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To say that our lives changed forever would be a total cliché. But, clichés do exist for a reason, right?
Just because I’m feeling kinda nostalgic, I went back and re-read the post: http://blog.audreyreed.info/baby_reed/2007/11/trick-or-treat.html
From this …
To this …
… in just a year. Holy cow!
On this beautiful & brisk fall morning, we ventured out with the Keys for our annual fall photo shoot. Well, almost annual with the exception of last year. Our fall photo shoots almost always correspond with Halloween & pumpkin patch season. Last year, we were busy getting ready for and going on our cruise in October, so we had planned to do our annual shoot in November. By the time November rolled around, I was pregnant and feeling crappy. So, we missed last year’s shoot. Bummer … But, I digress.
This was our first outdoor photo shoot with Logan, and, as with everything else, having him in the mix is a whole new world. The timing had to be just right - after bottle but before nap which is a pretty narrow window of opportunity when he’s in just the right mood. Ultimately, we decided to do it after his first bottle. So, Angie & Jim came over just after 8:00am. We couldn’t go too far away from the house because travel time would eat into that window. In the past, we’ve gone to places like the Celina Pumpkin Patch & the Dallas Arboretum. This fall, we opted to revisit our spring photo shoot location which was in this awesome green space behind my office in Adriatica (McKinney). We had to be snappy about the whole thing. On our photo outings, we’ve typically hung out for as long as we felt like shooting. Okay, truth be told, Angie and I would take photos until the guys decide they’ve had enough of being told what to do and having to smile nonstop about it. So, the guys probably weren’t disappointed to have a limited duration to the shoot. :-)
Putting all of that together, we pulled off a pretty great shoot! Angie’s amazing with her camera and is a whiz at the post processing. She’s already worked magic on several of the best photos:
Huge thanks to both Angie & Jim for their time and patience. It’s awesome to start incorporating Logan into our family traditions and these annual photo shoots (fall & spring) have always been important to us, and they are even more important now that the little man is here.
One last note - apparently the whole thing wore both Logan and me out. We ended up taking an almost 2 hour nap on the couch together. This is the first time that he’s slept any length of time with either one of us.
Why do I blog? It’s mostly selfish.
In light of that, I don’t worry too much about how many hits I get or don’t get. I check the statistics only maybe once a week out of curiosity to see how many hits and to see where they come from. BUT … having said all of that, I feel like I’ve been graced with my 15 minutes of blog fame in the way of a link to my blog from scrapbooker extraordinaire Stacy Julian’s blog. I have to admit that when I saw my name listed there with a link to my version of her “Give Yourself a Present Challenge”, I was totally stoked! So much so that I was compelled to call Angie immediately and practically squeal in delight to her.
And, that is my 15 minutes of blog fame. :-)
Well, apparently we don’t suck as parents. Logan has made it to 3 months without overly serious incident. We haven’t dropped him (yet), and he seems to be a happy & healthy baby. Last night, he slept 10 ½ hours and probably would have slept longer, but I had to get him up to feed and play with him before I took him next door to his nanny. We’re estimating him to be somewhere around 16-17 pounds and he’s in a size 3 diaper. He talks in that wonderful baby babble almost constantly and is infatuated with his own reflection - who wouldn’t be??? He’s adorable!
Happy birthday, Little Man!
I’ve been told that I take too many photos. And, sometimes, I almost agree. There are currently 750+ photos in the Logan library alone. There are 2000+ photos in my current library that dates back to 7/14/2007. Yup - that’s 2000 photos I’ve taken in the last 15 months. A little much maybe? But then I go back and look at some of the moments I’ve captured and am reminded again why I love my cameras. The only problem is finding a way to organize the photos so that I can go back and enjoy and share them when I want to.
Electronically, I discovered Adobe’s Lightroom about a year ago, and it is one of the most incredible pieces of software for managing digital photos and simple touch ups.
My constant challenge has been organizing printed photos - both for long term storage and to enable a manageable method of scrapbooking. On Angie’s advice, I borrowed from her and read Stacy Julian’s Photo Freedom and have finally been inspired by a system of photo storage that I think is completely doable. But, of course, this is like any other organization project - there’s always a price to be paid up front to get the long term return. So, this weekend, I began in earnest my journey toward photo freedom!
The first step is gathering and organizing all of your photos by decade. The first stash of photos I found was one of the more current - 1990’s & 2000’s. The binder and page protectors you see are for the current photos that I want to keep handy for browsing and selecting from for scrapbooking.
What really freaked me out about this project was all of the places that I know I have photos stored away. On top of that, my parents recently moved, and I have several boxes of photos & other moments that my mom found when she was packing and sent my way. It’s really frightening how many I have to sort through, but I’m actually looking forward to having the excuse and opportunity to go back through all of them.
Probably the biggest challenge to this project is simply finding the time to work on it, but I’ve found that even just 15 minute snippets of time are useful. The other slightly less significant but still present challenge is keeping the cat from using the photos as chew toys while I’m sorting them out.
Grrr! She knocked this envelop of photos off my desk (along with some cards) and apparently sorted through it until she found the tastiest one. But, I digress ...
Photo freedom here I come!
As new parents, we had several baby books handy when we brought Logan home hoping beyond hope that we could piece together half a clue of what to do with this new little bundle. During those first few tough weeks, we discovered that the techniques described by Harvey Karp in The Happiest Baby on the Block seemed to be the closest thing to a miracle we could have hoped for. Logan still sleeps with white noise in a swing and wrapped up in a daddy-special swaddle. (I'm sure at some point we'll have to ween him off these things, but when he's sleeping 8-10 hours a night with the occassional 11 hour night, it's hard to see the necessity. And, yes, we get just how lucky we are!) Once he’s wrapped up, he looks like a little baby burrito:
It’s amazing how swaddling him up almost instantly calms him down and, with minimal rocking, puts him right to sleep. The funniest thing though is when we unwrap our baby burrito. The very same thing happens every time. Check it out:
On a totally random note, Logan seems to have found his toes:
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