Ear infection, sinus infection, and goopy eye — and that’s just Tristan. Katrina got sent home from a sleepover with Grandmom and Granddad on Saturday night with a temp of 103.5. I knew she felt pretty bad when she wanted to come home. We’ll find out what’s going on with her later today. In the meantime, here are some flickr favorites to tide us all over.
Thrifting in my neck of the woods is pretty bad. The stores are mostly bare except for really bad stuff from the 80s. What we do have in abundance though is antique stores. This weekend a store near my mom was having a groundhog day weekend sale. The store is in an old house and different vendors have different rooms in the house. It makes for really fun poking around looking for treasures. Of course this time my mom and I — my best antiquing partner — were poking around while corralling an urchin who wanted to touch everything, especially if it was breakable. Still, I managed to uncover a couple of great things in our quick sweep of the place. My mom went back through more thoroughly after I removed Mister TouchEverything from the premises and called me to tell me she found something else — one of the many reasons she’s my best antiquing partner ever.
Anyway, Papa is in love with two of the three things that have made their home with us and he wasted no time in using them in some photographs:
I was looking for a vintage suitcase with Katie in mind — I’m trying to improve the dress-up/play-pretend box in our house — and she and Tristan carried this one around all afternoon. The table and chairs was the real score of the day. Papa has been wanting something like the set for a while and as soon as I saw it I took the tag to buy it. Luckily the price was reasonable because who knows how much I would have paid. As for what I brought home that he didn’t like, I’m hoping it will grow on him.
Grace’s post about the 52 weeks, my kid(s) and me flickr group fired a synapse in my scattered brain that said, Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be doing that… So, I thought I’d try to get a shot of the three of us today. Of course, it’s (ice)rainy here and grey so that meant we needed to use the studio. Did you see Grace’s photo? Do you see how calm her kids look. I took a bunch of photos and most of them looked something like this:
I had a vision and that wasn’t it. Oh, well, I guess being a Mama is taking what you can get sometimes. And sometimes what you get isn’t what you wanted but maybe it’s something better and more real anyway. Have a great weekend friends.
Thank you for all the get well wishes. I think that they, combined with quite a few doses of airborne jr. and zinc lollipops, made for a quick recovery. So right on cue as the urchins felt better I woke up with a sore throat last Monday. I was working on the premise that if I denied the problem it would go away but now that I’ve lost my voice the only thing being ignored is me. Anyway, sorry for not popping in here to say hello in a while. Stefan’s family arrived last week for Turkey Day and a certain boy’s birthday so we were trying to finish up a number of home improvement type projects. Nothing like company to light a fire under your rear.
High on the list of things that needed to be done was our upstairs hall bathroom. Katrina was, in her words, trying to swing from the towel bar so it needed to be replaced. We decided hooks might be a better solution since they would be easier for the kids to use plus they could not be confused for a trapeze. But since you never know with these two we decided to mount a board to the wall for the hooks to be screwed to — wood is stronger than drywall. We mounted two boards to accommodate a lot of hooks. To make the whole thing look intentional we painted between the boards with magnetic primer and a topcoat of gray.
We bought magnetic photo frames — these are 3.5″ x 3.5″ — and put a black and white photo of each urchin in one. Then we put the frame on the magnetic strip above where they should hang their towels. I’m planning to add some twill tape loops to the towels to make them even easier to hang. We replaced the horrid light fixture that was in there and hung two black and white photos that Nichole took last Spring. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out although I did say to Papa that if we ever leave this house the new owners will be thinking I was some crazy lady with a magnet stripe in her bathroom. Oh well.
Love this one, even though I’m not thrilled with the way I look. Aren’t they the cutest little shell/rock hunters you’ve ever seen? Back to normal craft-related posts soon.
Papa has started posting some photos from our Key West trip in his flickr photostream. He got some good ones so you go have a look…
We’re in the upstairs hallway today. I’ve had a display of photos in a variety of black frames here for a few years. But, they hadn’t been updated in a while — notice not a single photo of Tristan is displayed. So that’s something I’m working on this week. I don’t know about you but this seemingly simple task can be sort of daunting to me. I have trouble figuring out who to put where and then I inevitably print all the photos I want and then I don’t like the way they look. So, I thought of a solution.
The first thing I did was add a bunch of frames to the display so I could still have a good variety. Next I took the photo you see above. I brought the photo into my image editing software — PhotoShop in my case but I think almost any other image editing software would work. I whited out the frames where I want to add or change a photo. Some I knew I wanted to keep as they are.
After I did that I had a much clearer picture of what I wanted in each frame. The next thing I did was add some notes.
Now I knew that I needed three individual shots of each of the kids, plus one of our niece and one of our good friends’ kids. I also need to find three of Katie and Tristan together as well as a couple of family ones. So the next step was to identify the photos I wanted to include and then to scale them down to put over the white areas. This is really great because I can see how the wall is shaping up, plus I can also show the draft of the wall to Stefan without printing all the photos.
So far I’m liking how it’s looking. I still need to figure out which photos to use in a few more spots — the hard part is narrowing down the photos. By the way, if you look close you will see a few more shots from our recent photo session with Nichole.
So I know I promised you a doll quilt but it turns out mine won’t arrive at it’s destination until tomorrow so in the spirit of surprise the quilt will have to wait until then. But quick, look, here are some photos of my girl in gorgeous handmade clothes!
I’ve mentioned Sandi before but she really deserves her own post. Sandi is the proprietress of a one-woman children’s clothing boutique called Portabello Pixie. Don’t you love when you can purchase items from someone who is just a lovely person? I first found Sandi via Heather Bailey’s blog. Since then I’ve gotten to know Sandi a little bit through her blog and she’s made a few outfits for Katie.
I’ve been promising her to take some good photos for her to use in her gallery of past designs and last weekend while we had the studio set up we took a few shots of Katie in the two outfits Sandi made. Then last week Sandi sent us a new outfit for Katie so we took some more photos last night.
As you can see her work is gorgeous and the workmanship is wonderful too. If you are ever in need of a special dress or some adorable separates make sure you visit Sandi’s blog. I am certain she will be able to create something you’ll love.
To see more photos from last night visit Papa’s photostream.
I’m trying to decide which I like better:
I think the Papa and I make a good team and one thing we’ve sort of fallen into a routine with is photography. He knows about stuff like exposure speeds and f-stops and I seem to know what looks cute in a photo. A while ago I had seen this photo and with our friend’s baby turning one I thought we could try to recreate the cuteness. So today we did a little photo shoot with the tiny model. Here we are set up in the garage with the big background paper and two lights.
We actually did a number of outfits/poses before we let her dig into the cake but this was definitely her favorite part. I’m sure Papa will be posting some to his flickr photostream and blog soon but here’s a preview before she got too messy:
