Wordless Wednesday (sort of)

A wordless Wednesday in Instagrams!  Image descriptions don’t count as words do they?

From left to right:
1st row – Livi sleeping on Daddy (and hiding from Mommy).  She didn’t want her picture taken anymore. / Livi with Nana playing with her toy cupcakes (but she calls them muffins). / Someone bought these beautiful flowers for my sister.
2nd row – My beautiful mommy. / My nephew’s birthday cake. / A lighting fixture I happen to love! (Yes, random, I know).
3rd row – My girl Carrie from Sex & the City (did it really need explaining)? / Hungry hungry hippo. / Patching Livi’s eye before bedtime.

Free collage template (9 photos)!

This is going to be a less words on Wednesday for me!  I’m resorting to my Instagram shots; haven’t been able to pick up my camera in a few days.  If you like the collage below, feel free to grab it HERE!  It’s a .psd Photoshop file 850 px wide.  As a reminder, you just click on the layer named “PLACE PHOTO HERE”, that I highlighted in red, and go to FILE / PLACE to choose the image you’d like to insert in the square.  My template does not include the text.

The Big E Fair!

Sorry I haven’t been posting as much!  There have been BIG things happening over here!  Hopefully I can share some of them with you after the dust settles a little!

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few pictures.  The hubby and I took Alivia to the fair this past weekend!  Despite the horrific stand still traffic, 3 1/2 hour car ride, crowded fair grounds, and cranky over tired children (Alivia and her friend Mackenzie), we had a good time!  It’s amazing how expensive one day out can be!  They really soak you at these fairs.  Between admission tickets, carnival ride tickets, parking, food, etc., we have barely anything left in our pockets!  The poor hubby’s going to have to do an overtime just to make up for the money we spent!  No, I’m just kiddin’ sort of.

Let’s try this again shall we?

Guess what?  I’ll be having a guest blogger posting this Friday from Two Shades of Lovely and I’m so excited!  She’s going to be sharing some great links with you!  If you don’t already know Jeni, I’d recommend hopping over to her site!  Take a load off and have a look around!  Oh, and in case you have been following my The Missing Link posts (on Fridays), I’ll be posting Week 22 over at Two Shades of Lovely so I hope to see you there!

Are you using actions?

Since I got a new laptop I also made the switch from Photoshop Elements (PSE) to Photoshop CS6 (PS).  I was a little hesitant to make the transition because 1) Photoshop was very expensive and 2) I’d grown to love some actions that I had purchased strictly for PSE.  Actions that I hadn’t yet learned how to create manually.  I recently repurchased them on Paint the Moon and am so happy I did.  They work so much better in PS (or I think so anyway).  Not to mention the action selection has changed since I last purchased them and the bundles included actions like remove color cast and remove the wonky colors (love that word “wonky”)!  Today, I thought I’d share some before and after images.  I like to do this every now and then as I know it can be useful (or fun at the very least) to see how others are editing their images. 

Free Financial Templates… Can I afford this & how much money will I have left over?

I’ve been thinking of doing a post on finances for a long time now but never had a spare minute to create the spreadsheet templates that I wanted to attach along with it!  I woke up early this morning to work on them and just finished typing my last number.  I feel confident enough to speak on the subject of finances since I’ve always been great with money!  It started when I was a little girl and would steal the coins from my dad’s end table in my parent’s bedroom.  Yeah, I was a little thief, but soon those coins would add up to $10, $40, and then to hundreds that I would stash under my mattress!  Even when I found something I really wanted to buy, I almost always found a way to talk myself out of it.  No doll, clothing, board game, etc. would satisfy me the way watching my money grow did!  Soon I would have enough to open my first bank account and so that’s what I did with the help of my mother of course!  I never felt more grown up than I did on the day we opened that bank account.

Alivia’s Birthday – Part 1

We’ll call this post Part 1 since my laptop apparently can’t handle editing RAW files.  I’m hoping to be able to process the rest of my sister’s pictures when I get my new Macbook Pro in a couple weeks! 

So these pictures, like I mentioned in Monday’s post, were taken by my sister so don’t fall off your seat or anything but, yeah, I’m actually in them!  I was having such a great time processing these pictures until my computer would randomly shut down when I opened a RAW file.  It was ridiculous!  You can imagine how long it took me just to process these ones that I’ve attached here. 

Truly wordless; imagine that!

Child Photography (Are you editing faces)?

I have a question?  How do you edit your photographs of children?  Do you touch up faces?  If so, how much?  Sometimes I edit without thinking.  In this case, I had edited a picture of a child where I removed all blemishes from their face.  To me, a blemish is equivalent to food crumbs, dirt, bruises or cuts/scrapes which I’d also remove assuming it didn’t fit into the picture.  In other words, if I caught a picture of a child eating birthday cake and then removed all evidence of food from their mouth, it wouldn’t be quite as interesting.  Another example would be if I caught a picture of child crying who fell down and was lifting their pant leg up to see their boo boo but then I removed all evidence of the cut/scrape, it wouldn’t really make any sense now would it?  It’s like I’m removing half the story.  In this particular case, however, this child was posing for me.  It was a close-up of their face with no real story behind it other than “I’m so freakin’ cute with my BIG brown eyes”!  Blemishes in this case were distracting.   It takes someone like my husband to say “do you think the parents would be offended” to make me stop, think, and realize, “I’m yeah, they might find it insulting”! Crap! What to do, what to do?

Google Tutorial & Back to School Printable!

Sometimes I take for granted the small resources that I use to make my blogging easier.  It’s only when I get a question from a reader that reminds me I really should share my resources.  So a BIG thank you to Natalie over at Growing up a NJ Wife & Mom for asking how I loaded a .psd file into a Google document.  I already replied to Natalie’s inquiry but thought I’d share with all of you incase you were curious also.

Happy 4th… (freebie holiday collage)!

Hey there!  I have something special for you guys today!  I created a 4th of July collage!  For my sample, I took pictures of Aliva’s 4th of July dress which, I thought, went perfectly with this collage.  I hope to get some tomorrow of her actually in it!  I’m sure these will be a lot more interesting.  Although, I’m not quite sure the dress is going to fit her.  I’m thinking it’s a bit too small!  It’s a good thing I kept the tag on and have the receipt.  Something tells me we may be taking this back!  I hope not though!  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  I really should have tried the dress on her today.  You think I would have thought of that sooner when I had the darn thing out and she was actually awake (she’s in bed now).  My brain is mush today and it’s only Wednesday.  I’ve been extra busy over here trying to clean the house and prepare for a vacation that we are taking in 3 days!  Woo hoo!  Yeah, I’m a nut.  I start preparing for a vacation a week in advance.  I admit it!  I just hate to forget anything.

New Grungy Collage

Hey there!  Yeah, I’m a little late posting for Tuesday.  You’ll have to forgive me, I went to bed super early last night (which is when I would have been drafting my Tuesday post) because I wasn’t feeling well.  I’ve been feeling super run down and almost like I’m fighting what could be a pretty serious cold.  Either that or I have allergies.  Not sure.  I didn’t give myself the ol’ booger test.  You know what I’m talking about right?  You blow your nose and if your boogies are green it’s a cold but if they are clear than it’s allergies.  It comes in handy when the little ankle biter gets sick.  It’s nice to be certain what she has so that I can treat it correctly.  Anyhoo, so last night when the hubby came home from work (at round 7:15 pm), I took advantage and ran myself a nice hot bath and then climbed right into bed afterwards at around 8:00 pm.  I don’t think I’ve been to bed at 8 o’clock since I started this blog seeing as my nights are really the only time I have to myself.  Anyhow, it was nice.  Today, I am feeling a tiny bit better, but still not myself.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t come down with anything.  I’m already envisioning Alivia and I sick for the weekend.

Quarterly Top 5 Photos

 

I’m linking up the following 5 pictures (from April, May, and June) to the Quarterly Top 5 Photos photo challenge.  If you’d like to join in, feel free to read the rules and link up over at one of the following blogs:

 

- Sarah Halstead

- Ramblings and Photos

- Click.Pray.Love.

 

• Linky begins Wednesday, June 20th and ends Tuesday, June 26th
• Go through the photos from April, May, and June 2012
• Choose 5 and post them on your blog or Flickr account beginning March 28th
• PLEASE only use photos that include your CHILDREN and/or PETS
• Accompany each photo with a short explanation of why you chose it
• Be sure to include the Quarterly Top 5 banner or button in your post and you will be entered to win one of the prizes

New Pics… In love with my Daddy!

My Alivia is so in love with her Daddy!  I’m pretty sure he is in love with her too! 

New Pics… A Pigtail or Two

Guess what?  I finally made a button for this little ol’ blog o’ mine!  If you are interested in buttoning up, feel free to steal it!  You will see it in my sidebar.  The reason it took me so long to create one is because I wasn’t sure how to do it.  I finally had some time to do some research online and found a tutorial.  I would have attached the link to the site, but the code provided was incorrect.  After many tweaks, I finally fixed it.  I’ll try to do a future post about creating buttons incase you do not know how to create one yourself. 

 

On a different note, I just tried the patch on Alivia’s eye yesterday.  It didn’t go as badly as I had pictured it in my mind.  I had this idea that if she saw mommy wearing it, she may want to wear it too!  I actually saw a hint of a smile when I first put it on.  She thought we were being pirates together.  I ran around the house saying “Ahoy mates!”  Yes, it was quite the sight!  She quickly realized it wasn’t that fun after all.  I struggled with her a bit to keep it on, but in the end she won.  She finally ripped it off.  I don’t want to force it too much.  I don’t want her relating the patch to fighting with mama.  I will introduce it slowly but persistently in hopes that she, at some point, will be a little more cooperative.  I’m supposed to be patching her eye for about 20 – 30 minutes a day.  Even if I can get it on for 5 minutes at a time, I will be happy.  In case you are a little lost, I wrote about Alivia’s Intermittent Exotropia in some previous posts which you can find HERE and HERE.

Almost truly wordless and another Freebie

I can’t do it.  I can never publish a post with no words at all.  Seriously, though, this post is going to be a lot less wordier than any of my previous Wednesday posts.   I usually draft my posts the night before but I will not be home on Tuesday night so if you can believe it I am drafting this on a Monday night.  For Tuesday,  I have planned a girls night out with my sister and mom for an early Mother’s Day celebration.  My sister and I bought her tickets to Burn the Floor.  I can’t wait to see the show.  I’ve seen it once before, but many many years ago.  It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. 

Anyhow, I can’t let a Wednesday pass without linking up to all the Wordless Wednesdays out there.

Can you smell the tulips?

I don't usually shoot great pictures of flowers but I figured I'd participate in this photo challenge anyway.  I didn't see anything about how many submissions you can make but when I checked other submissions it looks like only one, so here it goes: