Parenting Tips you MUST Know!

Three very useful parenting tips when serving spaghetti to a 3-yr-old and 17-month-old:




1. Remove the kids' shirts first. If you do leave clothes on, make sure they are not wearing white shirts that have sentimental value (like, say, a shirt that the grandparents brought back from a trip). Bonus tip: As the Mom, do not wear you brand new white tank that you just bought.
In a nutshell: Spaghetti sauce + white clothes = bad news.



2. Do not give the children ripe, juicy, sweet, delicious, fresh-from-the-roadside-stand peaches as a first course.







3. If you expect your 3-yr-old to eat any of his dinner, do not let him have three bowls of cereal as his 4pm afternoon snack.




Now go procreate. I believe you're prepared.

New fave thing

So it turns out that I have a new fave thing almost every week. What am I, Oprah or something? Right now, this is my new fave. This blog is (obviously) in dire need of some maja sprucing up. I've searched around at how to make my blog look better, but am just in over my head! As it happens, Sharon at Redbud Designs is giving away a Complete Blog Design--something I could totally use!

PS~I totally have to mention that most of my fave things (including this one) are actually stolen from my friend Jamie's blog! I've known Jamie since elementary school (shout out to EBCS!) and we went to high school together. Jamie now lives in Manhattan and is probably the chic-est girl I know, and an amazing writer to boot! You should follow her blog...

Fix-It Friday #16

So it's another Fix-It Friday over at IHeartFaces! I am kinda proud of this edit because I didn't use any actions to aid in my editing! Just good, old-fashioned Photoshopping.



Original:

My Edit:
All I did was:
~pump up both the brightness and contrast
~apply a warming filter
~use the blur tool to get rid of noise and blemishes
~clone stamped under the eyes to remove redness and on the forehead to remove a vein
~finally, used the elliptical marquee tool to select each eye (individually) and pumped up the brightness and contrast again

And voila!

Babies, and Birthdays, and Pets, Oh My!

I had such a hard time choosing a birthday picture for this week! I actually ended up doing 3 different edits, and here is the one I chose:


I'll go ahead and add 2nd and 3rd place for your viewing pleasure:





And now on to the PETS category! Back when our youngest son was 6 months old (almost a year ago now!!), i finally succumbed to my husbands (not-so-subtle) hints for another dog. Yeah, I am definitely the most ambitious mom ever! So here is our Phoebe with Baby Turner:

Fix It Friday

So I'm making brownies to bring to my 10-year high school reunion tomorrow (I know, I just gagged a little that I'm that old!) and thought I'd give Fix It Friday a go during the 35 minutes of bake-time! This was such a sweet little girl!! Click on over to IHeartFaces to see all the entries from people who actually know what they're doing!! :)

Here is the before that was provided:


And what I did with it:

Silhouette

Boy, the word "silhouette" must be French in origin, because that is a difficult spelling! Anyways, when I saw this week's theme, I knew exactly what picture I wanted to enter. This is a shot that was a collaboration with my husband and myself--he obviously took the picture of me, but we set up the shots together and then I edited it in Photoshop. It was taken January 1, 2008, 22 days before our second son Turner was born. I have always loved this shot.

Weeding Children

So I just spent about an hour weeding our yard by hand. This was an hour of bending over in the hot sun, doing really meticulous work. It was slow and tedious.
And it is just like parenting.
As I was out there, I realized that I kept having to step back and look at the big picture of the yard to really see where the weeds were. If I stayed stooped over with my head down for too long, I lost vision for what was being accomplished and for where I needed to focus.
I had a rough afternoon with the boys. I was overly-zealous, and decided to take them grocery shopping at 11:30 (lunchtime), right after playgroup at the park. I forgot the coupons, so ran home first to get them. Holden had an accident in the car while I ran in for the coupons, so that added on lots of time of changing him and cleaning the car seat. Once at the store, Turner screamed and Holden continually disobeyed until I eventually ripped open a box of chocolate chunk cookies and started shoving them in mouths (3 mouths, to be exact). We check out, get to the car, dropping shoes in the street along the way, and finally head home. When I reached the stoplight to leave the shopping center, I realized I forgot to use my coupon. Awesome. I felt like giving up, so defeated.
But when I put the boys down for naps and began to weed the yard, parenting surprisingly bounced into perspective for me. It is in these moments that seem tedious and back-breaking and like such hard work that the work is actually being done to prune and "de-weed" these precious little lives. I just need to remember to step back every so often to not only look for problem areas, but also to admire the strides that have been made. And thank you, God, that I have Jesus raising these boys for me--doing the really hard work and speaking into them in a way I will never be able to!

Yard before:



And after: