Bath Time!

Let me tell you, it is SO hard to get decent lighting in a bathroom with no windows to get good bath time shots! I tried using my digital flash, and it just whited everything out completely. So then I had the ingenious idea to turn the flash backwards and the lighting was almost PERFECT! This will prove to my advantage in indoor shooting from now on.

Welcome

HOORAY!

Flower Power

So I'm revamping my photoblog, and I've put together a couple of options here. I already posted the first one, but I'm not sold on it yet. Which one looks better? Any opinions would be appreciated. By the way, these GORGEOUS daisies were brought to me by my AMAZING husband for Valentine's Day- my favorite flower. I had to take some pictures of them while they were fresh. Four flowers for four Valentines we've shared as a married couple. Anyway- can't decide which one is better, so now everyone else can decide for me! If you want to see the rest of the flowers I shot, I posted them on chelseasattic.blogspot.com. :-)


And my children, as always. Linus is finally starting to look like he wants to move- he's almost rolled over a couple of times and he's almost got his legs underneath him while he's on his tummy. It's about darned time! He's only nine months old. :-) Hopefully by his ten month birthday he'll actually be making progress around a room. I put a basket of toys in front of him while he was on his stomach this morning and he grabbed the edge of the basket with both hands and pulled with all his might, but he couldn't get himself pulled up. Finally I sat him up and he happily emptied the basket after that.
Chloe thought the flowers were as pretty as I did. She wasn't quite as gentle with them, but we can't all be perfect. And she also figured out that my name is Chelsea today and spent the morning calling me "Shoo-see" while I repeatedly told her to call me "Mommy". She thought it was hilarious. Oh, toddlers...

Good news!

Many beads of sweat on my part and a new hard drive later, we have a healthy computer again and have recovered all of our missing photos (and music and home videos)! After I clean my house tonight, my next project is GETTING ALL THESE ONTO HARD COPIES!! Never again will I let it build up that bad before I do something about it. I think I owe my father-in-law and his buddy from work, who got everything fixed for us, my LIFE! Seriously. It was touch and go there for a while...
So my plan to "build my portfolio" (in photography) has sort of gone cold for a while. I had it in my head that people are dying for this sort of work, but the reality is that the economy is bad, all my friends are just as poor as me, and getting family photos from an amateur is not a priority in many peoples' lives. Granted, I really haven't done much advertising, and after a creepy experience with a craigslist contactee, I'm not really sure how to go about that in a SAFE, non-threatening or pushy way. In the meantime, as my subject list has come to a stand-still, I've resorted to my children once again. And I think I might try this I Heart Faces thing out for kicks, it looks like fun! Thanks, Katie, for sharing the idea. :-) So enjoy yet another set of shots of my two lovely children, from a mother who has the biggest "mommy goggles" in the world when it comes to pictures of her kids.
PS- Call me a trend-freak, I know, but after mentally scoffing at every little boy I saw with the "fo-hawk" (is that even how you spell it?), I broke down and had to try it on my little boy at least once. Opinions anyone?



Also, every night both Linus and Chloe get a dance with Daddy before they go to bed. Chloe is such a Daddy's girl, it's not even funny. She hardly cuddles with me ever, but get her to dance with her Daddy and she nestles her head right into a cozy spot on his chest, tucks her arms in, and she's set to just lie there all night if she could. Here's a couple memories to share. :-)

A sick computer

Our computer yesterday all of a sudden would not let me boot up. Bad news bear, I know. A blue screen that seemed to have a pageful of pertinent information on why it wasn't booting up would flash across the screen for about point two seconds and then disappear, giving me time to catch about two words before it was gone, and then a black screen would appear saying that the bootup failed and what mode would I like to try to restart it in? I chose every single one and it never started up, just kept going through the same blue screen/black screen cycle. Craig's dad brought it to work with him today to see if a friend of his could look at it for us, but I was almost in tears last night thinking about all the pictures, starting from when we bought our camera the Christmas we got married, through two newborns and life leading up until now, all the home videos from about two years, and all the music I've purchased on that computer that I HAVEN'T BACKED UP that could potentially be lost. I didn't even print pictures to start Linus's scrapbook! I have very few pictures on our desktop, and some videos on our camera we haven't downloaded yet, and aside from the ones in Chloe's birthday slideshows/ first year scrapbook, those are the only outside copies we have. Luckily I updated my iPod the night before this happened, so all my music is there, but if I lose those pictures I will be quite sad.
Just thought I would let everyone know. Wish I wasn't so dang dependent on a stupid computer...

These Boots Were Made for Walking...

...And that's just what they won't do. I received these ADORABLE pink cowboy boots from a friend who's daughter had grown out of them, and Chloe hates them. Everytime I try to put them on her, she just says "No boot! No boot!" and won't walk unless I help her. We're trying them again today and I think she'll get used to them if I just let her walk around the house in them...wish us luck.

Yowzers!

Right after I dropped Chloe and Linus off at Grandma's house this morning, I was talking to Grandma for just a second when out of the corner of my eye I see Chloe slip on the stairs she was playing on and smack her face into the steps. She came up screaming and holding her mouth (which she often does, even if she doesn't hurt her mouth), but when we brought her into the kitchen, she was bleeding quite a bit out of her mouth. We located the owie: she had bit pretty hard right into the tip of her tongue. We had a hard time getting her to not curl her tongue in so Grandma could put a little pressure on it with a paper towel to get it to stop bleeding, but finally the bleeding ceased a little and she permitted us to view her tongue as she sheepishly stuck it out of her mouth through sobs and big fat tears. This picture was taken this evening about 7 or 8 hours later, but it still looks yucky.
The picture doesn't do it exact justice, but there's a good chunk of tongue flapping in the wind. From what I was told by a nurse, however, anything in the mouth heals quickly, and she was happy and able to eat pretty much just fine the rest of the day, so we didn't take her in to the doctor or anything.
This has been an interesting week for both our kids. Linus has had very icky poopy diapers for about the last month or so, maybe not quite that long, but close to it. As a result he's had a nasty diaper rash to accompany it. He was soiling about 7-10 extremely foul diapers a day, and Craig and I didn't think that was quite normal. So with the idea that it might possibly be something he was eating, like perhaps some type of allergy, I took him to the doctor just to be sure. She didn't run any tests or anything, gave me a couple of tips for the diaper rash, and instructed us to go ahead and take out wheat and dairy from his diet. Celiacs disease is a risk because it is in the family (which concerns gluten), which is the reason for both the wheat and the dairy. It's been one day so far and I actually changed two diapers today that were only wet, which I haven't done in a long time. However, I'm not betting on anything. It could be a number of different reasons and factors for bad diapers or good ones, so we'll do this for a couple of weeks and see what happens, and if it clears up, I'll introduce one or the other back into his diet and see what happens. I'm not too concerned about it being Celiacs disease- it seems like a major symptom of that at his age would be problems eating and problems putting on weight, and since he's not quite 8 months and 23 lbs, I'm fairly sure that's not an issue. But we'll see how it goes.
Other than that, life is busy, and good! Craig started back in school this week and I've taken on a number of guitar students and even a violin student (go figure, I went to school as a vocalist!). Still looking for people to take pictures of...and dreaming of becoming the next Ansel Adams in the meantime (yeah right!).
Love to all