Chef Nick

School's out for Winter break and I took off the week of Christmas to get the house ready, put up the rest of the decorations and bake cookies with the Kids. We had a great time and even made enough cookies for Mark to take some to the office. Of course nothing lasts long in cubeville :)

We made it through the Christmas morning gift-ripping extravaganza, the turkey cooking, the 'she got more than I did' squabbles, oh, and let's not forget the usual comment from Ms. Picky Eater Katie (she's 4) after everyone said how yummy the turkey was..."I don't like turkey" (groan!) We're lucky if we can get her to eat anything that's not chocolate or cookies or candy.

Hmm, where was I? Oh yea, school break. So, for the second week, we signed Nick up for a couple of 3-day classes at our Hands-on Museum. The morning class was CSI for 1st to 4th graders. He had a blast dusting for Fingerprints (with cocoa), identifying Hair and Fibers and solving small mysteries using their newly acquired skills.

After lunch, it was Easy as Pie, a cooking and baking class. They made empanadas, tarts and the final project was an apple pie. They kept a recipe book of all their creations and got to keep their chef's hat and apron--plus the pie!

So tonight, he had to demonstrate his new skill and prepare his apple pie for us--a great opportunity for me to try out some of my Christmas presents--a couple of popup flash lightscoops for my Nikon D60 and a hotshoe attachment for my external flash that makes it fit onto a regular tripod. I took both jpg and raw images, so I can post the jpg's right away (provided they don't look too crappy). Then I can spend more time tweaking them in ACR and PS.
The pie came out great and Nick was very proud he'd done it all by himself.

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Good Night Sweet Prince

After selecting a picture to use for the i ❤ faces "Sweet Dreams" Photo Challenge, I still had the other 6 pictures I had identified as candidates. The challenge is over, but I couldn't help it, I had to pick another one of my favorites. This is Nick at about 16 months taking a nap in his 'sling'. I loved that thing; once I had him in it, I could get so much work done and he'd just be happily snoozing along. I tried to schedule my trips to the grocery store around nap times and I remember getting the stink-eye from other mothers with screaming kids in the cart :O

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Sweet Dreams

i ❤ faces: "Sweet Dreams" Photo Challenge

I love this week's challenge, because it brought me back to those first few months after bringing ouradopted son, Nick, home in 2000. He's 8 months old in this picture and we'd just had him for 2 months. Naturally, we were taking pictures every chance we got. I have several of the falling asleep with the bottle pictures, but I had to pick just one (not an easy task). so here it is.

Check out the other entries for this week's challenge.

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