madison visit

at the end of A's vacation we took a short road trip up to see his cousin (on the other side of the family). here's boo's cousin J modelling my latest fun knitting project - little "feather" boas. this was made from 1 skein of crystal palace "splash" yarn, about 18 stitches in the round on size 11 needles.

as always, the park was a hit with the kiddies. while the dads took the kids, i checked into our hotel (J has two cats which don't agree with A's immune system) and stopped at a cute little yarn/quilting store on the way back. got a locally designed sewing pattern for some reversible bags that looks easy enough ... we'll see when (if?) i get around to making them.

a little sightseeing - saw the lovely state capitol.

J keeps her parents on their toes!

here i am sporting J and my new favorite hairstyle of late - hair pulled back with a headband knitted from the calorimetry pattern. this one is made from a partial skein of noro aurora that is leftover from making a friend's table runner.

storytime in the civic center. i'm still stunned that boo sat raptly through the whole time. tales from around the world - "the empty pot" from china, the hare and the snake, and i can't remember the others right now.

i think what he liked the most was J's 4-wheeler!

cleveland stop

on the way back from philly we stayed overnight with one of A's former colleagues. good thing too, given the blizzard! they have two sons ages 7 and 4 (who are growing up to be just like their dad) and a newborn little girl.

one impressive feature of their (huge) house is that there is no tv. they have a huge bin full of wooden blocks. i love the ramps that they had - will think about getting some of those.

they loved the crocheted edge blankets that i made for them. the morning that we left they were rolling themselves around into burritos.

as we left, the 4 year old told us a joke. "how does the easter bunny know when he's sick? from an eggs-ray!"

philly visit

at the beginning of the month we road tripped to philly to visit family. we stayed with A's cousins (their moms are cousins ... so does that make them second cousins or first cousins once removed?) and had an absolutely wonderful time. they asked us what sights we wanted to see in philly. to be honest, we had no desire to see stuff like the liberty bell again. our priorities as tourists have definitely changed; our idea of a peaceful vacation is a place with an enclosed play area so that we can relax. destinations are now guided more by where friends and family live rather than tourist attractions. in this case, they have a 4 year old boy and a 2 year old girl, so the play area is filled with all the thomas, bob the builder, and cars that boo's heart could desire.

it's also filled with some great natural light thanks to two skylights!

they had a fun time on wheels. why can't i get boo to ride wheels back home? he even tried out the tricycle, which he has no interest in at home.

our one quasi-sightseeing trip was to see the children's museum, which is housed in this grand old building. boo was willing to get on the carousel but not get on a horse - he wanted to ride just the stationary sleigh.

here is his cousin "doing the evan" as she puts it - going down face first.

one day was incredibly windy - perhaps even a bit too much for kites. nevertheless, the kids loved it! even when the wind whipped one kite out of grandma's hand and it went flying into a house.


grandma showed him how to logroll :)


here's monty, their jack russell terrier who is about the same age as dixie but has mellowed a lot more. he loves cuddling up in your lap. i think he sold A on the species. never mind his incredibly super-energetic puppy years.

we also got to see A's brother, and his mom drove up for a day too.

finally, i got to reunite with an old college buddy that i have fallen out of touch with. an encounter too brief but so uplifting.

first assignment

here are the pics i took with my first betterphoto.com assignment: capturing a picture of a child looking and laughing directly into the camera. i had to submit pairs of photos: a "before" pic of the child almost-but-not-quite connecting with the camera - this could be a genuine smile but looking slightly off camera, or a not-quite-relaxed smile. for example, here's one of my before/afters above.

miss m. is one of our neighbors - we share a backyard fence. she has an absolutely winning smile and loves the camera.

here's the only one i could get of boo. the main critiques from the instructor on these photos: the one with boo is taken from an angle that was a bit too low - he looks like he's leaning away from the camera a bit. i'll definitely acknowledge that - i must have taken like 100+ photos to get one decent one of him! i also have to work on my focus - the eyes are not absolutely sharp in some of miss m's photos. i changed my focus to center-weighted to try and work on that.

bathtime

first foray into photoshop. i'm taking a betterphoto.com online course - my first formal photography course ever! - called "photographing children and babies." this is the second assignment: shooting the child as a "botanical" - isolating those parts of kids that we love to stare at.

it's becoming quite frustrating to take pictures of boo these days - he mostly declares "NO PICTURES mommy! put that camera away!" so in a sense this assignment was easier than the last one (which required getting a relaxed shot of evan looking directly into the camera. ha! not happening!)

i'm loving this course so far. you can look at all the photos that the other students take and the instructor's comments on those shots too. there's also a q&a forum that is helpful. i thought i could learn this stuff from a book, but i think that now i'm at the point in my photography (or my life) that i need the extra push of this course.

thanks to this course, i've already ...
- perused my nikon d80 book a lot more to recall what each button does and what all the terms mean
- realized that although my 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 lens is beautiful for most needs, it doesn't have a large enough aperture for me to take good inside pictures with natural light. so i bought a 50mm f/1.8 that is great!
- learned some techniques for improving exposure without resorting to flash - increasing the ISO, and the new lens with the larger aperture capability
- become more facile with changing white balance and ISO on my camera (though definitely still working on this)
- become motivated to learn more photoshop. just bought a scott kelby book on amazon. now i know that the d80 book that i bought didn't motivate me to use my camera as well as this course has, but hopefully i can dodge the need for another course ... or maybe not.

this site was recommended by my neighbor, who works part time as a children's photographer. the course was a christmas present :)

toxo ... because it's cute

a friend of mine is nearing the end of her phd work on toxoplasma, and so when we visited her this weekend i made her this.

it's a little toxo! fortunately i have some infectious disease specialists as friends, who advised me to make a crescent-ish shaped creature. the pattern is inspired by some knitted bacteria that i found on ravelry.com, but was in its details was completely made up. i crocheted it since i'm better able to manipulate crochet for little creatures like this.

note the stripes spiralling down from it's head. toxo has an apical complex of actin fibers/microtubules that apparently spiral around the little protozoa. it uses these microtubules to pull itself along. it's hard to see the apical spiral complex with these pics. i also chose a stripe yarn that was kinda close in color so that they would be more subtle than in-your-face - think of it more of a suggestion of microtubules rather than an accurate depiction. the eyes are safety eyes (thanks beth) which i haven't used before, but certainly would be hard (impossible) to get off.

yarn: berroco air (body) and noro aurora (stripes)
pattern: self-created

happy easter!

we hid eggs in the front yard this morning and boo had a lovely time finding them ... most of them had stickers inside, but the clear favorites were a select few with m&ms. i also put some crocodile-shaped clips (target has some really cute kitchen stuff) in some of them.

it's a bit chilly - 38 degrees this morn. at least there's no snow this year!

any eggs in here?

we just got back from a quick trip to madison to visit A's cousins. i'll post more pics from the trip later, but here's their easter-egg dyeing fun. we accidentally dissolved the paas tablets first in water then vinegar, rather than vice versa as specified on the directions - but we preferred the variability of color produced by the still-dissolving dyes.

happy easter!