Honey, This is your mother speaking.

I am sorry to be the one to break the news but “Mr.Automatic” is a better photographer than you are.

I like the first one better, your kitchen is not the color of picture number four- I should know, I picked the paint color out of the pile of 80,000 paint chips you were buried under…

The photography gene did not fare well in our family…your grandmother, who you were named after, never had a working camera in the entire thirty years I knew her- and your other grandmother, well lets just say that having your mouth open in every picture is just genetic.

Well, love the flowers, what a nice husband you have to give these to you. Have to go, I need to talk to your father!

Love from your Mother,
Queen B.

The Christmas cards are going out in shifts, with the third wave going out on Monday…but the real question is, if you get a Christmas card after Christmas, do you think they forgot about you or are just behind??

Photo – a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

Ginger, Honey, Nelly & Apple

This is my favorite picture from 2010. My sisters and I got together to do pictures for Queen B. for Mother’s Day. We ended up in the park across the street from our rental house, Marmot brought his camera and acted as our photographer, and we somehow ended up standing in the fountain doing stupid poses. This picture captures my sisters and I, as we are.

Halloween was our first real holiday in the New House, and we got inaugurated with over 75 kids, $35 of candy gone in just over an hour! We also gave ourselves a great introduction to the neighborhood, with the first doorbell had Brewer crashing through the door and bolting down the street with me in hot pursuit. Nothing like barreling down the sidewalk after your idiot dog, with parents and their trick-or-treaters looking at you like wow, never seen a fat lady run that fast. Note- Brewer was not in the lobster costume yet, which I was told by a neighbor would have really added to the hilarity. I grabbed Brewer about two blocks down and hauled him back home, with Marmot (who had been in the shower) coming downstairs just in time to ask, why the hell are you sweating?

I put his non-sweaty self on candy duty...

Because we don’t have children (and because, according to Queen B, we have an inordinate amount of spending money for stupid things) we bought Halloween costumes for the dogs. Now one of the challenges of having two large dogs (88lbs and 105lbs) is that the XXL costumes from Petsmart are a little snug. But we were not disuaded by this small detail, we stuffed the dogs into them anyway. If I can stuff myself into a pair of killer shoes, the boys can suffer for an hour of costume wearing!

Brewer the Lobster...

Trying to get them to sit still for a picture!

Max the Shark

And yes, even the cat’s costume was too tight. But I’ll admit, it was on clearance at TJ Maxx for $2 (the inmate costume I really wanted was sold out) and it was actually an XS dog costume…who knew she was that fat?? I’m starting to see a pattern here…

Happy kitty!

So we decided to deliver pumpkin muffins to the neighbors from Max the Shark and Brewer the Lobster…Neighbor Bob shook his head, and told us we need to have kids already. lol

Yum!

The pumpkin muffins were a-ma-zing, its a recipe my sister Apple B. found on Allrecipes.com, the Pumpkin Bars II recipe and she just put the batter into muffin tins. Note: the tablespoons of baking soda and baking powder should actually be teaspoons. lol The awful part is that Brewer has taken up counter-surfing as a hobby, and ate about 12 of them.

Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween!

(taken with the new camera, and touched up, just a bit, with Picnik!)

I get to cross another item off the Baby Bucket List…as I am now the proud owner of a Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1. And its RED.

The circumstances of buying it were slightly dubious- and by dubious I mean mad at my husband, so I bought a camera just to prove how mad I was.

{I know Mom, I should have just cut the crotch out of his favorite pants and been done with, I know!!}

And then just to top it off- he wasn’t mad. What is the point of buying something ridiculous out of spite if he doesn’t care?!

But I have an awesome camera. Not too grown-up (ie, not too many features for me to use) but complicated enough that it makes an awesome click when I take the picture, it makes me feel like I know something about photography. Hah! So I’ve been scouring Pioneer Woman’s photography section, getting ideas on how to play with the manual features, and really thinking that I might want to try Photoshop Elements.

Stay tuned for a deluge of candids, like this gem-

You’ve been warned!

….isn’t just for girls….

We babysat last weekend, and he became buddies with Baby Grace…