Monday, December 22, 2008

Imagination














Every year we usually do Santa Claus pics at the mall. But when Santa sees a flock of girls coming at him all at once he usually gets the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on his face, so we thought we'd spare him this year! We found this Santa throne in the gym where our church meets, so I convinced Daddy he needed to play Santa this year.




























These girls crack me up! They love to play "office" or "school." I had to take a pic of their imaginations at work creating offices out of what they have available to them. Notice the old coffee cups, and later they even added a bowl of candy. Because you know, no secretary's desk is complete without coffee and candy!















This last one is my baby Hope. She has the greatest imagination of them all. Usually she's Shirley Temple, or Curly the Cowboy from Oklahoma. Lately she likes to be a baby named Chocolate Bar. Yep, she's my kid alright! In this pic she's doing what all kids have done at some point or other, turning a cardboard box into something useful. In this case it's a magical barn. (Please ignore the finger nail polish mural in the background!)
When my sister and I were kids we actually built an entire Barbie town in the front room made completely out of boxes. Even though we were desperately longing for the four story Barbie penthouse, I believe we actually had more fun designing a whole town on our own.
So this year for Christmas how about reducing the number of toys and increasing the number of plain old boxes? Sounds good to me!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Thrift Store Decorations











Here's some pretty Christmas ornaments I found at a thrift store a couple years ago. When I found these red and green satiny balls they were stuffed into a couple of gallon sized zip lock bags, but they were in great condition. So I bought them, attached thin wires to the top, strung silver beads onto the wires, then hung them on a long red ribbon. Mahvelous dahling!

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Picture Time













Hello there! It's been a while, again. After several calls to AT&T, and a repairman coming out to our house, we finally learned that it was our modem which was bad. Of course it was too old to be covered by warranty so we had to buy a new one. I'm not complaining though, we are actually able to get on the internet whenever we want now and it works fast! :))

What I've been wanting to share was our Christmas pictures I took of the kids in the park. I've never been a fan of professional picture taking places. #1- We could never afford them, they're too expensive! #2- They don't always come out great. And #3- I try to avoid dressing, polishing, then dragging my five kids through crowded stores, not just during holiday time, but ever!

Now, I've always used a 35mm which I LOVE. For years I steered clear of the digital cameras. Whenever my friends would give us pics of their families using a digital camera, the quality was never good and the picture would fade quickly. The problem with my 35mm though was that it was too big and bulky to carry around with me, you couldn't see the picture after it was taken to determine if you needed to redo the shot or not, the film is $5 a pop and to develop it was another $5. And when you have to develop the whole roll, you end up developing unwanted pictures which end up in the garbage. I take alot of pictures so it was getting way too costly.

So I finally broke down and bought a digital camera. I figured technology is better now than it was 10 years ago. I'm happy! I can throw it in my purse to always have on hand, don't have a drawer full of film that needs to be developed anymore, and I get to pick and choose the best pics that I want developed. I can store the pics on my computer and can e-mail them to family (as soon as I figure out how to do it!). But the best thing of all is that a photo editing program came with our computer that lets me crop and enhance the pictures I take, for free! Then I can e-mail the pics to a photo developing place and they'll send me the prints in the mail. I only have the good ones printed. This new way of doing pictures is WAY more time and money efficient than before! I have yet to get the prints in the mail, so we'll have to wait and see about quality, but the pics do look great on the computer (but NOT when on the yellow blog background, sorry). Have a look!