Just 1 picture of my baby!

I’m so excited!  She did pee pee in the potty yesterday!  She asked to sit on the potty which she’s done many times before.  Mostly she just sits on it and doesn’t go but I love the interest she’s been showing.  Yesterday, however, she was all business.  The minute she sat down I could hear her going.  I jumped for joy and smothered her with kisses!  Throughout the day I had randomly asked her if she’d like to try going on the potty again, but she didn’t seem too interested.  I explained to her that she went in the potty one time yesterday and that today it might be fun to try going two times (as I held up two fingers for her).  I figured once she went twice, than I would offer some type of reward.  I promised her a call to Santa and the Easter Bunny to make sure they knew how good she had been.  She loves to listen to me talking to Santa (yeah, it’s not my first time talking to Santa)!  My plan is to get her to go in the potty one more time than she did the day before until eventually she is only using the potty.  Not sure how it’s going to turn out, but I have high hopes and a lot of faith that she can do it.  We’ll see.  I’ll try to keep you posted and let you know if it works!

 

Want to make your own storyboard?

No problem.  Since I’m always creating storyboards/collages for my readers, I thought it would be fun to share my knowledge so that you can create your very own!  It’s actually pretty simple.  My recommendations for viewing this video tutorial at its maximum quality are:

1. Make sure the volume is up on the video.
2. Make sure the volume is up on your computer.
3. Change the viewing quality to 720p HD (the first button/icon on the bottom right side of the video).
4. Use the large player on YouTube (the fourth button/icon on the bottom right side of the video).  Viewing at full screen tends to look a little blurry/fuzzy.

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.

Six things I do to every photo!

I watched this you tube video the other day about 5 edits made to every photo.  It was quite informative.  I love to learn how others are processing their photos.  It made me think of the 5 things I do to every photo I process.  I thought I’d share them here with you today (okay so I’ve shared six)!  Maybe we have common editing styles?  If not, maybe you can learn from me and me from you?  What do you say?

I’d love to hear your editing recipes!  Or maybe the one thing you can’t live without doing to every photo?

My editing process below is based on images of people. 

Brightening Eyes

I’ve been using a pretty awesome action from Paint the Moon to brighten eyes in my photos but have since found a great little tutorial online to create the effect myself.  Of course, wouldn’t you know, I can’t find it.  I could have sworn that I pinned it to a board on my Pinterest page but apparently not so much.  Thinking back, I don’t think I pinned it because it was so easy for me to remember.  If I’d a known I was going to do a post on it, I would have saved it especially so that I could give credit.

Where did the weekend go?

I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend!  I had quite an eventful one!  The hubby and I took Alivia to York’s Wild Kingdom in York, ME with her Auntie Nancy, Uncle Erik, and friend Mackenzie on Saturday, Auntie Gina’s on Sunday, and Nana’s on Monday!  By Monday afternoon, Livi* was asking for nothing more than to go home.  I’ve noticed that as much as Livi enjoys getting out of the house and socializing that she gets over stimulated after awhile and wants to be left alone.  Oh the tribulations of being an only child!  Poor baby!  I don’t blame her though, her mama is the same way!  With that said, we took her home and she relaxed with Daddy for the rest of the day while I went to the mall with my mom and started Livi’s Fall shopping!  I say started because I still have shoes, outwear, and some hair accessories to purchase.  Lucky for me I love shopping (I sort of have a serious shopping problem addiction) or I might find this to be overwhelming! 

Desktop background being removed?

I’m going to share a little secret with you, well for all the MacBook users out there!  Apparently there is some type of glitch in the system that removes your desktop background every time you restart/shut down and log back onto your computer.  I was a little disappointed to say the least especially seeing as I just bought the new MacBook Pro Retina and wanted to personalize my desktop with a picture of my baby girl!  You figure you pay that much money for something that a simple thing like being able to customize your desktop background should work!  After trying many different things to resolve the issue with Apple Support on the phone, something finally ended up working!  So here’s the fix:

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 Party!

Alivia’s birthday was yesterday!  She turned two years old at exactly 8:58 pm!  I can’t believe two years have gone by!  It’s like I was just mixing formula for her bottle, turned around, and a little girl took my baby’s place!  As much as she’s changed, if I look hard enough, I can still see the newborn in her.  Her eyes and nose are quite the same, only a bit larger.  Her mouth is the only thing that has really changed.  Although the shape remains the same, her lips have become fuller.  And the shape of her face that was once a tiny round circle has become slightly more defined around the jaw line!  And these are just her physical differences.  I could write a book about how much she has developed mentally!  It’s crazy really! 

Getting my craft on!

I have a little treat for you guys today!  I’ve been crafting all weekend (you know in between changing diapers, giving baths, washing clothes, cleaning out my closet, making returns, etc.) and you can say I’m rather exhausted!  It was so much fun though!  Crafting I mean.

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?

Intermittent Exotropia Update

First, if you unfamiliar with Alivia’s Intermittent Exotropia, you can find some previous posts I’ve published about it HERE.  

It’ll be about two months that we’ve been patching Livvy’s strong eye to treat her Intermittent Exotropia and she’s been tolerating it fabulously!  We started out with around 25 – 30 minutes and are currently patching for about an hour now!  When I first started patching I was noticing her eye deviate a lot less.  At around the month and a half mark, however, I started to see it deviating more frequently.  Not quite as frequent as when we weren’t patching at all but never the less, more frequent.  In the beginning I was hopeful that the patch was going to be a successful treatment but now I’m not so sure. 

Getting to know me…

I thought it might be fun to share a few things about myself.  Well, 10 things to be exact.  It also allows all of you to find out if we have similar interests or things in common which is always nice!  I don’t know about you but when I find I have something in common with someone, I instantly feel closer to that person.  It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!  Anyhow, here it goes:

You’ve got me begging… (& Freebie)

Okay, you guys are not going to make me beg are you?  Okay, okay, then, here it goes…

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, won’t you even consider being a guest blogger on my awesome bloggy site?  We would love to have you!  Still, NO?  Than, how ‘bout a bribe?

I created a fun printable below.  I’ll turn my head and you just take it.  In return, though, you promise to write a little something for my readers.  What do you say?  Deal?

New Pics… Esterina’s Birthday!

Go Elena, it’s your birthday!  Go Elena, it’s your birthday!  Well, not really but yesterday was just as exciting!  I made it through my dentist appointment!  Apparently, the dentist thought it was just a fluke that my filling fell out and that it would probably not happen a second time if she refilled it.  So that’s what she did!  It took all of 10 minutes and I’m as good as new.  If it falls out again, however, apparently I will need a ceramic fill which is essentially a crown.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn’t fall out again!  It will cost around $600.00 out of pocket!  Yikes!  It’s amazing how little that dental insurance covers.  I still can’t believe that dental work (other than cleanings of course) is considered cosmetic!  Are they kiddin’ with this crap?  Seriously, it’s crap!

Web hosting + blog registration = confusion

I have a question today.  Does anyone out there use web hosting for their website?  Also, do you register your blog?  I’ve been doing research on these two topics and I’m still not understanding them completely.  Apparently a web host makes your website accessible on the world wide web.  This is strange.  The minute I created a domain name, I was accessible to everyone on the internet.  I’m not sure I get it.  Among providing accessibility though, hosting sites will provide you with various amounts of disk space to back up your content to.  Some hosting sites also provide security monitoring and advertising credits (which I’m still not quite sure what that is).  I don’t know about you but the back up services alone are enough reason for me to purchase services.  Does anyone know if Blogger does this already?  Back up your content? 

New Pics… So here’s what we know

Alivia loves being outside.  She loves playing with the sand, but not standing in it even with shoes on.  We had to lay a towel on the sand for her to feel comfortable sitting in it.  When she got even a speck of sand on her feet she’d demand us to “wife” her feet.  That’s not a typo.  She pronounces “wipe” as “wife”.  She likes the warm ocean water but absolutely loves the pool!  She likes Mommy and Daddy to pull her around in her floatie.  She also likes to lean back in her float just enough to be able to kick up her feet comfortably and show off her pruned little piggy toes!  She loves sunhats and sunglasses and wears them well!  She loves her pink crocs and Little Swimmer pull-up diapers!  Hmmmm, what else?  She loves her Daddy!  She got to spend so much time with him while we were away on vacation!  It was so nice seeing them play and interact with each other.  I love the way she looks at him with such love in her eyes.  You can see that she feels so safe and secure in his arms.  I am going to write a post about this separately because I have some great pictures of the two of them together.  Today, however, I wanted to share some pool pictures.  Our pool in FL was so beautiful!  It was pristine, heated, and deserted (just the way we like it).  Nothing like having a HUGE pool to yourself!  Boy did we pick the perfect week to vacation in Sarasota.

New Pics… More Freebies and a Photo Challenge

Do you know how I drafted this post?  With Alivia in my lap moving around as if she had ants in her pants.  She was grabbing my glasses, playing with my hair, and calling out parts of the face.  Eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, etc.  She has been crazy clingy lately.  I have no idea what’s going on.  She has been crying if I don’t hold her.  She has been getting very upset even if I get up to get a drink, go to the bathroom, anything that requires me to be away from her if even for a couple seconds.  This is like separation anxiety to the extreme.  Now I have to get up and get her some water.  Wait for it.  Can you hearr the wailing?  I can’t carry her with me everywhere, she is way too heavy for her little mama.  Seriously, I’m 93 lbs. and she is about 24 lbs.  Shall I do the math?  She is more than a quarter of my weight!  To say I’m weak would be putting it mildly.  I lack upper body strength badly.  You should see the size of my scrawny arms.  Don’t mind me while I rag on myself!

Issues with Posting?

Now onto more frustrating things...

I hate to be a complainer, but I've been experiencing some problems with Blogger.  When I draft my posts and format them exactly the way I want them, the minute I hit that Publish button, my formatting changes.  When I say formatting, I am referring to the spacing between lines, paragraphs, pictures, etc.  For example, let's just say I single space between paragraphs and double space between pictures (using the enter/return key), then I publish the post only to find it has completely reformatted itself.  Once in a blue moon Blogger will remove line spaces, but mostly it will add additional line spaces between content so that there are HUGE gaps of empty space between paragraphs and pictures.  Then my posts look sloppy.  Additionally, I draft posts that I am not ready to publish at that very moment so I will save and close them.  The next time I open these same posts to make updates, the formatting is entirely different.  It is quite frustrating to say the least.  Sometimes I have to go into that post and reformat it multiple times (usually 4 or 5 times) for it to finally be correct.  I'm way too anal to let it go.  So now that I've vented, I feel a little better.  I wanted to show you what I mean, so I've attached screen shots of the way I format my posts (pictures 1 & 2) and screen shots of the way Blogger reformats my posts (pictures 3 & 4).  Damn you Blogger!