The children playing on the swing.
08 February 2009

Matt and I have significantly changed our diet over the last five days. We are eating “raw.” Not completely raw, just largely raw. We first heard of this diet from watching Crazy Sexy Cancer. In the extra features, Kris Carr shows you how to make a green smoothie, but I really didn’t like the way it tasted. Matt continued to drink the green smoothies, but I stopped.

I did however continue to investigate the raw diet. And how can a man this beautiful be wrong! Here’s some other folks’ Before and After pictures. Very compelling.

I also learned that you don’t have to severely limit the fruits as Kris Carr does. Matt and I started this 14-day Green Smoothie Challenge. And since they use fruits in their green smoothies, I found the smoothies much more palatable.

It’s been interesting. We are both surprised by how hungry we get and the sheer volume of food you consume on a raw diet. I’ll keep you guys updated on how our raw adventures go.

Clara loves the sandbox. Whenever she visits,
she’ll easily spend an hour playing in the sandbox.
Right now, there’s a bunch of fallen leaves in the sandbox
that we need to clean out and get it ready for a summer
of play.
02 February 2009

Over the past three months, I have put on 10 to 15 pounds (one stone for you Brits out there). The weight gain came out of nowhere. My weight has been a stable 180 lbs for the past four years since Lily was born. Then all of sudden, bam! I started gaining weight.

I had been trying to figure out what it was. Am I eating differently? Has my metabolism changed again? When I was in my 20s, I was one of those folks who could eat anything (and I did) and never gain weight. People always said to me, “You’re so lucky” and “Your bad eating habits will catch up with you.” And they were right. I was lucky and my unhealthy eating did catch up with me. At age 28, to be precise. I shot up from my healthy weight of 150 to 180. Then I kind of stabilized.

Yesterday I was talking to Carla about my weight gain and that none of my clothes fit. I have to suck in my stomach right now to put on my slacks, and once I have them on, they are so uncomfortably tight. Then she asked, “Is Damian still taking as much milk as he used to?”

Holy macaroni! That was it! The baby has started weaning himself. He doesn’t take near as much milk. I’ve had a free-for-all with food for the last five years, between being pregnant and nursing. Now my body doesn’t need all those extra calories to produce babies or milk.

Damn. My food playtime is over. Time to adjust my eating. 🙂

Photoshop is extremely good at making muddy photos
look a million times better. This picture was taken
in the shade, and therefore the lighting did not give
much depth or variation. Photoshop had to do that.
Damian
02 February 2009

I saw this quote the other day:

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

and I liked it very much. I was curious who said it, so I Googled it. This is a quote from George Bernard Shaw.

My Google search led me to an essay by Scott Ginsberg on this webpage. I like the article very much, but I especially like this line:

Never apologize for your art.

I apologize for my art all the time. In fact, I never even thought about not apologizing for my art until I read this article. It didn’t even occur to me.

I love my art, even my crappy art. And by art, I mean my photos, my drawings, my blog, my writing, anything that comes from deep inside of me. And that’s why I love it. But, externally, I do realize that some of it is crap and could use improvement.

But that’s not the essence of art, is it? Art is not about perfection; art is about self-expression. And therefore, Scott Ginsberg is right. We should never apologize for our honest communication with the outside world.

Lily pouring dry grass all over herself and Damian
30 January 2009

A random weird fact: I always cry at the end of Lady and the Tramp when Trusty is lying unconscious in the mud after being hit by the animal control wagon and Jock starts howling sadly.

So, just a warning to any women out there who have not had babies yet: be prepared to cry at every sentimental cartoon Disney scene after you have had children. Annoying but true.

I took some photos yesterday of the children playing in the back garden. In the first few photos, due to the settings that were set on the camera, I unwittingly used fill flash.

30 January 2009

I turned the fill flash off, which is how I normally have my camera set, and this is what the pictures looked like:

I still have so much to learn (or relearn — I had learned about fill flash in college, but dumped the knowledge as soon as the course was over). Using fill flash really helps a photo on a very sunny day. I can use my Photoshop skills to somewhat compensate for my lack of photography skills. I played with the levels of the second photo to find detail in the darkness.

Poor little guy had no color in his skin after making such drastic changes to the levels, so then I had to correct for color and add pink back into his skin.

Of course, I played with the levels of the first photo as well to bring out more detail. This is the fill flash photo again with very slightly tweaked levels. No color compensation required.

Fill flash is pretty awesome. Maybe I shouldn’t have disregarded that knowledge so easily. 🙂

Damian blowing out the candles on his birthday cake.
(We were so sick of cake by his birthday because
of Lily’s ginormous cake a few days earlier, that Damian
got a little cake so that there would be absolutely
no leftover cake afterwards.)
08 January 2009

I watched this 20 minute video, The Story of Stuff, and then read Your Money or Your Life (it was on the recommended reading list on The Story of Stuff website, and I happened to have it on my bookshelf, so I dusted it off and read it). After watching and reading these two things, I’ve been depressed because the framework of my reality has been torn down.

Considering that I’m a modern suburban hippy (or at least I thought I was), you wouldn’t have thought that the environmentalist ideas presented would have thrown me for such a loop. You see, I was so used to blaming big business, advertising and the government — and waiting for them to fix the problem — that  I never really examined my role in the process. The movie and the book covered two ideas that, though they may not be novel, are still presented in a very personal, cogent and immediate manner:

1) We — you and me — drive consumerism. Without our willing participation, the system will not work. In all fairness, we were raised from our cradle by society to be consumers, but now we are being shown that we don’t have to live within the paradigm with which we were raised.

2) Here, I am going to quote Mr P.J. Ruane who left this comment on Amazon regarding Your Money or Your Life: “Your income depends on the number of hours you work, so if you spend frivolously, you are not spending your money, you are spending your lifetime. e.g. You earn $10 per hour tax paid? then if you spend $400 on something (that is probably really of no benefit to you, that you didn’t really need), you are really spending 40 hours of your lifetime for that useless item. To most people that is a working week. Multiply that a few times and most of our working lives are spent for NOTHING.”

There was another comment on Amazon that I liked very much from Eric Scarbro: “As with all revelations, the reader needs to be ready to hear the message.”

So where does this leave me? I’m free-falling now. I don’t have an answer. More than just a habit has been changed, the framework of how my reality works has been changed. I have no reference now, and so feel very lost.

But that’s not neccessarily a bad thing. However it is a very uncomfortable thing. Where is the line between enough and mindless consumption? I don’t know. But at least I know there is one now.

This is a really good spot for a Mary Poppins quote. 🙂

Enough is as good as a feast.

Daddy and the kids played with blocks.
24 January 2009

I cannot take a decent picture with a flash. I mean, sure, the content is great and the composition may be good, but the lighting is just crap. If I were to take one photography course, it would be how to take pictures with a flash.

And all my photos are of a photojournalistic nature. I don’t do studio or set photography where you have time to set everything up precisely how you would like it. I need to learn how to take good immediate photographs with a flash. I would say, at my current level, the use of a flash is definitely my weakest skill.

We bought the most amazing Princess cake for Lily’s birthday.
It really was a work of art.
01 January 2009

I’m trying to not let the blog go dead again, so please bear with me while I write semi-uninteresting posts for awhile until I get my groove back.

Random weird blog fact: As I’ve mentioned before, I have maybe 15 people who read my blog, all family and friends. That is a tiny blog especially compared to the blogs out there that have thousands of followers. So here’s the weird fact about my miniscule blog:

To date, there are:
2682 comments
49 are legitimate
2633 are spam.

Isn’t that crazy?! Can you imagine how many spam comments the large blogs must get? I had to put a little filter on my blog. The big blogs must use fire-proof, teflon-covered spam filters.

The kids played outside in the leaves on Christmas day.
25 December 2008

Never let it be said that I don’t listen to my father-in-law. As requested in the last comment, more photos of the children. 🙂

And yes, even with the economic recession, there is definitely a feeling of hope among Americans with the election of our new president. I hope he is everything he seems to be.

Lily wanted pigtails, so I did her hair up.
I don’t know what it is about little girls in pigtails,
but they are cute cute cute.
23 December 2008

Then she danced around the living room
in her new pigtails and her Giselle dress.
23 December 2008

First of all, I have to give a little bloggie shout-out to my father-in-law. He is the strongest supporter of my blog. Sure, it’s because of the steady stream of cute pictures of his grandchildren, but it’s still nice to have such an enthusiastic fan, even if it is by proxy. Shelrie, Ben (Matt’s brother), Allison, my mother-in-law, Sam, my adored husband, Justin, Donna and Deb also all encourage me and my little blog… you guys are awesome. Thanks for encouraging me in all my creative endeavors. No matter how old we get, it’s always nice to feel like you’re wanted and you’re doing a good job. My little preschoolers thrive on praise and approval, and so it seems do adults.

I’ve been thinking. And creating. And doing. And living. And my blog was tossed to the side for a little while. You know how I constantly search for the perfect planning system and how I am a lover all things office/school supply related especially if they are feminine, pretty and/or cute. Well, I’ve decided to create my own planning system, tooled to fit my specific needs. I’ve ordered some bookmaking books and next on the list is a padding press to create my own pads.

I am both excited and intimidated by the idea. Can I create a usable and pretty planning toolkit? Can I combine the functionality of a dayplanner with the encouragement of a goal-oriented system and tie it all together with beautiful colors and art? I don’t know, but I think it will be a lot of fun trying, if I can manage to just keep my lack of self-confidence at bay.

Art is in all of us. When we create, we breathe life into our soul. Creativity should be nurtured and honored because it feeds passion and growth.

That will be my mantra when self-doubt comes like a cold, unwelcome wind at my door.