Good Pictures and Poor Pictures

***Good pictures a' comin' alert.  At some point in the next week or so, I plan to upload some amazing photos from a family photography session and blog a little bit about the photographer.  

***Poor pictures a' comin' alert: Bear with me the next few weeks, as I'm resolved to learn the manual settings on my point and shoot camera.  

When I wanted to buy myself an electric guitar, my dad said I had to memorize all of the chords on a chord chart and prove that I knew them on my acoustic before I could buy the orange electric guitar I wanted.

And I did.

So it's one of those things.  

I'm resolved to learn the manual setting on my basic camera, as it will likely be awhile before we can afford a more expensive camera, and I want at least the basic knowledge of how cameras work before I get a fancy one.  

By all means, if you see something I'm doing wrong (especially on a consistent basis), and you have the knowledge and skills of photography, let me know in a comment.  I will be so grateful.

Also, we don't have any photo editing software on any of our computers other than Microsoft Picture Manager.  We used to many years ago, but it was not a "legal" copy of Photoshop, so we got rid of it.  If you have any editing tips as to contrast, cropping, etc. that aren't "high-tech", I'd love them too.  I'm all about learning new things. 

Million and I dyed rice a couple days ago.  We didn't have rubbing alcohol in the house, so I used cooking wine.  Ha. That's our budget right now.   I'm going to put all of this rice in a jar with some marbles and other small objects;  Million can shake it around and watch the rice blend colors and the objects move around as a result of the shaking.  I might even wrap it and put it under the tree so that Million can tear even MORE homemade wrapping paper off presents.  He can wait two weeks to shake some rice, right?

 Here's one of the salt-dough ornaments that Michael, Million, and I made this year.  I have a few about the house to remind me that God cares for the birds, and He cares for me more.

I blogged a while back about Michael ordering some diapers and surprising me.  They came a few days ago.  Aren't they cute? I'm the little cloth diaper dork who has a chart in the laundry room to mark down how many diapers I've washed to see when my diaper investment has been fully "paid off." For the record---under 480 more diapers washed, or under 9 weeks left until we recoup our cloth diaper financial investment.  Even if Million started potty training early (which he will not be...because I'm not ready for that yet!), we'd have a "free" stash of 40ish for the most part gender-neutral diapers and all of the go-along's for any future kids.


And that's all I've got for now.  Hope your weekend is fantastic.  Michael might (crosses fingers) be able to spend some time at home this weekend.  And we will potentially have homemade pretzels to celebrate.  Or bagels.  Because bagels make all the world better.