This Is How I MomSolving the puzzle of motherhood one piece at a time

It seems like finding time for blogging is currently quite a tough thing. Like any stay at home mother, from the time I get up until the time I go to bed my life is dedicated to my son. Since he’s not mobile yet (though we’re working hard on sitting up), he’s mostly in some way attached to me, which makes getting any kind of work or play done hard.

When he naps, I usually try to help my husband with the business side of things or do stuff like, y’know, cooking, which leaves me all of an hour after I bring the baby to bed at 9:30pm. I try to find some time to read or take some photos outside to practice when the time allows, but it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like.

For some reason, Logan used to nap a lot longer when my husband and I were still alternating sleep schedules and I had a lot more time to, well, do stuff. I kinda miss it, but having more time with my husband is definitely a nice trade-off and the overall better solution. Rarily, but at least sometimes, we have time to do things like these…:

…But with taxes due (we don’t get returns, we have to pay – a lot), and expanding the home business, things have been stressful to say the least. Oh well, things are getting better. We did have our 2-year wedding anniversary and picked up this little guy to celebrate!

We named him Nocturne (nerdy gaming reference) and Logan LOVES him. He’s a 10-week old bombay kitten. I also decided to finally give in and get a jumperoo and it has probably been the best baby purchase I’ve made to date. Logan loves to jump and jump and jump and play with the toys for up to half an hour at a time, and that’s HUGE for him. Normally he gets bored and wants to be picked up or otherwise entertained after 5-10 minutes.

Yep. Loves it.

Since the weather has been getting a lot nicer, I’m making an effort to take Logan out more, so he can discover the world. He hates bright sunlight in his eyes and he hates the cold, but he’s been pretty appreciative of spring so far.

So anyway, that’s what we’ve been up to. Times are busy, but the productive kind. I hope that the stressful phase will alleviate within the next few months, so we can enjoy Logan’s first summer to come!

We’re back from our mini trip! It’s been quite an exciting, exhausting and fun weekend. We went to the Washington coast and stayed in a nice little hotel called Ocean Crest Resort. The view from our room looked quite like this:

In fact, this is the sunset that was going on when we arrived late Saturday night:

If you’re ever going up to the Washington coast, I greatly recommend it. The rates were cheap, the rooms were clean and spacious (with a mini kitchen!), and the view was priceless! We got really lucky with the weather too – there wasn’t a speck of rain until we left on Monday. In fact, we were so spoiled by the weather that our trip to the coast awarded us with this sky:

Now that I have you sufficiently jealous, let’s talk about how the trip actually went! This was our first time taking the bean on an overnight trip, and since we had been alternating sleep schedules up until that point, we also decided to put them back together to have more time together. I mean, who wants to be alone for 8 hours unable to go anywhere when you’re on vacation?! Besides, even though Logan has some night wakings here and there again, he sleeps decently well overall.

The car trip to the coast went pretty well. Logan took a 40-minute nap, and was awake and mostly amiable for the rest of the car ride. I had some of his favorite toys lined up in his reach, and he was content grabbing onto them.

We wanted to go out for dinner after we’d arrived, but as it turned out, most restaurants closed at 8pm. Thankfully, we found a grocery store that was on the verge of closing and ran in to grab a DiGiorno pizza and some drinks. Phew! Hunger crisis averted. We threw it in the oven and hung out with the little guy until his bedtime. He fell asleep pretty well, but he was up a few times at night – which isn’t a biggy, but since it was the first time I was sleeping in the same room as my baby since he was a few weeks old, I had trouble sleeping myself. I kept expecting him to wake up at any point, and I was wide awake with every tiny noise he made.

So in the morning, I was sufficiently dead, as well as my husband who’d just done a complete 180 with his sleep schedule. Still, we dragged our butts out of bed and went to a Casino Resort to grab some breakfast!

We’d actually meant to take a small stab at the slot machines, seeing as neither of us have ever gambled and it seemed like a fun way to pass some time, but it turns out you can’t go into a casino with a sleeping 5-month old strapped to your chest in an ergo. I suppose this is common sense, but we hadn’t really thought it would raise an issue. So instead, we decided we’d go check out the beach… but the breeze was strong and Logan was shivering in the ergo when we got close to the beach, so we turned around and instead decided to drive onto the beach so I could take some pictures, then go home to grab some naps.

That is to say, both my guys grabbed some naps and I held the fort. Logan was only out for about 30 minutes and, in fact, hasn’t napped well since then, even though we’re back home now.

Thankfully, we did go to eat dinner that night and had an enjoyable rest of the night together. Hubby turned in early and I brought the little guy to bed at his normal time, then hit the pillows myself. Surprisingly, he didn’t wake up at all that night until about 6am, at which point hubs was up to take care of him, so I could get some decent enough sleep. Once I was up, we packed our belongings and got ready to head home.

We made a few stops on the way home, including one at the State Capital…

And there you have it. Since then, we’ve just been adjusting to our new sleep schedules & Logan did an amazing job sleeping in his own room last night! I was so proud of my little guy. Speaking of, he just woke up from his nap so I better cater to his needs.

I’ll see you in the next few days with a 5-month update!

Since I most likely won’t have time to blog tomorrow, here’s our St. Patrick’s Day post a few hours early.

May your day be green…

Happy…

Thoughtful…

Full of fun things…

And laughter…

And ticklish feet…

…and most importantly, don’t be a Grinch!

This post was brought to you from the land of (receding) sleep regression & half rolls!

…from the munchkin!

So yesterday I gave in and purchased Adobe Lightroom 3. It seems to be a fairly easy to learn tool in comparison to Photoshop, but there is a learning curve. I’m tempted to purchase some presets that I’m sure would help me out a lot – namely these, but I’m not sure I should. If I purchase the presets, I basically give myself a free pass not to learn it. If I figure things out by myself, I’ll feel much more accomplished afterwards. Then again, with time limited as it is (I get maybe 3 hours that are not taken up by this little person per day), presets might be a smarter choice for now.

Regardless, these are the results I’ve had so far with Lightroom… I don’t really know any of the controls well at this point.

Pretty good, I think! And just because I think he’s just too cute for words (I’m biased, I know), here’s the first picture of Logan a little bigger:

The 50mm f1.4 USM lens arrived yesterday, and I couldn’t be happier! Our weather has been very gloomy & dark, so I didn’t get to give it the test run it deserves, but I still managed to play around with it for a little. The lighting was so bad that I had to set a +1.0 exposure override AND let the little guy sit in the doorway outside to get some decent pictures, but hey.. at least it worked.

A lot of my first pictures came out pretty blurry and less than stellar. I’ve never owned a fixed focal length lens and I found out pretty quickly that it’s not the best for self-portraits… at least not the on-the-go shot kind where you hold the camera.

I also learned that f1.4 is an extremely narrow depth of field. EXTREMELY. Note how the sides and top of the hairband are already going out of focus. I’m sure I’ll find a good use for it (like beautiful bokeh shots!), but it’s definitely too narrow for shots of the little bean.

These shots were taken at f2.5, which still resulted in too narrow a depth of field. I’m thinking 4 might be better in the future. Still; they came out pretty cute.

What I especially love is how SHARP the lens is. Check out the reflection in his eyes here:

Yep, that’s clearly me, holding a camera, standing in the doorway. Hahaha. Nuts. So far, I love it! I can’t wait for better weather so I can give it a test run outside with the little bean, though. And get a better feel for, y’know, the apertures and when to use which one.