When Gillian is quiet...

You know you are in for a great surprise...

(Note: she was in the basement, "colouring" when she came upstairs growling like a tiger...Thank God for Crayola washable markers!!)

The girls from good to bad

I had my background set up the other day for a shoot I was doing, so I figured it was a good opportunity to take some shots of the girls.


Done up with a little texture.




Gillian got into the mix after her nap, but by then Madison had had enough!


Then, why not try for the lot. This may be the Christmas Card picture with the quote - "Peace and Harmony for All", I'm just not sure... :)

Holidays in Hand

The big thing in Scrapbooking is documenting each day in December. Why some may wonder? For me, I think December is a special month, so many traditions, new snow (hopefully), winter fun outdoors, snowmen, giving, opening presents, decorating the tree, eating (!). This year, I'm joining Jessica Sprague on her Holidays in Hand class and the goal of the class is to prepare you for documenting December so that when December comes we are ready. I will do mine digitally, and hopefully print them out at the end into an album. As I haven't been scrapbooking much lately I hope I can at least get a few pages done. Things are going to slow down on the photography front, and I'd like to focus on scrapping!

For our first assignment we are to list our values, our hopes, our traditions and what we treasure most for these holidays and here are mine:

1. Now that the girls are a little older and Christmas is starting to mean something I'd like to establish traditions for them that combine what Eric had growing up and what I had growing up: eggnog, oranges in our stockings, selecting a real tree and cutting it down, decorating the tree (without a big fight .. heheheh), decorating the house.

2. Playing in the snow. (hoping that we actually get snow by Christmas). It will be fun to see the Girls get so excited about it and play like kids should play.

3. Spending time with family, eating, laughing and exchanging gifts.

4. Taking lot of photos to capture the moments.

I'm sure I'll have more, but this was the beginning of my list.

The Value of Backing Up

I like to think that I'm pretty organized, I also like to think that I'm diligent about backing things up like my photos, my documents, my taxes etc. This theory was kind of put to the test last week when my computer spontaneously started to crash and reboot itself over and over again. I was just able to get an e-mail off to Francois, my computer guy, saying that my computer was starting to act funny (I think it heard me) when, poof I got the black screen of death. My brain immediately went into panic mode trying to figure out when I last backed up my photos. Ironically two weeks ago I decided to move ALL of my images onto two EHD and changed my downloading and any work I did to one of them rather than my computer's hard drive. So now everything I did was off of my 2TB EHD. So I was pretty confident that if my computer's hard drive was fried, I wouldn't be loosing much. Thankfully in the end it turned out to be the motherboard that bit the bullet, and it was easily replaced, all data I had on my computer's hard drive was saved, and everything was fine. The only inconvenience was not having my computer for 4 days and then having to install all my programs on again. Since the last time I replaced my computer, I've moved to using my e-mail strickly through the web, and similarly with bookmarking, I change to using Delicious. So whatever I can save on-line I will. Very useful when your system crashes!

Halloween Minis....

Highlight video from Saturday's mini-session. I had a lot of fun with the little ones! They were so cute and posed very well for me under the circumstances... Bribery with Halloween candy will go a long way!!



It was tiring, but I very fulfilling - learned a lot, met a lot of new people and had fun all at the same time. The only downside of it was missing hanging out with the girls and Eric getting ready for Halloween! I didn't even take pics of my own kids on Halloween!! But I'll recreate it next weekend for pics.