WordPress weekly photo challenge: Blue

Living in San Diego, CA, I get to enjoy beautiful blue skies the majority of the year. I’m not sure what makes the sky so blue here, but I’m guessing it has to do with our latitude and the ways the sun rays light up the sky. It really does help when taking photos of various subjects, and using the blue sky as a nice, contrasted background.

I took this photo in our backyard a few weeks ago, after what will probably be our last rain for the next six months.

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Blue

I also can’t help thinking about my boys when I hear the word blue. My whole world is blue because of them. They avoid the aisles of girl toys, calling them “the pink aisles”. They both have beautiful blue eyes and look great with blue tops, so I buy a lot of those. We also have a blue couch at our house, courtesy of IKEA. With a removable cover you can throw in the washer, this is one of the best furniture investments I’ve made with two kids. Here’s my four-year old when he was just a baby, sitting on the blue couch in his blue footsy pajamas, with his beautiful blue eyes (which you really can’t see well on this picture). 

And here’s a photo of his brother when he wasn’t even two years old, sitting on our blue couch in my blue T-shirt, using my Boppy pillow and a burpcloth to breastfeed his lovey. How cute is that? I also have a photo of him using my breastpump but you’ll have to wait for the color “yellow” to be the theme of the photo challenge!

A special Mother’s Day story

This past Thursday afternoon, I received a strange email message that got my attention immediately. It came from my Every Day I See A Cow blog, mentioning a post I wrote last Thanksgiving where I featured cow hand puppets from IKEA. But it wasn’t about a cow.

The email sender was a mom located in Nova Scotia, Canada, almost 4000 miles away from San Diego, where I live. As I read her message, I quickly realized it was a cry for help. Earlier during the day, her two-year old daughter lost her lovey. Her ONLY lovey. Yep, no backup. Gasp!

So this desperate mom browsed the web for hours looking for a new lovey, which happens to be a lamb hand puppet from IKEA, just like the ones featured next to the cow on my Thanksgiving cow blog post. Of course, luck would have it that IKEA recently stopped selling these hand puppets. Apparently they’re not a hot item on the resale market either. At least, not on the day this lamb puppet disappeared.

As you can imagine, this tragic and sudden loss didn’t go well for her daughter, who kept crying and asking for her lamby. As she couldn’t find another one to buy anywhere, this poor mom became frustrated until she saw my blog post and emailed me, asking me if by any chance I would have an IKEA lamb hand puppet. Hmm, I replied, attaching the photo below, like… this one?

IKEA lamb hand puppet

I actually bought several hand puppets at IKEA a few years ago. I think they were only $1.99 each at the time and very entertaining for the kids. I think I have a frog, a chicken, a zebra, and of course, a lamb. My kids still like to play with these puppets once in a while but I figured they could manage with one less.

So I got this mom’s address and on Friday morning I went to the post office to send our lamb to greener pastures. I’m pretty sure Nova Scotia has much greener pastures to offer than San Diego. And the best thing about all this is, in about a week a little girl will be happily reunited with “her” lamb lovey. Someone should tell her it just went on a vacation for a week or so…

This experience tells me that as moms, we need to stick together. Maybe one day another mom will be the one helping me out when I need it. But if there’s one single piece of advice I can offer new moms, it’s to get several copies of your baby’s lovey. That’s what I did with my two kids and even though we haven’t lost any so far, I don’t regret the additional purchases. 

By the way, if your child ever lost his or her lovey, I’d love to hear your story. How far did you go to replace it?

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Unfocused

The first thought I had when I read this week’s Wordpress photo challenge was to feature my mind. There’s nothing more unfocused in my life than my mind right now. Scrambled thoughts? Checked. Lack of focus? Checked. Wheels spinning and nothing moving? Checked.

Of course it’d be pretty hard to take a picture of my mind and it might even scare you a bit. The good news is, I’m working on clearing up my mind and turning my many thoughts into action. I’m getting my days organized so I can get the important things done. And it seems to be working, so I’m taking it day by day. My biggest challenge at this point is not only to handle the urgent items, but also the ones that have been sitting on the back burner for so long, they make me my creative side itch. Have you ever had that feeling? It sure feels good to scratch the itch once in a while.

But I digress, and I’ve done a lot of that recently,  so let me get back on track. Unfocused is one thing I’m very good at when I take pictures, especially when I use the macro feature. My camera is VERY good at focusing its macro on everything except the very thing I’m interested in. I’m sure there’s a trick to it but I haven’t figured it out yet.

So I often end up with images that clearly lack focus. And getting rushed by my kids doesn’t help. Last weekend we went to the zoo and I got the opportunity to take pictures of beautiful flowers. At some point, I spotted a butterfly on some lovely purple flowers so I decided to use the macro to capture it. This is how most of my images turned out, with no real focus on anything in the frame.

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Unfocused

Fortunately I managed to take one single image that turned out OK, even though I’m not too crazy about the lighting situation. But at least the subject was in focus. Unlike my kids, who had run away to the exhibit next door and kept calling me to come and see a tiny antelope called dik dik. I’ll admit it was pretty cute. But I still like my butterfly better.

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Two Subjects

I just spent the past two weeks enjoying Spring Break with my two boys full-time and… I survived! We had a long wish list of activities and managed to do all of them except two – not so bad. Of course I’ll be missing spending time with my kids but it will be nice to get some free time back to work on some work projects I set aside during our vacation time.

One of the activities on our list was to visit the Legoland Sealife aquarium in Carlsbad, CA, north of San Diego. Every time I’ve gone to an aquarium and tried to take pictures with my digital camera, I’ve always ended up with not a single photo good enough to keep. Too dark, too blurry, too pixely… I’ve never read my camera manual closely and couldn’t figure out how to take good pictures in such low light environment when it’s not the camera’s best working conditions.

So this time I decided to do some homework, especially after Nancy at Nrhatch encouraged me to take more photos of sea creatures in aquariums a couple of months ago. I guess my hard work paid off. Of course not every picture I took was good. In fact I had to delete many, but I still ended up with a few good ones. And several of them fit this week’s WordPress photo challenge about “two subjects.”

In this first picture, you can see two Japanese spider crabs crawling on opposite sides of the tank. These crabs can have a leg span of 16 feet, yikes! Or, yum, if you like eating crab like me.

Weekly wordpress photo challenge: two subjects - Japanese spider crabs

I’m really proud of this second picture, my first success at photographing sea jellies. I wanted to take a photo of just one but I couldn’t get close enough (other people were standing in front of the tank) and they were twirling around too fast. But in this shot I managed to end up with two sea jellies.

Wordpress photo challenge: two subjects - sea jellies at Legoland Sealife aquarium

My last picture is one of my boys “underwater”. My eldest stood there for me to photograph him when suddenly his brother head’s popped up right behind him. Two for one!

Wordpress photo challenge: two subjects - Legoland Sealife aquarium

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Regret

I try to live my life without regrets simply because I find the feeling unproductive and overwhelmingly negative. However the one thing I do almost every day that causes regret is taking pictures. I can’t remember how many times I’ve found myself in a situation where I was poorly equipped. A great scene with the kids, a beautiful sky, an inspiring sunset and… no camera.

Until a year ago, my cell phone featured a 1MP camera, so it was pretty much useless and I tended to carry my good digital camera around with me. Then I upgraded to a 3MP camera phone and started thinking it may be enough when I’m on the go. Honestly, it’s not. It does poorly in low light conditions and even worse when my kids squirm around.

Here’s a photo I took at SeaWorld San Diego a few months ago in the new sea turtle exhibit. The tank is absolutely gorgeous and makes you feel like you’re snorkeling among dozens of sea turtles. But when I tried to capture this lovely moment with my phone camera, all I got was this stinking picture. And now our SeaWorld passes are expired. Regret!

Wordpress weekly photo challenge: Regret

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