wednesdays & thursdays

i didn't get my pictures up last night since i fell asleep on my couch on accident. oops. so i'm going to flood today's post with loads of pictures from yesterday and today. anyway, i was playing around with panning while emma was riding her bike yesterday afternoon, and after a lot of blurry pictures, i struck gold on this baby (at least i really like it).

{{added}}

panning how-to

focus your camera on your subject that's moving in a predictable pattern. staying focused on the subject follow them with your camera taking pictures while they're moving. you should keep your subject in the same place in your frame as you move your camera. *side note* if your shutter speed is too fast, it'll be harder to get a blur. :)

figured i'd get another shot of a fun hairdo. i modified it from one i saw on this site... which i was linked to from this site. it looks a little on the ratty side since i took the picture after a full day of playing & hanging at school. i just love the blogging community. there are so many amazing moms that share their fabulous talents with the world through blogging! i think that's pretty dang cool.

are you ever too old to fly through the air via your daddy's arms? i really don't think so! although they're getting a little harder on the back. lol



figured it was a good time to get another picture of my other little princess today. man, i still can't get over how much her glasses have changed her sweet little look into a tween-ie sort of look. i guess, according to online dictionaries, she technically IS a tween! how did that happen so fast? stan tells them that they don't have permission to grow anymore. and they respond, "we can't! God makes us grow!" :)

today emma came home from school upset because apparently some boys told her to "be quiet". she has such a sensitive spirit, she was just devastated. so when i was getting my picture of the day torrey said, "hey mom, get a picture of me with my muscles and write, 'don't mess with my sister' on it in photoshop." i just thought it was so dang cute. what good sisters they are!


stan the yard man decided he was going to burn our dead pompous grass bushes instead of painstakingly hacking them apart. after a call to the fire dept to make sure that was ok, he went to town. he looked like a kid in a candy shop setting those babies on fire. ah smell the testosterone... and smoke. :)

wierd science

emma's class went on a field trip to seattle's pacific science center today. i love it there. nothing like checking out butterflies, moving a two ton granite ball with your bare hands and making crazy shapes on a shadow wall. all in a day's work. :) i've got a bunch more pics, but since it's nearly 3am, i'll just get these two up tonight. loved how the space needle was refecting on the water skimmed granite ball. :)
and on a side note... when we got home from the field trip, this little doosie was in the mailbox. gotta love it. would have been better if it were for two cents. guess they had to give me their two cents twice...

{smushed}

emma and i were snuggling on the couch after school today. i grabbed the camera for a quick shot of her cute little face smushed up against my leg as she dazed off into space. i love those precious little moments of blissful rest that we sneak in between the craziness of life. and i've had a lot of those business of life sort of days!

tomorrow we get to head off to the science center in seattle for a fun field trip with all of the first graders from her school. then off to host the online chat at amr tomorrow night!

new friends & annual fun

i met a new friend this weekend! i was out at warm beach camp taking pictures for the first of their two annual women's retreats. this beautiful lady, thelma wells, is the speaker this year. she's got such a lovely heart and an amazing story. we sat and enjoyed a couple of meals together this weekend, and i just love her to death! :) i can't wait to see her again this next weekend. if you're in the area, and would like to see her... i'm pretty sure they've still got a few spots open. you can register here for overnight or commuting.


while i was out getting pics, i figured i'd get some updated high ropes course shots. and you know it's not flattering taking a picture of someone from 35 feet below looking up. so up i went with my camera in tow to get a few from a better vantage point. this was the only shot i got of myself...
today i snapped a quick pic between catching up on projects of emma in her i-wanna-be-like-dad dress up outfit. too too cute!

crazy days!

crazy days

i've spent the last couple of days out at warm beach camp taking pictures for the first of their two their annual women's retreats. i love taking pictures for them, and seeing all of the women that come to the conference. i even got to connect with a friend i haven't seen in 15 years! how fun is that?

anyway, i have a bunch of pictures from the last two days for the camp, but a few i snuck in for myself, too. including a few i took from 35 feet up in the trees on their ropes course. (my very favorite thing there!) so i'll hopefully be getting my 365 pics up tomorrow.

caught up

digging around in a box of old books of mine, torrey found this story about the titanic. i can't remember anything about it, but she's really enjoying it so far. she has such a passion for books. she's always reading 4 or 5 at the same time! :)

i'm taking some antihistamines that have been making me super sleepy. i've had some allergic reaction, that still isn't all gone... and another 8 days on the sleepy medicine. man, it makes getting up in the morning a real bear! i'm going to need a coffee i.v. if this keeps up!

i got some tulip pictures yesterday. hopefully i can get a few up in the next day or two. :)

back to the basics

when i first started scrapbooking (as a kid) i used what i had handy... scraps. scraps from daily life... wrappers, brochures, business cards, dried flowers. in my 20's my roommate, cami, was a dear friend with a degree in art and the sweetest heart in the world. we'd make fun collages out of magazine clippings about life musings and silly things. our prized project was a set of 38 collaged squares for a friend's birthday... entitled 38 ways to forget your age. i wish we'd taken pictures of it. we laughed so much coming up with and making those little collages.

anyway, to make a long story longer, the ever cool emilie ahern, inspired by amazing ali edwards, challenged the scrap review team to make a project out of junk mail. (you can check out the fun pages we made here.) it brought on a rush of all of those 20-something memories of late nights with mountain dew & red vines mixed with the smell of rubber cement. after making the layout for the scrap review, i got the bug again last night to make a few more recycled goodies. so i made a couple of cards and a tag, and generally trashed my room with scraps and clippings. caught the bug, too? head over to tsr and check out how you could win a fun goodie with just your old junk mail. :)
oh! and of course i was going to draw the winner of the tinymeat mini card holder today, too! thanks to random.org, we have a winner....

Alicia Sharp said...

The name of my book would be " A Hillbilly's Life." I was born and raised in a very small town in N.C and we are all the time getting called "hicks" because of our country slang! That's OK tho caue I would not trade my life for anyone elses. I also know what true Southern Hospitality is!!

April 20, 2009 3:23 PM

congratulations alicia!!! email me your addy, and i'll send you off your little card holder!

lastly, i knocked out the picture of the day first thing this morning. it's hairdo shot of emma before she headed off to school. the hairdo was courtesy of the amazing mindy & her awesome blog! thought the heart do was cute with their heart dresses. :)

spring colors

we had another day of sunshine and 70 degree weather. ahhhhhh, spring! the smell of the flowering trees is in the air, the tulips are blooming and we're wearing short sleeves. yahoo! although i hear the rain is supposed to come back tomorrow, but today we lived it up in the sunshine.

and speaking of color... emma's class tie dyed shirts at school today and emma came home and said, "mom, mom! i won an award at school today! i won 'the messiest hands award'!" lol. gotta love it!

don't forget that i'm drawing a winner tomorrow, comment on monday's post for a chance to win the little goodie. :)

{wishes}

we had the most amazing spring day today. sunny and in the 70's. and if you're from washington, that's shorts & tank top weather! after school, the girls and i had a snack picnic out on the grass and soaked in some good old vitamin d.

i liked how the picture of the day turned out with torrey looking like a renoir painting. a cool bonus from focusing on the dandelion. the girls picked all of the wishing flowers out of the yard and blew them everywhere. after which emma said, "i love the blow these wishing flowers because in awhile they'll make more wishing flowers, for us to blow and make even more wishing flowers." a grown up's weeds are often a child's happy little wish come true. gotta love seeing life through their eyes!

emma & her wishing flower. i was hoping to get the seeds flying off more clearly, but i'm sure with all of the dandelions that will be growing from their wishes, i'll have plenty more opportunities to catch the magic moments. :)

oh, and don't forget to enter on yesterday's post for the giveaway. stan & i are loving reading everyone's answers. i'll draw a name on wednesday for the tinymeat card holder. i'm hoping to make a quick album with one of them tomorrow too. i need some updated pictures for my purse. :D

duck, duck, duck... giveaway!

we went to my niece's 10th birthday party today... and much to her (and my sister's) surprise, one of the kids brought her a baby duck as a present! i'm not sure if she gets to keep it, or if it's going to live at her friend's house as a foster-duck. either way all of the girls had a great time snuggling up to the new baby duck.

and yesterday, emma and i wore ourselves out (hardly!) checking out a town-wide sidewalk sales in our town. a bunch of the little shops in town had great sales going. the owner of character traits even generously donated some items for warm beach camp's women's retreat. i also picked up a couple of scarf headbands, a purse, and some oilcloth type wallet things by tinymeat that i'm planning on making into some purse mini albums. i even picked up an extra one for my friends here on my blog!

this cute little vintage shoe card holder could be yours... check out the bottom of the post for more details! :)

i found these tea towels at another shop just down the street called bungalow bay. i loved them all, but only got the blue crown one. i'm sure i'll be back to add to my collection!

then we headed down to poppyseeds, one of my regular vintage shop stops. i picked up a milkglass plate, a hat and some funky frames for torrey's bedroom.

and of course, no stanwood area shop hop is complete without a stop at the spare room vintage flea market. we ended up with a little pink bowl and a mercury glass bird for my kitchen... and a very fun day out with my baby girl.

so now for the tinymeat cardholder giveaway... give me a sec, i'm trying to think of something fun... wow, stan and i are sitting here trying to think of something creative, but we're both coming up with pretty dumb stuff. lol. ok, really, here's what we came up with... answer either one of the following to be entered:

stan's idea: if you were to write a book about yourself what would the title be?
noel's idea: 5 adjectives that best describe you

ps i totally think mine is easier, although stan's is a cooler question.


stan's answer: the exhaustive concordance of happy little accidents
noel's answer: short, loud, sarcastic, smiley, shutterbug

because who doesn't like a quickie

a quickie card, that is

had my monthly stamp club card class last night. these were the projects we made. three quick and easy cards. gotta love anything you can whip up in just a couple of minutes and still have the great satisfaction of making it yourself!

all supplies by stampin up (except stickles used on the birthday card)

my cool new shirt from hoity toity i picked up yesterday. it wasn't exactly the shot i was hoping for, but keeping with the quickie theme, i didn't have a lot of time to take the pic yesterday.

special focus: creativity

my new how magazine came in the mail today. i loved the color and the focus of the magazine. focusing on getting creative & doing things with your hands. there were some great little how to's on screen printing, block printing and stenciling that have me tempted to pick up a few different kinds of paints and go to town.

since my water was shut off today while they did some work on the line, i figured it was a good day to explore some local boutique stores a shop lady told me about the other day. and lucky me, i found hoity toity. they have the coolest store. super cool shirts, jewlery and gifts! and you can shop their cute stuff online, too.

i mean, seriously are these squishy baby heels the cutest thing ever, or what?! i just want sombody to have a baby girl so i can get them as a gift! i just love finding cool locally owned stores to explore. this one is on my new list of must-frequent-often shops!

what we lack in talent...

we make up for with, um, something else

the sun decided to grace us with its presence this afternoon, and the girls and i headed to the backyard to play a little tennis after school. now, none of us are any good. and by not good, i mean really really lacking in the tennis talent department. our triumph of the afternoon was getting the ball over the net four times in a row. but dang it, we had fun! and we do have that in spades (and rackets and flying tennis balls). and isn't that what it's all about? having fun together. so while we may not be collecting trophies, we are raking in the memories.

{happy wednesday}

sassy sweet

eight years old has marked a year of lots of changes for torrey. a new house, new school, new glasses... and a new independent spirit. not that she hasn't always had a bit of that, it's just that this year we've seen the change over to the tween years. she's really coming into her own, and this girl's got a sassy streak. (i can't imagine where she gets it from, she says while avoiding eye contact..) it's been a lot of fun to see, but comes with the classic problems of sassy-ness. when it's OK to be sassy, and when it is definitely NOT ok to be sassy. lol. sometimes you wonder why life always seems to be changing - just when you got used to the last load of changes. but with each new thing, there always seems to be truckloads of blessings that come along with them... so that's what we do. walk, one foot in front of the other, into each bit of change.

thank you so much for all of your kind words yesterday about my friend, donna. your thoughts and prayers mean so much to me. what a blessing!

thought i'd post a teaser from the tsr {the scrap review} review on the silhouette i did the other day. hopefully it's not too scatterbrained sounding. there seemed like there was so much to say on the matter, stuff just kept coming out! lol. anyway, there are more projects & a complete review you can check out if you want to kill some time.

and one more tsr teaser. this was the project i worked on today... turning this into something album worthy. :) i'll let you know when the project posts in a few days.

{pray}

this is my beautiful friend donna. just two weeks ago she had a very sudden double mastectomy due to breast cancer. on the day of her surgery she called in the morning and asked us to pray for her. the girls and i did, and after school i got this little note from emma's reading teacher:

One of our reading words today was "pray." Emma said, "speaking of pray...I would like to pray for my mom's friend Donna, who is having surgery... could we do that?" I was touched. I told her that I would in my heart and anyone who wanted to could in their own heart. That seemed to satisfy her

donna is emma's sunday school teacher, and a walking miracle. she spen 8 years in a wheel chair with a bucket list for the "time left" she'd been given. then, within the last year, she started walking! our miracle girl can walk, even up stairs holding her gradbaby! she has one of the biggest hearts of anyone i have ever known, and makes me want to be a better person.

this dear friend starts an aggressive six months of chemo next week. so today she came by for some pre-chemo pictures before heading off for a couple days of camping with her hubby. we'll do some again when her hair is gone, and celebrate each day God blesses us with her. but i wanted to share this wonderful woman with you, and ask you to pray for her as you think to.


oh, and as a side note, i have a new article out today on the scrap review. :)