Princess for a Day

On Saturday morning, Katie announced that she wanted to dress up in last year's Halloween costume (a pink princess outfit complete with tiara) and have a Tea Party. She spent some time trying to decide which ones of her stuffed animals to invite, since she only has four chairs.
Well, you don't have to tell me twice, I know how to spot an opportunity to grab the camera to try to capture this event (emphasis on try :D). Of course, I only managed a couple of shots, mainly because her highness didn't want to hold still and the whole event lasted just about under 15 minutes before we declared the party over and is was decreed that we wanted to watch a video *sigh*. I so envy the professionals who used to come to Katie's daycare--Li'l Angels Photography. They always got the best, most natural smiles out of both my kids. I can't seem to get them to stop long enough to try to focus :P
I did, however have the perfect pages on hand--Quickpages (also known as Ploppers) at that. So, all the work of the Layout has already been done and all one has to do is plop pictures into the placeholders. These particular ones are freebies from Vera Lim (vlim_itsmydayqp6 and qp1_antje), so these came together pretty fast.

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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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Pink Katie

i ❤ faces: Pink Week Photo Challenge

This is my first entry for this site and I am honored to participate. I have (fortunately) not had anyone in my immediate family who was suffering from Breast Cancer.
Finding pictures for this theme was hardly challenging, as pink is Katie's favorite color. What was, and forever is, challenging was to find pictures where she was holding still long enough to not look like an eyewitness picture of proof of aliens or Sasquatch.
Although this isn't the sharpest picture, I really like Katie's expression. I was supposed to take a picture of Nestor (the bird), which I dutifully did. She wasn't so happy two minutes later, when I told her I had enough pictures of Nestor and wanted to take some pictures of other things. :)

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Time for a quick tutorial

It’s Saturday and that usually means cleanup time -- blech. But all work and no play...you know? So, in-between laundry and dishes I took some time to work on a cool movie-poster tutorial from the NAPP site (http://www.photoshopuser.com/members/?page=view&id=kung-fu-poster - accessible for NAPP members) which turns a picture (preferably with a kung-fu pose) into a movie poster. The tutorial used a stock image, but I had just taken a picture of Nick a couple of weeks ago that I thought was perfect. I even thought of a way to finish the project faster than the tutorial by using a brush for the sunburst in the background rather than creating it from scratch, so it took only about 20 minutes. I think it came out quite well, so I uploaded it to my Scrapbook album.

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Saturday @ Home

Wow, we didn't have anything planned for this weekend! Usually, there is at least some birthday, cubscout event, or something else going on. And, to top it off, the sun was out, which doesn't happen too often on weekends here in Washington after all! So, we went outside and the kids did some swinging and digging and then they found an old plastic basketball hoop stand which we bought for Nick when he was 2 or 3. After a few hoops (more or less), Nick started coughing again and I started to get a headache--darn allergies! Well, back inside, where Katie decided that it was Mommy Pig's Birthday and she proceded to organize a tea-party.
Invited guests included Max and Ruby, Blue, Magenta and Marlin--not Nemo, since this particular fish does not have the lucky fin.

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29 Seconds

I used a template from an Ad Challenge by Kellie Mieze at www.DesignerDigitals.com.
The Quote is also from a Designer Digitals Challenge by Jackie Eckles.

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Template Challenge

I had been looking for something to use this picture with, when this template came along. I used another photo I took from the ferris wheel at the bottom of the Spaceneedle and applied some sketch filters, then I removed some of the color, erased some edges and painted some color back in to make it look like a work in progress sketch.
Picture Template: Kellie Mize-Ad Challenge Freebie (at DesignerDigitals),
Papers: KPertiet_NotebookNo2-12, Angela_Barton_One_paper8, Carousel_BG9_juliemead, MRE_SSPaper_Downtown_Special; applied various blending modes; Edges: NRJ_FREEBIE_INKEDEDGES, SG_bonus_grunge_overlay.

After I saw the Neon at Night podcast from the Russell Brown Show, this looked like the perfect candidate LO to try it out.

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