Happy New Year!

I woke up this morning with the determination that I was going to update my blog. Everyday I have so many ideas of what to write in the blog, but so little free time, that it never gets done! The kids and their amazing "mommy's on the computer" radar keeps me from writing. Then they go to bed, and I fall asleep. So needless to say, New Years was not excatly a rockin' late party here. We had our friend over for supper, they have young twins (5 months old) and a 2 1/2 year old so they also crashed early. But it was fun to get together, eat and have a few drinks regardless of what time we stayed up until.

On New Years Day Eric and I participated in the first annual Chelsea Pond Hockey Tournament. It was organized by a friend of ours and held at the pond just around the corner from our place. We had our first game and got thumped 15-6. Regardless of the score it was really fun and quite a unique experience to play on the pond. The organizers have build two full sized European sized rinks on the pond and today is a big day out there, games every 30 min from 9 am to 4 pm. We may as well wear our boots by the end of the day because with no flooding, the ice will be mush! I'll try and take some photos today between our games.

After we came home and warmed up, I decided it was time to introduce rice cereal to Madison. She has been so hungry lately and I'm barely able to keep up with nursing her, so at 4 1/2 months, I decided to try it. Abby, of course, wanted to help out so I had her feed her while I video taped and took photos. The only problem with that was Madison just wanted to eat her fingers so Abby was struggling with how to get the spoon in her mouth! It was quite funny. And not surprisingly she liked it and was happy to get some food in her!

Now working backwards from New Years... we had a wonderful week in between Christmas and now. The girls were home and we had fun hanging out together. They were a little sick, but nothing more than a cold developed, thankfully! On boxing day there was an ice storm here, and by some miracle our power didn't go off. It would would randomly turn off for a second then back on again, but nothing sustained, which is usually the case when that happens. The days following the storm were so incredibly beautiful. Everything had a thin layer of ice and when you stood outside in the quiet windless day, it sounded like tiny pieces of glass breaking all around you.

And for Christmas, I won't have much to post. It was a fun and tiring day, lots of gift opening, eating and family. I didn't take nearly enough photos and of what I did, they all really suck! I'm too distracted on Christmas morning to get my photo taking self together, it's funny! It happens every year and I look back on it kind of sad because I wish I had done a better job of capturing the day! It's just so overwhelming! Next year will be slightly easier since I won't be nursing anymore... but we'll see!

Anyway Off to bed - I started this at 7:00 am, it's 9:15 pm now, and my body needs rest after playing so much hockey in two days! Night!

It's not really looking like Christmas...

There isn't a stitch of snow, the temperature is barely making it below 0, and we don't have any decorations up yet! I really hope it starts snowing, because I'd like to ski this year. Since I didn't even put my skis on once last year, I have to make up for lost time and also take advantage of being home with Madison. So fingers are crossed that it snows!

We had a good weekend. The girls and I (OK mainly I) make an advent calendar. I basically spent the day Mod Podge-ing Christmas paper onto 24 little tiny boxes!! Gillian, surprisingly helped more than Abby. While she didn't exactly cover the boxes evenly, she was at least doing it. After starting at 9:00 am, I finished at 8 pm. Of course with the kids running around and Madison needing me throughout the day, I wasn't working on it 100% of that time. But I must admit, by the end I had had enough and wished I had bought one for $1.99 at the grocery store!! :) I'll post a photo of it tomorrow after I hang it on the wall.

Today, we went for a hike, then just chilled in the afternoon. Here are a couple shots:

And a couple cute shots of Madison standing in for my me while I check my lighting for my last shoot:

Tomorrow we start gymnastics and maybe a little visit to Santa!!

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.