sand box and other springtime activities

One rainy day Jamie wanted to play in the sandbox so we put a hat on him:


But that did not suffice, so out came the sun umbrella (ironic, huh?):




And another day that Jamie and Abby were playing in the sand box (these pics are from when we first got new sand, needless to say, there is a lot less, at least in the sand box, now):




And some other activities that Jamie enjoyed this spring include: drawing on belly, wearing sister's flare jeans, and riding the bike in the house in pajamas and slippers (he doesn't know that this is a privilege most kids don't get!):




Our pink princess, these were taken before the pain-staking process of getting her eye-teeth in, at which point, she was not so "princessy":

seattle aquarium

Well, I was looking through my pictures and the blog archives and realized that I never blogged about our trip to the seattle aquarium way back in March. Chad had just returned from a trip out to sea working on one of the carriers, so we decided to have a family day in seattle. The aquarium has been newly remodeled and is really nice. Here are some pics:











Over by the pike place market they were filming a movie (I can't remember which one now):

Asleep at the market:

update

So I realized that I've only made one blog post this whole month so I mean to remedy that issue today. I actually haven't done any programming since June 1st so there's really no excuse. No wait, there is, this is what my computer looks like:
That was after falling about 8 ft to it's demise on the hardwood floor. I was bringing it out of the attic (where I had been scanning pages) and the strap on the bag I was using broke (nevermind one strap was already broken and it was a stupid thing to do). Thankfully the inside of the computer still works and that is what I am using now until the new Dell arrives. My brother Jon was on vacation so I "borrowed" one of his flat screens. He got back yesterday and is probably now wondering where the heck it is.
So there's been alot going on in the last 2 months and a ton of pictures taken. The problem is that now that I've figured out how to make almost every picture look better in photoshop, I want to edit them all before I share them! And of course, I just don't have time to edit a few hundred pictures every few days. So I will try to not be so obsessive about it. And speaking of editing pictures, whoever says that jpeg is just as good as raw is wrong. And it's my opinion that it's not a matter of opinion (if that makes sense at all). The SOOC (straight out of the camera) shot is hardly noticable between jpeg and raw, that's true. However, if you find yourself in a low light situation, or some other situation where your exposure is not spot on, well then you can't do much about it if you're shooting in jpeg format. Raw, on the otherhand, has no loss of information from the original picture, and you can easily adjust the exposure in photoshop with no wierd looking, grainy pictures coming out of the deal. Here's an example.
Very dark jpeg picture:

Very bad looking after attempting to edit file (grainy & odd colors):


Very dark raw file (converted to jpeg):

Very good looking edited raw file (converted to jpeg AFTER editing):


Stay tuned for most posts.

Abby's learning to talk!

So we've hit the explosion, as far as learning new words goes. I'm sure there's more, I just can't keep track of them anymore, pretty much anytime you ask her to say a word, she'll at least try. One of the funniest things she does is try to imitate Buzz Lightyear (the kids have really been into Toy Story lately). She'll goes "oo -aynaawe-eeoon" (or so) and raise her hands up in the air, you can tell she's trying to say "to infinity and beyond!" because all the inflections and the amount of the syllables that she says are just right.

7/3
cacka (cracker)
ow (ouch)

7/1
baby
ba-oon (balloon)
moo-oo0n (for Goodnight moon)
tan-u (thank you)
nana (banana)
bapple (apple)
may-me (jamie)
may-mo (nemo)

as of 6/10
mama
dada
Abby
baby
ba-ba
da (ya)
no
oh-wow
go bye-bye
tickle-tickle
peek-boo
weee (when sliding)
tweet-tweet, squeak-squeak, peep-peep (all sound the same)
rha-rr (growling)
ow (meow)
oof-oof (woof-woof)
p-p-p-p-p-p (for elephant)
ck-ck (quack-quack)

summer activities

Just a few pics I took the other day, I was practicing with small f-stops (large aparature) to get the foreground in focus and the background blurry. It could have been a bit better but it is hard to get a 3 year to stand still. This was even with bribes of candy.