I’ve Moved!!!

If you’re here… I’ve moved!  I’m now at my dot com:

http://playdoughinmycarpet.com

Thanks so much for your visits and comments over the last 3 years.  I look forward to seeing you over at the new site!

Sentimental post…

Well, today’s the last official day of this blog.  For those of you who don’t know yet, I’ve set up a dot com at:

http://playdoughinmycarpet.com

Evidently to do a redirect from this blog to my new blog is in conflict with the TOS (terms of service).  So, I guess I’m asking you to just go to the new blog and sign up by one of three ways: by subscribing by email, by liking my Facebook page, or by following through Google Follow (if you have a Google Reader).

Anyway, after looking at some of my old posts, I started getting sentimental.  When I started I only had two kids (I was pregnant with our third).

Robin, Nathan, & Ashlyn, AUG 2008

I blogged about the joys of pregnancy, about bargain shopping, and interjected just a few things from our lives that I found amusing at the time.  I always enjoyed taking pictures and looking at photography books, but I never anticipated that I would enjoy photography so much (something I’ve been blogging about for over a year now).

I look forward to the journey ahead over at the dot com… I’m not sure what the future holds over there, but excited nonetheless.

Thanks for the memories!!!

Sunset Splendor…

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!  This Saturday will be the LAST day that Playdough in My Carpet will be at this address.  Please visit…

http://playdoughinmycarpet.com

You can follow either through: email subscription, Google Follow, or through the Facebook link.  Thanks so much!

 

I do love me a good beach sunset. However, it seems like trying to replicate this daily event through the lens of a camera is impossible. And it IS impossible. You can’t experience a sunset without seeing the rays spill out over clouds, reflecting over the way, warming your skin for the last time for the day.

Anyway, so here is an attempt to capture the end of what was a spectacular day. I’m really not sure what all happened that day, but to know that I lived it is a gift in itself. Here’s the before… there’s things I like about it, mainly the reflection of the sun in the little bit of water on the shoreline. I kind of like that you can see the circular haze around the sun.

BEFORE

AFTER

I must say, this “after” is quite a bit darker than the before. It seems like the trend is to make everything lighter, but I think there’s DRAMA in dark images. I love seeing a pic of a primarily dark subject with just a little light shining.

Anyway, first I went to work on the little sun reflections. I remembered a tutorial I saw on YouTube talking about starburst effects. I thought it would be cool to see one on the reflection on shore. It really didn’t do much to it, but it did provide a cool starburst on a bit of the sunlight peeking through the pier.

I wasn’t happy with how the sky ended up after these adjustments, though, so first I adjusted with curves. I still wasn’t happy, so I did another copy of the background layer and changed the blending mode to “multiply” and then masked out that on the sand to keep it from getting too dark. I then ran MCP’s Crystal Clear Web Sharpening.

Here they are side by side

Where did the summer go?

Seriously… where did it go?  I had such BIG plans for the summer.  One of my plans was to spend each day going through one month of photos beginning with March 2006.  How far did I get?  June 2006.  Yep, behind on that one.

My other plan was to do ALOT of fun things.  Movies, outings.  We’ve done a couple and I’m hoping to do one today, but quite honestly, the month of June stunk because of sickness that seemed to cover every square inch of space in our house.  It ran its course at separate times with different people.  Different members of our family had manifestations of it in different ways.

We did manage to get to KY to see my parents and to do an overnight trip to Sanibel Island in July.  It still seems like a large part of that month is missing, though.  Where did it go?

And now it’s August.  We’ll begin school in a couple of weeks (provided Mom can get her act together and continue to plan).  Ashlyn is already BEGGING to do school.  Nathan isn’t so stoked.  I think we’ll try to squeeze in a couple of fun things before all the craziness with that begins.

Have you accomplished everything on your summer to-do list yet?

Today’s picture edit is from the Edit Me Challenge over at My Reflection of Something.  You are given a picture and then everyone that participates edits that picture in a different way.

I must confess… I  used alot of actions on this one.  I like to try to do everything myself or at least attempt to, maybe limiting actions to one or two.  But today I’m of the persuasion that actions are there for a reason and I might as well use them 😉

Here’s the before: photo courtesy of Carrie at Page’s Memories

Here’s the after:

First I cropped it in a bit to an aspect ratio of 5X7…

Ran Ashley Sisk’s Clean Action  (I can’t find the link) 😦

Ran Vibrance by A Sort of Fairytale at 60%

Ran The Bees Knees/Urban Delight (I can’t remember opacity levels)

Ran Pioneer Woman’s Quick Edge Burn, changed the color to a sea blue and lowered the opacity.

Here they are side by side…

          

There ya go!  I’m off to try to check off some more things on my summer list.  Have an awesome Wednesday!

Goggle Eyes

So… setting up a dot com isn’t for the faint of heart.  Or the ignorant of html code.

I’m using a standard theme for my new blog, but learning about child themes in order to make some adjustments that needed to be made.  I fix one problem, but then it seems like another one pops up.  Can I hear an amen from you other self-hosted people out there?

At least right now it’s functioning even if it isn’t perfect.  I’m sure, like many things, it will ALWAYS be a work in progress.  My kudos to you computer geniuses out there.  To visit my new blog (which will be active beginning this coming Sunday) visit:

http://playdoughinmycarpet.com

Anyway, today’s sweet shot is of… Ashlyn.  I really need to get more shots of the boys here, but it seems like they are just too fast and active for me sometimes (although my daughter can hold her own sometimes in the activity department).  She almost ALWAYS wears these goggles when she swims… she looks cute with her little goggle eyes.  She made a big leap yesterday in the swimming department (she’s been able to swim now for about a year) but she can now swim underwater without holding her nose.  Yipee!

Sunsets and big news…

Hey y’all!  Happy Monday to you!  I was pretty much absent from the bloggy world for the entire weekend… well, let’s face it, I didn’t do a lot last week.  Our homeschool evaluation went well and although I now have the task of trying to plan our schooling year and do some other things, I’m so glad to be able to jump back in.

I also have a big announcement!  No, I’m not pregnant.  Scroll down for the news…

Today’s SOOC shot was actually taken a couple of months ago.  I think I’ve posted pics from that June day here before, but I had a plethora of sunset pictures.  Plethora… I think I learned that word from “The Three Amigos.”  “Effe, would you say that I have a plethora of pinatas?”

Anyway, here it is.  I plan to post my edit on Thursday, be it clean or a crazy creative edit… I’m not sure.

Okay… and my big news?

I FINALLY (after a year of owning my own domain) set up playdoughinmycarpet DOT COM!  That’s what I spent most of the weekend doing.  It’s still in the tweaking phase, but I plan to totally switch over beginning next week.  I’ve put all my posts from this blog over there, but I can’t seem to get the comments to load.  Anyway, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do a redirect (click on playdoughinmycarpet.wordpress and it sends you to the .com) so… it’s kind of like starting over.  I do plan to have the “subscribe” button and the google follow widget over there.

So, PLEASE update your bookmarks, reader, etc.  My new home will be

http://playdoughinmycarpet.com     🙂

I’ll probably duplicate this week’s posts over there, too.

Have an AWESOME Monday!

Good to WOWSA…

Wowsa… today’s my birthday! 🙂  I’m 37.  And I’m good with that.  If you want to know the skinny of why I’m absolutely fine seeing another year come, read this article.

With all the stuff I listed before on my to-do list, I haven’t been a very good blogger this week.  Seeing as today is my birthday, I’m probably  not going to be doing much blog hopping/responding either.  Thanks for understanding!

Here is my Good to Wow that I was supposed to post yesterday…

BEFORE

AFTER: Pretty much just a clean edit.  I cropped it, did a curves adjustment, then adjusted the hue/saturation.

I’m off to eat a breakfast cooked by my hubby and to enjoy the streamers/various decorations hung by my kids.  Happy Friday everyone!

 

Sweet princess…

One major thing on my list is done… typing up a year’s-worth of chicken scratch lesson plans.  Can we say “procrastination?”  I mean, I could read them, but the teacher that’s coming to evaluate Nathan on Thursday would probably look at them in disgust and wonder about my abilities to teach handwriting. 🙂

Unfortunately I’m not completely done with the portfolio and other things I have to get together, but I’m going to try my best to respond to comments and check out your blogs.  Because I was attached to my computer yesterday typing up those lesson plans, I also didn’t get laundry done… that blessing is waiting for me today, too 🙂

On with today’s picture… I tell ya what, a princess party is a never-ending source of sweet pictures, laughter… so many things.  This is a shot of my resident princess, Miss Ashlyn.  She was looking out the window at the pool at my friends house.  The dogs were playing in the pool, splashing and while Ashlyn had this beautiful flooding of natural light in her face… well… momma just had to capture some of that goodness!

And here it is with Kim Klaussen’s Stained Linen texture applied…

Good to Wow: SOOC

I made my list of stuff to get done this week and it’s long.  LONG.   I’m sure yours is, too.  Sometimes there’s things that HAVE to get done and some things that you’d like to get done.  It seems like my list is stuff I HAVE to get done or else.  Things like work on typing up lesson plans from last year so that the evaluating teacher can read them for my son’s homeschool evaluation.  Finish some final editing work for some photography clients.  Pay bills, work on my part-time job stuff, send emails, work on our taxes before school starts so I don’t have that hanging over my head.  Begin some long-term lesson planning for my 2nd grader and kindergartener.  Etc.

So, this week will be minimal at best.  I’ll try to keep the blog posts going, but emailing responses and blog hopping will have to wait until I’ve checked enough off of my list for that day.

Luckily today’s pic link-up doesn’t require any editing; in fact, it is required to be SOOC (straight out of camera).  Awesome 🙂  It is from the princess party I was telling you about yesterday.  This is my daughter with an assortment of little princess friends, demonstrating this week’s theme of LAUGHTER.

Aren’t they adorable???

Well, I’m hopefully working on my list right now, bleh.  How’s your list???

The gift of insight…

I just have to have a picture that goes along with a post, you know?  Otherwise it seems lacking.  This was yesterday… a friend of mine held a princess party for several young girls in our church (she was babysitting two of them) and had the cutest little shindig complete with cookie decorating, find the glass slipper games, etc.  Us grown-up women had to dress up, too 😉

Anyway, several months back I had written a post called “I Am Beautiful.”  It wasn’t a statement of vanity; rather it was an affirmation of the acceptance of the way God made me despite my years of self-loathing and self-criticism.  I had written it after being inspired by a post from my friend Courtney who had written a post about her journey of self-love.

Since that post, Courtney has created a meme on Sunday called “Revolution: the road to self love.”  I had been faithfully reading these posts but didn’t get around to writing one for Sundays until last week.  Because I often wonder how transparent I’ll be on this blog, sometimes posts like these are hard for me.  But I’ve really been praying about today’s post and decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and do it anyway.  Maybe someone will be inspired or affirmed.  Maybe a lot of you couldn’t care less.  But here it goes…

Like many of you, there are certain parts about myself that I haven’t liked, be it physical or personality-wise.  What can often be your best attribute is usually your biggest fault.  I’m a very sensitive person; I’m sensitive in spirit, yet I can also be sensitive situational-wise, so I have to constantly keep that in check.

Physical-wise, I think I’ve discussed some of that.  I have this crazy curly hair that will always be that way.  I’ve received a lot of compliments on it through the years, but there are times when I wish it wasn’t so different.  I have also been… ahem… blessed in the upper torso region.  Not to go too far there, but I’ve struggled with everything that goes with that for years.  There are other things that go along with that, but for right now I’ll just stick to those two.

You see, in the last few weeks I’ve received a huge lesson of self-acceptance when it comes to those two aspects of myself.  After a doctor’s visit, I discovered that…

 … I had a lump in my breast.

I was ordered to have a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound to further check it out.  I scheduled it for as soon as I could (about 6 days later).  For those 6 days I wondered whether or not I had cancer.  I knew the statistics: about only 1 in 10 of those are actually cancerous.  But when you don’t know… you don’t know.  I wondered what my life would be like a month down the road.  Would I undergo chemo/radiation?  Would I be bald?  Would I  have to have a mastectomy?  Worse… would I not beat it and make my husband a widower and my kids without a mom?

You might think I was overreacting, but I really think it was God giving me a gift.  I found out that I did NOT have cancer (praise God!), but through the experience I saw a little insight as to what was really important.  You see, I learned that:

• For every time I have cursed my hair, there is a woman out there who has lost hers from the harsh treatment for cancer.
• For every time I have cursed my upper torso region, there is a woman who is dealing with the loss of femininity from having a mastectomy.
• For every time I have dreaded getting older (on Friday I will turn 37), there’s a woman with unresponsive cancer making videos for her young children (so they’ll remember her) who wonders if she will see her next birthday.

My prayer for you today is that you will truly see yourself the way God sees you; as a unique creation, beautiful in His eyes.  Try not to curse the things that make you, you.  And live each day realizing it is a gift…

Joining this week’s link up at

Perfect Imperfections