Photography Challenge Day #22 - Hands

This is Kate's favorite outfit right now.  She was so proud of the stars I painted on her arm at Scott's end-of-school party to match the stars on her shirt.

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is long over.  However, posts are definitely not daily.

My rules for my self are:

1 - Take everything in manual mode

2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Phineas and Ferb Cupcakes

Claire and Scott had their birthdays several months ago, but they thought it would be fun to have a swim party at my parents' pool. So we waited until the weather warmed up and had a belated birthday/"Welcome to Summer Vacation!" party the day after school let out.

And what better theme to celebrate summer vacation than Phineas and Ferb?

There's 104 86 days of summer vacation...

I used the same frozen buttercream transfer technique as I used on Kate's Hello Kitty cupcakes a couple years ago. So easy! Made the little buttercream stickers on wax paper ahead of time and kept them in the freezer. The day of, I frosted the cupcakes, my sister helped me roll the edges in sprinkles, then we stuck the buttercream stickers on them! Voila!

But honestly, the cupcakes were about it. We had the same CD of aquatic-themed music from Kate's swim party last year playing. We kept things low key. The kids had a blast swimming, so they didn't need much else.

Just to keep it real, the rest of the "decorating" was this table with a few wild sunflowers cut from my parents' property:

I Can Has Cheezburger Cake?

My best friend's son wanted a cheeseburger birthday cake.  When she called me up to see how hard I thought it would be, we both took a gander at Pinterest and then decided we could probably do it.

Yesterday I went over to her house and we had a go at it:

Our hamburger cake turned out even better than we expected!

Nailed it!

But like, for reals, not sarcastic.

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If you want more details on how we made it, you can check out my friends' blog post:

http://geekilyeverafter.blogspot.com/2013/06/do-you-want-fries-with-that.html

Hair At Last!

Kate had her last day of preschool and I took a few pictures of her.  As I was looking at the pictures, I was able to take a step back and realize that she has long curly hair now!

When did that happen?  Just 2 years ago we were here:

At the time, Kate's hair seemed pretty straight and thin and it was growing SO SLOW!!!  I guess I was comparing Kate's hair to the way Claire's was at the same age.

I tried to find a photo of Claire at almost 4 years old to compare to, but I didn't have much.  I had to get creative to make it "bloggable," sorry.  This is a photo of Claire's hair at almost the exact same age as Kate is now:

Claire's hair:  Longer, thicker, and curlier than Kate. 

Still, while it's not quite Claire's hair, it feels like all of the sudden I've woken up to discover that  Kate's hair has really come into it's own.

(And thank goodness, because Kate is the one who actually requests that I do fun styles like this heart with her hair sometimes!)

Photography Challenge Day #21 - Faceless Self-Portrait

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  However, posts are definitely not daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC