Thought some of you might like to enter. The grand prize is $2500 cash, and three other prizes of $500 towards Sigma gear could come in REALLY handy to get the 30 mm 1.4 (first lens I ever fell in love with) or to put towards the highly anticipated 70-200 OS coming this August!

While most of the rides weren’t appropriate for the under two set, there was  of course a carousel:

and the “Jalopy” train which jasper did NOT want to get out of!

and LOTS to look at:

In fact, they had all sorts of fun crazy things they never had when we were kids, like a pool of water and these giant clear beach ball looking things that people go inside and “walk” which looks like a hampster running on a wheel.

And this bungee thing where you get strapped in and jump incredibly high into the air:

The night ended on a great note when Jasper and Jeff hit the hammer to ring the bell:

and won the coolest prize – a blue light Saber!

I think going to the “carmelo” will become a great summer family tradition.

Hope you all had a great weekend!

Apparently every study ever done that has attempted to measure the relative happiness level of couples with children vs. couples without has concluded that the child free couples are universally more measurably happy.

The article also discusses how every parent instinctively rejects this notion outright, but still the evidence piles up.. apparently the stresses of parenting on an every day basis cause all sorts of stress, depression and marital strife.

Having experienced the marital strife first hand, I can certainly understand the premise.  Attending to the every whim of an often ungrateful, uncooperative unRELENTING little being is often thankless.. and yet, no parent regrets having their children!  Which is another observation the article makes – people tend to regret NOT having children but not the other way around. Which leads the author to conclude that there is some immeasurable transcendent satisfaction that we get out of childrearing – it’s just not always evident in the day to day drudgery that parenting can be at times.

I’m curious how having children has effected your own happiness and the state of your marriage/relationships?

I don’t think I’m necessarily “happier” but I am more fulfilled.  And obviously I can’t imagine life without Jasper!  But did it almost kill my marriage? Yes.  Do I refer to the Jasper’s first year as the “dark ages”? Yep.  Honestly, the thought of doing it all over again is terrifying to me, even though every time I see an under 1 year old my ovaries ache..a lot.

So it was in that fragile emotional state that I read Jill’s blog post about 5 month old baby Sam who was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 High Risk Neuroblastoma:

Any child (or anyone!) diagnosed with cancer is heartbreaking, but this little boy’s story, his smile, and maybe the fact that Jasper had those same pajamas just really got me yesterday, particularly so soon after having lost someone I love to this evil disease.

If you have a minute, please check out Jill’s post about Sam and the Help Sam fundraiser she’s doing. There are some amazing prizes that she is in the process of adding to daily including a pair of earrings from my mom’s Etsy shop and the necklace of the winner’s choice from Charmed & Dangerous.

I need for there to be hope for this little boy like there wasn’t for my friend.   Thanks in advance for any support you can give!

I’ve never been an outdoorsy type of girl. I have nothing against nature per se, but a few things conspire to make me much happier reading a book indoors than soaking up the sun outside.

First, I am the palest creature you’ve EVER seen. Seriously, I practically glow.. and I’ve always been like that.  So I’m not exactly sun worshiper material.

Secondly, I have super dark almost black hair that attracts heat like moth to a flame. When the sun shines directly on my head I swear you could fry an egg on there and I feel like positively wilting from the heat exhaustion.

And third, I get poison Ivy if it enters a 50 mile radius of my vicinity. Case in point, I have it right now from the one or two times I’ve wandered around the yard with Jasper, or maybe from touching the dog or maybe because someone who had it looked at me from a few hundred yards away.. either way, I have it and it’s miserable!

But the absolute WORST thing about spring/summer in the CT/NY area is the severity of the tick (or more specifically Lyme’s disease) problem.   Lyme is bad enough in an adult because it’s hard to detect and hard to treat, but in a baby/toddler who can’t tell you exactly what they are feeling it’s that much harder.

So needless to say Jeff and I were pretty horrified to find a tic burrowed in between Jasper’s shoulder blades two nights ago.. horrified and rather at a loss as to what to do to get it out!

A google search turned up that we should pull it straight out, no wiggling so as not to separate the head from the body.. but that only encouraged the tick to burrow in further.

Obviously we didn’t want to go to the E.R. (I can only imagine where removing a tick falls on the triage hierarchy!) but I remembered there was a “PM Pediatrics” place nearby, a sort of emergent care for kids.   When I called them I still wasn’t sure if we were overreacting, but they assured me that it’s something they do/see all the time.

I’m SO glad we went.. they applied a numbing cream in case they had to dig into his back to get it out (which they did, poor little guy!) But honestly the WORST part was us having to hold him down on his belly while the Physician’s assistant removed the tick.. the screaming was at a level I haven’t heard from him in a long time.. if ever.

We were really lucky because the tick wasn’t engorged with blood and it was on him for less than the required 12 hours to transfer Lymes, but most of all because the tick was big enough that we even SAW it on him. Deer ticks can be so tiny they often go undetected completely.

So as Jasper stands at the door every day and whines to go outside, I have to try really hard to enjoy out time outdoors without seeing a leaves of three or tiny black critters behind every blade of grass.  Ugh, how many weeks until winter?

Right before Jasper was born I picked up a few old books at a consignment sale, books for older kids (i.e. non board books) like Paddington Bear. On a whim I dug them out of the closet recently and turns out Jasper is ready for these more wordy stories.. he now LOVES paddington and mommy is more entertained too because these books have more interesting story lines than the average baby book.

So the other night I was at Marshalls and decided to see what other “older” baby books I could find and grabbed a Berenstain Bears book called “The Berenstain Bears Do their Best.” It’s a non board book, has bears, what’s not to love right?

Imagine my surprise when I got to this stanza on the third page:

“A Kite for me and Sister Bear?
A kite for both of us to share?
Let’s thank the Lord from up above for Papa showing us his love.”

???????

It goes on from there:

But we believed in Papa’s skill.
And our faith in God’s help is stronger still”

I felt like I was in some strange alternate universe.. the Berenstain bears.. we used to read those to my little sister, they weren’t religious! And if they WERE religious, wouldn’t the Berenstain bears be JEWISH? (As it turns out, the series creator Stan was in fact Jewish. It was his evangelical son that  started this new “living lights” series of Faith based Berenstain books after his father’s death.)

Now, I don’t want to offend anyone with this post, I’m aware that I have plenty of readers of all faiths and I’m really happy about that.  But Jasper is somewhere between 50-75% Jewish and none of us are practicing anything.  So I’m not saying that there’s anything overtly wrong with faith, or even religious books for kids, but if you take a well known character and insert religion at a later date, it would be really nice to maybe notate that rather prominently to warn off non religious types like me that this is probably not a book you want to buy for your child!

Had I very carefully read the back cover, I would have noticed in fine print where it said “Living Lights Berenstain Bear books help children learn how God wants them to live every day.”

But, I did not because, well, I wasn’t aware that I needed to be on the look out for such things.

Again, if you are a person of faith you might actually prefer the faith based Bears to the old ones I remember from childhood. But I personally find it somewhat disturbing that any of us have to even worry about scrutinizing classic character books for faith insertions of any kind.

I wonder if perhaps the Living Lights Publishers got similar feedback because subsequent titles became much less ambiguous. For example:

and

For now, I think we’ll stick to Paddington, and I’ll be reading the back and front covers much more carefully before purchasing from now on…

Not only was she gorgeous with a great fashion sense, but her friends were also trend setters and creatives like one of her flat mates in London who was (is) a fashion designer who designed many of her clothes.  Here are some of the pictures I entered:

We have always had amazing prints from my parents’ past lying around.  As a child I can remember looking through them and being amazed that these care-free fun stylish people were MY PARENTS once upon a time!  I truly believe that looking at all of those vintage pictures was the start of my love for photography.

In addition to those prints, my parents have boxes of forgotten slides and negatives which is why I researched and bought them this amazing scanner for Christmas capable of scanning slides and negatives.  This is a huge leap in technology – I remember not so long ago that a slide or negative scanner used to cost close to $1000, now you can get a flat bed scanner with an integrated slide/negative carriage for around $100!!

If you have old slides and negatives, I highly recommend getting on of these units, it’s like finding hidden treasure!  Like this image of my mom, grandmom and me on the beach that I’d never seen before two days ago:

me, mom and grandmom at the beach

Of course the challenge is finding the time to go through them all, infact the scanner had sat untouched until this contest prompted us to get in those boxes and dig.. but I’m so glad we did!

If you have or do enter your mom into the contest, leave a comment with a link to your mom’s picture because I’d love to see :)

PS: contest ends on April 16th so hurry!

This is Jasper’s new mantra and it’s created a bit of a dilemma.  If the french doors are open so that the fresh air comes inside, Jasper takes it as a cue to let himself outside – I can’t even begin to enumerate the dangers this presents but I’m sure you can imagine!  So either we stay stuffy, or we lock the screen door. Seemingly a simple solution, but when the screen door is locked he pushes on the screen – I give those screens a prognosis of about 2-4 days.

Anyway you look at it, Jasper has taken the arrival of spring to mean that he must be outside at all times lest the wrath of toddler be permanently unleashed.   So at any given time you can find me in my parents’ yard trailing after Jasper while he  explores.  My parents find this endlessly ironic, because to say that I am not outdoorsy is a vast understatement.   In typical karmic fashion, I have been blessed with a child who is in so many ways my opposite.

The upside is that I can bring my camera  along on our little jaunts which makes them quite a bit more entertaining, for me at least (not sure Jasper shares my sentiments!)

Yesterday I thought to bring my 85mm 1.8 out of hibernation for the occasion.. and wow.  I’ve always thought I was a zoom girl, but when I pulled up all of my shots in lightroom I was amazed that every single one had 100% nailed focus on the eyes.  A nice change from both my Tamron 28-75 AND my 24-70L which seem to have much more temperamental results.

Here are some results of our wanderings..

and though the following have some technical issues (blown whites) I love how it captures Jasper enjoying three of his favorite things: Pop pop, outside and helping:

By the way, Jasper surely gets his love of the outdoors from my Dad who from early spring to late fall spends every free minute working in his yard!

All images taken with the 5D Mark II, Canon 85mm 1.8 at about 2.5 and 200  ISO, varying shutterspeeds.

Enjoy your weekend, indoors or out!

Sleepy tired cranky eyes say buh bye!

When Daylight Savings ended last November I cursed the person who thought it was a good idea to CHANGE TIME.  Obviously this person was not a parent of a toddler.

Before that fateful day in November, Jasper had no problem sleeping until 7:30 am…It was blissful.   Eventually he did get used to the time change and we had a good run for a month or two, but over the past few months Jasper’s wake up time has slowly migrated back towards 6:30.

First it was 7:15, then 7:oo, then 6:30 and on some bad days it’s 6:00-6:15 and it’s KILLING ME! The problem is that I was used to going to bed at midnight, which allowed me enough “mommy time” to get a few things done for myself, not the least of which is photography and blogging.  Midnight-7:30 or even 7 was more than enough sleep for me, but six hours is just not enough, so I’ve had to grudgingly resolve to put myself to bed an hour earlier than I want to go.. often leaving projects half way done or barely started.

So I have high hopes for this weekend, the weekend that the rest of the country dreads  as the one in which they  “lose an hour of sleep.”   If I am lucky and all goes according to plan, Jasper’s wake up time through the magic of DST will become 7ish instead of the ungodly hour of 6ish.

If you  have a similar mission, I wish you good luck and godspeed.  And if all else fails, lots and lots of caffeine!

Ever since, I’ve been on a hunt for the perfect baby doll.  This was surprisingly difficult because of my strict criterion : Cheap, close to lifesize in length and also head circumference. The head circumference was important to me because I have started making up my own hat patterns and wanted a lifesize head to check my sizing.

Last weekend I went to Toys R Us, measuring tape in hand and started measuring the heads of various dolls… yes, I was that psycho lady measuring dolls heads in the aisles of TRU!  Strangely enough, all the dolls that were close to the correct length (18-20 inches) had disproportionately large heads or vice versa so I headed over to target and struck gold with the Circo Feed and Sleep Baby Doll.  It was 18″ (close enough) and had the exact average newborn head circumference (13.5) and was under $20. Score!

Here she is modeling on of my new hats:

My plan B was to buy something off of ebay, but that would have taken forever to get here, plus most of the “lifesize” dolls were those reborn type of dolls that have always really creeped me out.  I’ve never understand the whole reborn treating a doll like a real child phenomenon, though I know sometimes these are grieving mothers and there is no way for me to even attempt to understand the depths of that sadness and what behavior it has the potential to bring out.   I tried not to judge, but I admit I did a little…

And then, Jasper started playing with the doll.  I wasn’t prepared for how watching him feed a doll its bottle would flood me with emotions just thinking about how if things were different Jasper could have a little sibling right now..

Seeing Jasper interact with this doll I could just so clearly see him as a big brother and my heart just ached with sadness for me and him that in all likelihood it will never come to pass.   It’s been a lot on my mind lately, both because I’m approaching my 37th birthday and also because a huge percentage of women on the bump toddler and even SAIF messageboards are pregnant again or have already given birth to their second.    I feel guilty even feeling this way, knowing how incredibly lucky I am to have Jasper, but I can’t help myself.

I’m so glad I have a creative outlet to drive these thoughts out of my mind, and one that even allows me to be around newborns every once in a while..