Month: August 2011

42 is my new lucky number

Clearly, I have done something to please the Universe, because this has been a month full of wonderful news and awesome surprises – and it’s barely begun. Do you mind if I take a quick moment to share my joy?

Last time I was talking about good fortune, I mentioned that I had been offered a job (my former position!) working in social media for the Canada Revenue Agency. I was gathering the paperwork so they could prepare my letter of offer when I realized that (gah!) my French levels had expired, and so rather than the leisurely three weeks of vacation I had been planning, I spent at least an hour each day curled up in a heap of practice tests and grammar workbooks. Then there were more misadventures when one of my two prescribed tests was delayed when the building’s air conditioning system failed. I tell you, I never manage to find the easy road! And speaking of easy, the reading test was not. At all. In fact, I was so sure that I’d missed the required grade that I was sick about it all weekend.

To my surprise and delight, I found out Monday morning that I passed with exactly the levels I required for my new position at the CRA. My letter of offer is now signed, and I start my new/old job at the end of the month. Yay!!

While I was tapping the refresh key and hoping for an early peek at my results late last week, I got an e-mail from my friends at Mom Central Canada and Fisher-Price. It turns out the PlayPanel program has been so successful that they’re extending it and even expanding it. More details will be announced at this year’s Blissdom Canada conference — and the whole PlayPanel team has been invited to attend. I was heartbroken last year when I had to sell my Blissdom 2010 ticket because the conference coincided with the closing date on the new house, and ticked off at myself for totally missing the wafer-thin window of ticket sales this year, so you can imagine how excited I am to be actually going this fall after all! (Speaking of Fisher-Price, don’t forget to sign up for their Celebrating Milestones program, where you can win a $200 prize pack of Fisher-Price toys AND a $200 spa gift card for you! /plug)

And! As if that weren’t enough excitement… I was on my way to one of the infernal French exams when I happened to catch a tweet from Andrea: “Hey @DaniGirl – I just opened up my copy of @Canadian_Living and noticed that you are ‘blog of the month’ Congrats!”

To which I said, “Whaaaaa?” I had no idea! And it took about a week before I was able to track down a copy of the September issue of Canadian Living (sadly, my subscription lapsed last fall, but I am definitely going to remember to renew it now!) And lookit that, she was right! Postcards from the Mothership is Canadian Living’s blog of the month!

Canadian Living's blog of the month!

Wow. What a month! I’ll tell you this much — 42 is turning out to be a very lucky number indeed!

Porch Mini-Sessions: The M Family

July was an amazing month for Mothership Photography, and it will take me the rest of the summer just to get around to blogging about the terrific fun we had at a handful of portrait sessions!

Seems like a hundred years ago now, but it was only a couple of weeks ago when the M family came out to Manotick for a mini-session on the porch. It was a lovely summer afternoon, and we couldn’t have asked for a better day for portraits. I also couldn’t have asked for a sweeter, more photogenic family!

M Storyboard 2

I was warned that the six year old son had a habit of making that squinty non-smile that boys of that age seem to make, and so I took it as a personal challenge to bring a genuine smile to his face. Little did he know, I’ve had lots and lots and LOTS of practice battling that boy non-smile thing. Bwhahaha, I won!

M family kids

M Family portrait

(I’m trying something new with the storyboards – what do you think?)

M storyboard 1

It was a lovely afternoon spent with a lovely family — not a bad way to pass the time on a summer day! Thank you, M Family!

Now that the summer is coming to a close, I’ll have far fewer spots available for custom photo sessions. If you’d like to book your family’s portrait session, you should get in touch soon!

The end of a decade of diapers

With the exception of a brief and glorious six month break in late 2007, we’ve been changing diapers in this house for a rather astonishing nine and a half year block. Assuming a reasonable five diapers a day, and nearly two years of double diaper duty while Tristan was a toddler and Simon a newborn, that’s conservatively just a little shy of TWENTY THOUSAND diapers.

*pause for thoughtful consideration of the mountain of time, money and mess that comprises 20,000 dirty diapers*

And so, we embark upon our last potty training voyage. I have to admit, we’ve been a little laissez-faire about the whole thing. The idea had been that we’d approach potty training while we were both home on vacation this summer (the other boys were successfully potty trained in the summer around age 3.5 as well, so we really haven’t even thought about trying before now) except with the French test and the photography and everything else, we sort of forgot to get around to it. So with just a few days of vacation left, I decided rather abruptly this week that it was time — no fanfare, no breathless bloggy updates, and no frantic googling of tips and tricks. I bought a pack of underwear, and dug out a bag of skittles from the treat box. We were good to go.

It was my friend UberGeek, also father to three boys and just far enough ahead of us on the parenting curve to be full of great advice, who suggested the disposable underwear idea. Given that the first few days and weeks would inevitably lead to accidents, he suggested when we were potty training Tristan way back in the day that we acquire the biggest bag of cheap underwear we could find for the training period, and save the fancy Sponge Bob and Spiderman licensed stuff for the longer term. Sometimes, it’s easier to toss a mess than to deal with it. Hey, it’s cotton, it will biodegrade far quicker than those 20,000 disposable diapers!

Lucas did great for the first day. I sat him on the potty a few times and nothing happened, but to our great surprise and delight, late in the afternoon he rushed frantically into the bathroom saying, “I gotta go! I gotta go!” and he did – in the toilet. That’s one clear advantage of big boys who potty train well past the toddler years — we’ve never bothered with an actual potty and for the last two boys didn’t even bother with special seats for the regular toilet. I’m all about the convenience and path of least resistance, and this definitely qualifies!

The next day, we had mixed success. He did well all day until the big boys reported he was hiding shortly before dinner, his telltale sign that he was busy filling his diaper — except he wasn’t wearing one. So we’re down one pair of underwear but more importantly, I was abruptly and unpleasantly reminded of my least-favourite aspect of this whole potty training deal: the wiping. I seem to manage to erase the ugly details from child to child, but it seems to me in retrospect that the period between graduation from diapers to potty and the ability to wipe one’s own tucus is interminable. It’s actually way easier to wipe a prone butt with a diaper wipe than an upright butt with toilet paper. Way easier. #357 on the list of things they forgot to put in the parenting manual.

And now here I am at the point of this long and rambly potty post. There is one key difference between potty training this child and his two older brothers — a septic system. The potty training part doesn’t worry me at all, but in my less enlightened pre-septic years, I found those so-called “flushable wipes” a godsend. Butt! (ha!) Consumer Reports found that while TP disintegrated in a mere 7 seconds, a flushable wipe did not even start to break down even after 30 minutes of agitation. Do a quick search on “flushable wipes septic system” and you’ll never flush one down again, I promise you.

So, enlightened bloggy peeps, any ideas to make the interminable stretch of butt-wiping a little more bearable? I’m thinking maybe dampening the TP first? Using the wipes but bagging them and throwing them out? Is there something simpler that I’m overlooking?

Feel free to share your potty training travails and successes as well. I think I may need the inspiration in the days, weeks and *whimper* months to come…

Project 365: All caught up, and a birthday present for me!

It took three posts about 365 this week to do it, but I’m finally all caught up. Yay! And sorry for the glut of pictures this week. Well, not really. All these years, I’ve always said that I can only blog what’s in my head, and my brain is pretty much entirely in the shape of a camera body these days!

One of the things I never did get around to blogging this week is that it was my birthday on Monday. It gives me a certain geeky delight to finally be the answer to Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe and Everything — 42!! And my birthday present from my parents, Beloved and the boys was something I’ve coveted for a long time, a Lensbaby Composer Pro lens!

What’s a Lensbaby? It’s a creative effects lens that turns on (in the case of the Composer line) a ball and socket, allowing you to selectively focus. You know how you can blur the background with a shallow depth of field by opening your aperture up as wide as possible, aka using the smallest f-stop number? With that, you can only blur out things in the frame that are behind or in front of your flat plane of focus. The Lensbaby allows you to blur out things in the same plane, and you can move the “sweet spot” of focus around the frame by twisting the ball and socket part of the lens. It gives a very dreamy kind of look to pictures, and a bit of a stretched perspective to the very edges of the frame.

It took a bit of getting used to it. This first picture I took was of Katie (since she was my first “baby” she seemed like a good first subject for my Lensbaby!) and while you can see the selective focus at work, it’s not a stunning example of the lens at its best. The sweet spot is about half way up her snout, and with an ordinary lens using a small depth of field, her paw should be in focus, too, because it’s the same distance from the camera as her nose.

222:365 Lensbaby Katie

The thing about the Lensbaby is that it’s a partly manual lens — you set the aperture from a set of magnetic rings you actually drop into the camera (so no changing apertures on the fly) and you can set your camera to aperture priority mode so that the camera chooses the shutter speed. I found, though, that the exposures were a little hit-and-miss and I’ve switched over to manual mode a few times to get better control. The hardest part, though, is controlling the focus. I used to be quite adept at manual focusing, because with my D40 and my 50mm lens, I had to manually focus all my shots. I’ve gotten lazier, or older, or less able to focus, though, and the manual focus thing is a little tiring. Worse, though, is figuring out whether the subject I’m trying to focus on is actually in the sweet spot or maybe I’ve got the sweet spot pointed somewhere else and the spot that I’m peering at will never actually resolve no matter how much I tinker with the focus. It’s definitely a learning curve. But when you get shots like this one, I think it’s more than worth it.

224:365 Lensbaby farm

And when I went poking around Watson’s Mill one perfectly still and perfectly gorgeous summer morning, the Lensbaby and I had a grand old time. Lensbaby + Watson’s Mill + perfect summer morning = bliss.

223:365 Reflections of Watson's Mill

Speaking of summer, is this not a perfect summer picture? I planted two whole packages of sunflowers this year, and even sprouted one inside (it was a Mother’s Day gift) and transplanted the seedling into the garden. You know how many sunflowers I got this year? None. Apparently while I may take pretty good pictures, I suck as a gardener. Lucky for me, there are publicly consumable sunflowers available!

221:365 I love summer

Thank goodness, there are perennials in the garden that don’t require any care from me, like these yellow daisies.

217:365 yellow daisy

I took this picture at about a quarter to six one morning while I was studying for my French test, and at the end of the day realized that I hadn’t picked up my camera again for the whole day – and so this became the picture of the day, my bedheaded boy.

218:365 Bed head

Apparently sleep was an unconscious theme this week!

219:365 Yawn

And finally, last but certainly not least… I mentioned that Monday was my birthday, right? What better way to spend a birthday than doing porch portraits of the two-week old son of a friend? Baby N is by far the youngest visitor to grace the porch, and he wasn’t really interested in being posed. Holy cats, the newborn photography thing is a LOT harder than it looks. We did manage to get a few good shots, though, and while we tried to get him all tucked up on top of the scale (his mom is hovering about half an inch outside the frame) that last leg would not stay put — and in the end, I kind of like it dangling like that. Isn’t he perfect? I think I might need another baby after spending time with him. Um, don’t tell Beloved.

220:365 Baby N

From Lensbabies to lovely babies, it was a photogenic week!

Friday Family Fun: Back yard camp out!

I love the idea of camping. Fresh air, change of scenery, the great outdoors, campfires and sleeping under the stars. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a princess and also love nine hours of sleep. In a bed, not on the ground. And not within arm’s reach of my entire family.

That’s why I really love the idea of a backyard camp out — the less diva-ish members of the family (that is, everybody except me!) can sleep in a tent, but there’s no 500 meter hike to the nasty outdoor loo in the middle of the night, and if it pours the farthest you have to run is across the patio to safety. Also? No bears.

Campout 2

Yesterday was just about the most perfect day imaginable for a camp out. Warm sunny day, cool dry night. We had a camp-ish supper of sausages, salads, and (I swear, I didn’t plan it maliciously!) beans. Then we stoked up the fire pit and had s’mores for dessert. If you don’t have a fire pit in your back yard, you can always do these on the BBQ, too!

Campout 1

The kids couldn’t wait to get their jammies on, and Beloved and I laughed at the steady stream of “mandatory” supplies that migrated into the tent: favourite blankies and pillows and stuffies and comic books and more blankets and more books. One handheld electronic game was intercepted and denied. The kids couldn’t wait to get to bed – should have thought of this years ago!

Campout 3

I listened with half an ear most of the night, expecting to hear the patio door sliding open and little feet seeking softer beds, but they all made it until dawn in the tent. Lucky for me, I was already awake — Willie couldn’t find anyone else to torment at 5 am and had been chasing dust motes across my bed for more than half an hour when the kids tumbled in, boisterous and happy after their night in the tent.

And the best part of backyard camping? You don’t need to re-stoke the fire to have that first, and very necessary, cup of coffee in the morning!

Project 365: In which she crams in news, updates, and oh yes, a few pictures too

Remember last time I did the 365 project, and I ended up having 366 pictures in it because I lost count? Yeah. The hardest part of the 365 project was counting to 365! And now, I’ve somehow gotten myself all out of sequence in being so behind. I’m on track for numbers, but somehow ended up with a week that has an extra day. Hmmm. Oh well, so this catch-up edition of my weekly 365 post is a little longer than the others.

Anyway, you can see why I went into communications and not, say, astrophysics as a career. I actually find astrophysics absolutely fascinating, but you probably need to be able to do things like, um, count. And keep track of things with a modicum more accuracy than I seem able. “We found an extrasolar planet with an atmosphere remarkably similar to the Earth! Where is it? Um, somewhere to the left of M31, give or take forty light years…”

Speaking of the intersection of paying work and photography (also good that I don’t rely on my segue ability for a paycheque, isn’t it?) I have some exciting news this week. I’ve been approached by Getty Images to license some of my photographs. Fun, eh? Stock photography doesn’t pay exceptionally well, mostly a couple of dollars per licensed image from what I can tell, but it’s more than what the photo was making just sitting there looking pretty on Flickr. I’ve seen some photographers making in the hundreds of dollars per month, but they have a lot more images and frankly, some pretty amazing work.

This is the first image up for licence, and there are about half a dozen more in the works.

129:365 Dewy [Explored]

Who would have ever guessed at the beginning of my first 365 project in 2009 that it would lead to all these paid photography gigs? I can’t believe how much things have taken off this month — it’s very exciting!

Speaking of 365 projects, didn’t I say this was supposed to be a post about catching up? Here’s what I set out to show you today. When I went downtown for my job interview with the CRA, I was sitting at a traffic light and admiring this view of Parliament Hill. I never fail to be humbled by this view! (Even though I am not really looking forward to the commute back downtown to the Market from Manotick, I am looking forward to all the gorgeous downtown photo opportunities!)

208:365 Parliament Hill

I was going for a sort of a chiaroscuro effect with this one – just a little bit of low key light on his face. Not entirely convinced it worked, though!

210:365 Morning light

This too is a bit of a play with chiaroscuro – I’ve been thinking a lot about light lately!

213:365 Burr

I haven’t had as much time as I would have hoped to play with my camera even though I’m on vacation because I’ve been spending at least an hour or two each day studying for my infernal French exam. (I went to write it yesterday, managed to write the grammar test and then they sent us home because the AC was broken and they were shutting down the building!! Gah! I have to go back today to write the reading comprehension test!) Anyway, if you’re going to spend hours of your vacation studying for a French exam, there are worse places to do it than on the porch!

215:365 Studying

I love this picture so much that I almost hate to bury it deep in an extended 365 post. I’m betting you can figure out where I took it! 😉 (Have I mentioned how much I love the Agriculture Museum lately? If you haven’t gone recently, you must!)

216:365 Cowboys at the Farm

You know my life is a little out of control when something as wicked-cool as the Social Capital conference happens and I can’t even get around to writing a blog post about it. But it was a week ago Saturday and it was *awesome*! One of these weeks I hope to write a proper blog post about it. This is from the round-table discussion I hosted on photography and Flickr — it was a great little chat!

211:365 SoCapOtt

Did I mention it’s been insanely busy? French test, conference, interviewing and scrambling for new job, and two (TWO!) portrait sessions for Mothership Photography this week. Yikes! This was from a session I did at a local park on that day when the heat blazed its way well past the 40C mark. It was crazy hot, but I had a great time with this toddler, his parents and his grandparents, chasing him all over the playground. Picture a not-quite-two-year-old on the loose in the playground wearing nothing but his diaper and a kilt. I know, adorable, right?

209:365 Sandy toes with kilt

This was from a porch portrait session I did last weekend. The kids were all dressed up for family portraits, but once we had the formals done, their parents let them have some fun on the playstructure and the treehouse in the back yard. I love love love this — there’s something dreamy and lovely about it, don’t you think?

212:365 Dreaming

And finally! We ordered Chinese food one night, and Tristan didn’t agree with my fortune cookie, so he made me up one he thought was more appropriate.

214:365 Good fortune

Good fortune, eh? I’m a lucky girl.