General Update and Blabbery

I haven't been able to blog as much as I'd like to lately. Having 3 kids keeps me pretty busy! But we are making fun memories and enjoying our "party of five". This post will be a general update on our family, and if I start to ramble on, well just forgive me, okay?

Let me start off with this: I have a new camera. It's a Canon Powershot S2 IS. I haven't learned all its tricks so some of my pictures are coming out dark or blurry. But I'm trying to figure it out! I'm taking lots and lots of pictures so I can learn all about the camera.

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Now on to the fun stuff!

Sunday was a significant day as both of my boys celebrated their "birthdays". Caleb turned 2 1/2 and Stellan turned 2 months! Stellan weighs half of what Caleb weighs! Crazy! Caleb is hovering around 29 to 30 pounds and Stellan weighed 14 1/2 pounds at his appointment this morning.

Stellan's latest accomplishment is drinking one ounce from a bottle! My ultimate goal is for him to be able to drink a full feeding from a bottle so I will be able to leave him for a few hours at a time. I have an opportunity to do something I've wanted to do so badly (more on that later) and I will need to be able to leave Stellan with Daddy for a few hours. So anyway. We are making progress towards that and that makes me happy!

Stellan is a really good sleeper and has been from the beginning of his short little life. He has slept up to 6 hours straight during the night on several occasions. He did have a cold a few weeks ago that messed up his sleeping some. He would wake up several times a night coughing and gagging. But I'm glad to say that he's almost completely past that and has started sleeping well again.

He is the smiliest baby I have ever known. He has been smiling since he was born almost, and now he's started cooing. It's just precious.

He recently found his hands. Quite often now I see him like this, happily trying to suck on his knuckles:

Just his sweet little face:

My original plan was to give a full update on our family in one post. But I've been working on this post for 3 days now and I'm ready to publish it. So I will continue the updates in another post or two. Toodles!

Before & After

I dug into my old folders for this week's photo. This is a picture of my (older) son in the backyard of the house we lived in last year. I'm getting into texturing photos and I really like how nice and subtle this one is.

Before:After:I used my Kodak EasyShare Z740 and edited in Photoshop CS3.

Yay!

Daddy Turns 31!

So to celebrate, the boys all took a nap together! :)

We had a family picnic in the living room for dinner:
The two little boys that have stolen my heart:
Time for presents!

And then ice cream cake! Laura Anne was excited.

Helping Daddy blow out the candles:

Mmmm, yummy cake!

Don't you just love this photo? He's just so darn cute!

Three of the cutest firemen this world has ever known:

Hooray for birthdays!

Before & After

A friend sent me this awesome photo of a waterfall in (West?) Virginia. I couldn't resist playing with it in Photoshop. I did several different edits, but this one was my favorite, I think.

Before:

After:

I edited using Photoshop CS3. I cropped it, boosted the colors and added burned edges.

Visit Pixel Perfect to see more before and afters!

It's Time....

for a "compare the baby photos" post! I'm comparing Caleb and Stellan today. I've already heard, many times that Stellan looks just like Caleb. There are two main differences: 1--Caleb had 3 times as much hair as Stellan does, and 2--Stellan has chunkier cheeks than Caleb. But other than that, I think they look very much alike.

Caleb:

Stellan:

Caleb:
Stellan:
Caleb:

Stellan: (in the same outfit as Caleb above)

So what do you think?

I'm Back

I figured it out. Now back to the regularly scheduled blog. :)

Sorry...

My old blog template disappeared so I was going about changing it the other day when I noticed that all the pictures, blog archive and link list and so on were not showing up anymore! How annoying. I've changed the template for the blog several times before and this hasn't happened so I don't know what went wrong or how to fix it. That's why my blog looks utterly retarded right now. Anyone know what could've happened?