You can't help but laugh when you're hanging out with Gabe

I picked him up from my friend's house after volunteering at school today and he ran out to the car ahead of me. When I got there he shouted "Mom, I can make a Y!" I looked up and saw this.

Somehow I became a soccer mom

I hated soccer as a kid. I hated soccer as a teen. I all around just don't enjoy anything about the sport. But somehow...I have 3 kids playing soccer this year. (for the record...still not a fan)

Nathan


Aria


and Gabe


Nathan and Aria's teams are at the age where the kids are trying and have a fairly decent grasp of the rules. Aria even made her first ever goal on Saturday!

Gabe's team though is 3 on 3, no goalie, kick the ball around and try to make a goal for the right team. It's pretty cute. And Gabe is a star. We got a few strings pulled to get him on the 4 yr old team even though he won't be four til next month and he's rocking it.

Except for the whole understanding how the game works thing.

We (and the coach) spent most of the game yelling at him to kick the ball the other way. lol. He'll catch on eventually.

Here he is while the coach is explaining how soccer works. See how he's paying such close attention?


And here's a video. You can watch him make a goal for the wrong side. :D

It's a blanket....with sleeves!

We're big fans of The Big Bang Theory. On the season finale Penny gave Leonard a blanket with sleeves to take to the North Pole with him and when Sheldon saw it he said "How clever!"

Dave and I both make jokes from one liners from that show all the time so in honor of tonights season premier...guess what Dave got me?



By the way, apparently I'm behind the times because a friend came over and was like "Oh, you got a snuggie!" I had no idea this was an infomercial item that everybody knew about. I'd only ever seen it on TBBT. lol

photography book recommendation

I like to keep my eye out for books that the average person who just wants to take good pictures of their family can benefit from. I always recommend Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson but it's more for the person who has a SLR camera and wants to learn to use it.

But today I want to recommend a book for anybody. It will give you an in depth look at 3 easy points that will greatly improve your pictures.

1. Get closer
2. Shoot more frames
3. Turn off your flash

It's called How to Photograph Your Family by Nick Kelsh. It's older and he talks about film, but those tips are exactly the same for digital photography. He has lots of great before/after shots and simple explanations. Many of the pictures in his book were taken by just regular people with a point and shoot.

Tender mercies

I forgot to mention this below, but there were some tender mercies besides my blog that I discovered after my hard drive broke.

1. I run all my photos through lightroom before transferring them to my hard drive. Lightroom automatically saves the raw files on my c drive. I had cleaned my c drive off back in June, but I still had all my pictures from Nathan's baptism forward. Including a few shoots that I had finished proofing but hadn't burned to disk yet. Luckily I had their raw files (one was a wedding!) and was able to just re-photoshop them instead of having to tell them I lost their pictures. That makes me shudder just thinking about it.

2. Our kitchen faucet is on it's last leg and has been for a while. It randomly loses all pressure on the hot water. It had been acting up for a week or so and we thought we'd have to finally bite the bullet and replace the faucet. (they're expensive!) After the hard drive broke it started working again and has been since.

3. Facebook and blogger. The pictures I uploaded there and here are still there. Granted I can't make big prints of them because they're compressed files, but I can do 4x6 prints or photo books without any trouble.

Too sad to blog...but also grateful for my blog

Wow, I haven't blogged in a while. I think this is the longest for me. I have a reason though.

A couple weeks ago Clara knocked my external hard drive off my desk and broke it. My 750 gig external hard drive that held 8 years of pictures, videos, journaling and files. I did back it up on occasion, but the last backup was 3 years ago. Coincidentally, my blog is 3 years old, meaning what remains of my memories of the last 3 years is preserved right here on my blog.

The data isn't gone forever, but it is inaccessible without a clean room. And sending a hard drive to a clean room costs around $3000. (I called several places, they all gave the same quote).

Aaaand...it's gonna take a while to save that. (we don't believe in credit cards)

So, I was sad. And left with no inspiration to blog. Which, really, is totally the wrong reaction when you consider how glad I am that I have this blog. It now holds priceless memories.

But, I was called out on Facebook for giving my cousin Katie withdrawls because of my blogging absence. I was adequately chastened and I'm back.

So...hi! Didja miss me?