I have a lot of other organizational projects on my list that I'd like to get done in the midst of everything else, makes me realize we are going to be very busy.

On another note, I used some of my Christmas money to buy a new lens for my camera. I know I am going to love this lens. It makes it so much easier to take crisp clear pictures in indoor settings. Here a just a couple of my faves.

It also takes great close ups. I can't wait to play some more!