Just Me.

Self Portraits for Theme Thursday. Click through to The Land of K.A.

2009

I want to clean out my basement already.
I want to plant a more successful vegetable garden-more of the things I know will grow.
I want to use my treadmill.
I want to play with my kids more. I want to not say, "not right now, I have to..." so much.
I want to complete a 365 photo project.
I want to hang photos on my walls.
I want to get more family photos out of the computer.
I want to sell or publish a photograph.
I want to shadow a professional photographer on a shoot.
I want to study under professional photographers.
I want to rent some cool lenses to try them out.
I want to go away with my husband with no children again.
I want to take care of him.
I want to live each day gratefully.

2008

I turned 29.
I have been married for 6 1/2 years.
I have embraced my jeans and T-shirts mom uniform and added crocs.
I joined a camera club.
I read Understanding Exposure. And read it again. And again.
I read countless photography books from the library.
I have been inspired and humbled by the talent I've been watching in Flickr.
I have embraced RAW.
I photographed sunflowers and daisies, my favorites.
I hung some photos on my wall.
I made a quilt.
I painted my children's bedrooms and my bathroom.
We bought big kid furniture...no more cribs or changing tables.
I planted a vegetable garden and ate lots of yummy BLTs.
I planted several herbs and made delicious batches of pesto.
We built a playset and spent lots of time outside.
I bought a treadmill and a Wii Fit.
I exercised sporadically.
I fell in love with good German food.
I fell in love with good German beer.
We budgeted our money successfully (until the holidays) and found that it's not so hard.
We bought a minivan...the most glorious vehicle known to man.
I reconnected with lots of old friends on Facebook.
I have loved and mothered my little family.
I am more wholly and completely myself than I have ever been.




2007

New Woman

This morning I went in for a haircut at a new salon with a new person and I feel like a new woman!


Back:



Behind the ears:


Serious with fluffed hair:


Also, I could use these pictures to audition to be a Nikon camera model.



Here is the before:

Quite long, heavy, blah. (Also wet in this picture)

Catching Up in a Nutshell

It always pleasantly surprises me when I have been absent from blogging and people notice. I get emails from dear, sweet bloggers who have noticed my lack of updates, or I run into someone in real life who has been wondering what we've been up to.

In the last few weeks, to tell you the truth, I've kind of retreated into myself for a bit. When my husband's grandmother passed away, it really shook us up. It's been taking us, and more specifically, me, a while to get back into the swing of things.

• I've been waking up around 5 o'clock in the morning for the last month or so. No alarm, just some restlessness. You would think I would be getting so much done, but really it just means I've reactivated my Warcraft account.
• I walk/ran for 24 minutes the other day. And by "slash-ran" I mean my legs moved in a running fashion while the top half of my body ached, bounced and cried. Oh and you know that soft, pooch of a mama belly that reminds you of just how enormously large your body can be? Yeah, do they make some kind of supportive garment that would keep it from reminding me quite so intensely?
• I thought that maybe I could try and walk/run by myself sometime before my husband leaves for work in the morning. I should have thought of this back when the sun was coming up before 7, which is, um, after my husband leaves.
• Jack is potty trained. Completely. All done. It only cost me an estimated $4 in prizes per successful number two for the last month, several future carpet cleaning bills and many, many tolls on my sanity.
• It was supposed to rain today and then turn into fall. Instead it's close to 90 degrees and I think I smell a little.
• I have new curtains, the first curtains I have ever bought. They are delightfully grown-up and elegant. They will soon have baby face print smears on them because Sarah finds them a hilarious place to hide.
• I have no Halloween costumes for the kids yet. I need ideas! Leave comments!

Flickr. Sigh. After reading Zoot's post I have decided to change the way I use Flickr. It seems that since it is such a large, public place for photos that there's a lot of picture stealing. I have read about several bloggers who have had problems with pictures of their children being used for other websites. Nothing completely creepy (that I've heard of), but enough to make me want to change things around. I like taking photos and sharing them on Flickr and on my blog(s), but I am going to change all pictures of my kids so that only family and friends can see them. I wouldn't like it if someone stole a pictures of a flower from my Flickr, but it would not. be. okay. if someone took a picture of my kids.

If you are a blogging/virtual friend: I would like you to be a "friend" in Flickr. Contact me either in Flickr, in my comments, or I will try and find you in Flickr.

If you are a real-life friend: Please sign in to Flickr and I will make you "family." I know it's another login/password thing to register, but I will feel better about knowing who can see pictures of my babies. (I think you can use your yahoo user name and password). Also, you will get to see the best pictures (shh, don't tell the blog friends).

Link to my Flickr; I am MotherBunny if you search for me.

(The links on pictures in my archives are going to be messed up for a while till I get the Flickr permissions straightened out, so, if you actually go back and read them, I'll fix them soon, or maybe never if it doesn't seem like a problem.)

I'll Be There For You, Like I've Been There Before*

My junior year of college I lived in an apartment off campus with my three best friends. The four of us had so much fun together; it really was one of the best years of my life. But we had a falling out and broke our lease and went our separate ways. A couple of us kept in touch and we would sort of hear what the others were up to over the years.

This year, a tragic circumstance brought the four of us to the same place, together for the first time in seven years. Seven years! And it is like we had never left each other.

We have all gotten married and now there are six babies between us.

These girls were some of the most important people to me during one of the most fun and exciting years of my life. We lived the Friends lifestyle, only minus the actual adulthood and career jobs. We borrowed each others' clothes, got annoyed with each other when we left cereal bowls with milk sitting out (yeah, that was me), and saved roaches under bowls for someone else to kill so we wouldn't have to feel the crunch and squish.

In the seven years we've been apart I think I needed that time to grow up (a lot). I guess we all did. And I am so blessed that we can come back together, hang out and watch our children play. And I can hug these girls and kiss them and snuggle their babies like they are my family. They were a part of my life when I was doing a lot of growing up. And I'm so glad they are able to see the woman I've become.





* It's so funny when a cheesy TV theme song can make me teary!