Photoshop fun

So, I used to take a lot of pictures. I mean I still take a lot of pictures of the Little Man, but I used to take pictures of other things as well. I had this beautiful camera that I bought with my high school graduation money and it was stolen out of my car after college. I know, who leaves something like that in a car? What I can I say, I was probably drunk. In any case, I used to love taking pictures and have been talking about doing it more. So, I am going to take a class in Photoshop elements and start playing around again. This is one of my first attempts at self learning though. I found the steps to do this on dooce. I believe it's known across the blogging world as "The Dooce Effect". I think it's pretty cool.

Before:


After:

Day for Dad

Four reasons instead of two:

For being such an involved Dad in every aspect of his life...

For changing diapers, washing bottles, soothing nightmares, dressing him hip, reading favorite stories over and over again, telling him what is going on in the world, making sure he always has water, giving hugs and kisses, teaching him what it means to feel safe, finding Elmo, bath time, morning cuddles, how sad you were for him to give up the bottle, playing good music for him, taking him to school, picking him up from school, going to get gelato, being patient, swimming lessons, playing the hat game, protecting him, wrestling on the floor, playing catch, going for walks, giving him syrup with pancakes...

For the way you look at him like he is the most important thing in this world...

For loving him wholly and unconditionally...

Thank you. I love you.

I'm sure no one told me...

Being a parent is tough.

I love it, but making the shift from "The one who feeds, clothes, changes and loves the baby" to "the one disciplines, teaches and gives time-outs to the toddler" is much harder than I realized.

Will is barreling into the terrible two's with a fantastic force.

Until now I had no idea that a person could simultaneously relax every muscle in their entire body and suddenly collapse into a pile of screamy, whiney fanstasticness in 2 seconds or less...in the middle of frozen food aisle. Yep, I am now "That Mom". You know the one, the one all the single people look at and think "good lord, why can't that woman just control her child?" and shake their head as they try and extricate themselves from the aisle where said tantrum is happening. I was once one of those single, childless people with the head shaking and the good-lording. If only I could go back and slap some sense into myself.

But you see, the thing about toddlers is that they are also really damn cute.


And sweet natured (at times when they are well fed and have gotten lots of sleep) and amazing and give you looks that make melt and want to give them anything in the world...

They are learning so fast that their poor little bodies can hardly keep up with it. You can hardly blame them when they get so frustrated that you don't understand that "gercklye" yelled 100 times with increasing intensity means "water" that they start throwing all food and any other object in a 4 foot radius at you (go-go gadget arms!)...can you?

Umm, yeah

So, I haven't updated here in a while. My Mom was here (best visit ever), Dan is back (yay!), things have been a little crazy. But I wanted to share these two pics because they make me very happy and will write more soon. Will is entering a very interesting age and there are lots of stories to tell.