Bad Mommy Moment...

Someone has been on a bit of a milk strike for the past two months (which it's strange because he used to LOVE his milk).  And he will only nibble at yogurt or cheese so I have resorted to sneaking dairy into his meals like making homemade clam chowder.  I have tried smoothies in the past for his snack (which he didn't like because he knew it was milk based - too smart for me!), but the other day he tried some carrot/orange juice and loved it so I thought I would try again.  I saw a recipe to make a smoothie with milk, OJ and bananas (why lead me astray like this Reader's Digest Cookbook?!).  The blender was occupied with some chicken soup so I just decided to mix the first two ingredients by hand.  Something in the back of my mind told me that you shouldn't mix acidic juice with milk but hey, OJ and milk is basically what an Orange Julius is right?  Right?? Besides though it sounds kinda vile I did a taste test and it tasted pretty good.  My super sweet unsuspecting baby actually guzzled this concoction down.  I felt proud at my trickery and thought I had a surefire way to get Ethan to drink more milk.

Fast forward and hour later (the below is a bit TMI and graphic.  Be forewarned): 
Ethan's poor little stomach decided it did not like the drink.  At all.  It revolted in a major way.  He threw up over himself, me and down the entire 20 step staircase (which actually curves so this is projectile vomiting at it's finest).  At least he wasn't affected in any other way.  Right after upchucking three times he looked at me and said, 'Go outside now?'.  It wasn't until after we cleaned up, showered and dressed that he told me in no uncertain terms that he 'Don like that.  Don like orange juice'.  I don't blame him.  After this I don't like orange juice either.  Poor baby.

Making Collages in Lightroom

I haven't used the print feature of Lightroom before but wanted to learn how to make a collage solely within Lightroom and found it fairly easy to do so.  I basically followed this tutorial to make the grid collage with text shown below.  This other tutorial shows how to overide the one picture per page rule within the print module layouts and place multiple pictures of different sizes on one page.  Now if only I could find pre-existing templates for easy collage making!  It is very easy to do it yourself but I am that lazy.  =P

Our Saturday

This is how we spent the day in pictures:

A car ride to the park.

An early morning jog.

A ride on Daddy's shoulders.

Clowning around on the jungle gym.

Play time with play dough.

Cuddle time.

Bath time fun.

iheartfaces Fit-It-Friday's #51

This is the orginal:

My color edit:

All editing done in Lightroom only.
-Adjusted WB based on the whites of the eyes
-Cropped picture
-Increased brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance.
-Using adustment brushes increased clarity and exposure on eyes

My B&W edit:

HK Zoological and Botanical Gardens

This free park is open daily and located in Central. We took went for a visit last week to check out the birds and monkeys. They also have a reptile house but we didn't make it there.

The entrace to the park.

At the fountains.

We saw tons of birds and primates...

but Ethan was way more interested in the construction lights. He wanted to play with each and every one!

iheartfaces fix-it-Friday

Okay, I'm a day late to send in my contribution. I have been participating in fix-it-Friday for a few weeks now but have been too lazy to actual post my edits. Below is this week's challenge:

Before:

After:

Edited only using Lightroom:
1) Adjusted white balance based on white door paint using eyedropper tool.
2) Cropped photo.
3) Increased brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance.
4) Used skin smoothing tool on face. Photoshop will be much better for skin editing, but I don't have that!
5) Add very slight vignette

That's it!

Little Negotiator

Ethan is becoming quite the negotiator these days. Our conversation during lunch today:

Me: Look Ethan - we get to eat chicken soup for lunch today!
E: Don like it. (Don't like it)
Me: You didn't even taste it yet. Let's try some.
E: (refusing to let the spoon near his mouth) How bout cookie?
Me: We don't have any cookies.
E: How bout man ereal? (As we refer to Quaker Oat cereal since it has a picture of a man on the box. As opposed to 'circle ereal' which are Cheerios)
Me: How about some soup?
E: How bout eese-stick?
Me: Okay you can have a cheese stick. (I come back and give him the cheese)
E: (plays but does not eat cheese stick. gives me a big grin). How bout cookie?

*Sigh*. I miss the days where he would readily guzzle down (and love!) everything that we plopped in front of him. But of course back then he didn't know how to express his preferences either. =P

The Best Sound in the World

The best part of this age is the deep belly laughs that you get. I never know what will set off a fit of giggles - a new word, a funny sound, or lately having objects fall off from your head.

To Yeh Yeh and Nai Nai

I got an idea from my friend Cindy to make an album of our family tree (well actually it's just a print out of some pictures of members of our family). We will periodically whip out the pictures and he will say hi to everyone. Ethan has been missing his grandparents so decided to send a shout out.

Lightroom

I've recently started getting obsessed with photo editing. I love love love Lightroom. It's so easy and intuitive to use and you can batch process large groups of photos shot under the same condition with just a few clicks. My problem is that I love super saturated photos so I am a bit heavy handed with colors. Well, my other problem is that I'm not exactly a great photographer to begin with so my starting photo isn't all that great to begin with but we will ignore this one for now. =P

This is the original SOOC:

Edit 1:

Edit 2:

Okay, I also have a problem where I like to tweak the settings around a lot and then I can't figure out which version I like best.

Easter 2010

We had big plans for an egg hunt this year. Alas we were stymied twice. First when our friends who were hosting a get together with all the little kids at their house on Friday got sick so the event was cancelled. Then we found out that the public egg hunt in DB was only for kids 3 and older. So we ended up just having a little impromptu egg hunt in our living room. Ethan wasn't exactly too ecstatic about the thought of collecting eggs until he realized they were fun to spin around the room (until an extra hard kick resulted in an egg casualty). The eggs were dyed his favorite color - green!

Ethan kept wanting to put the eggs in his pocket.

Short clip of our fun with eggs.

Little sock bunnies that were made based on this tutorial. I can't sew very well so they didn't turn out as cute as the ones in the tutorial but Ethan liked them!

Ethan lit up when he saw the bunnies

It's hard to see from the picture but there were mobs of people at the DB egg hunt. And this was only one of the 5 egg hunts they had that day!

Dancing on the beach!

Even though we couldn't participate this year, we were able to scavenge some leftover eggs still hidden in the beach.

There was also a big festival in the town plaza. There were vendors selling balloons, clowns, and arenas to play egg hockey, ride a mini roller coaster, catch fish, and paint eggs.

Ethan got a balloon lion to play with.

Ethan had only eyes for the bouncy castle so we waited patiently for our turn to jump! The line was insane - it took us half an hour to reach the front, but it was worth it. Ethan loved bouncing around - so much so that he was very reluctant to leave (i.e. mini meltdown!) when our few minutes of fun were up.

And what was left of the balloon lion the next day. =P

All in all we had a lot of fun this Easter. Happy Easter everyone!