Deck the Walls

I'm obsessed with pictures.  I have dreams of gallery walls in every room of my house.  I tried my hand at making my own photo canvases for Christmas gifts, which actually turned out pretty good, but nothing beats a professionally made photo canvas.

That's where Easy Canvas Prints comes in.  Not only is their website easy to use, their prices are excellent as well!!!  All you have to do is upload your favorite picture to the site, choose your canvas size and any enhancements you would like, and a beautiful photo canvas arrives at your front door!  There are so many sizes to choose from, ranging from 8x8 to 30x40 or you can even create a custom sized canvas!  I was also stoked to see that you can even upload pictures from Instagram!  This is awesome for me because favorite pictures lately have come from my Instagram! I just can't decide which one to pick for my next canvas!!!

One of my favorite pics of the kiddos

A sweet moment

You better start thinking about your favorite picture because one lucky reader will receive their very own 8x10 canvas (valued at $44.71) from Easy Canvas Prints!!!  How awesome is that?!?!?  All you have to do is enter below!  Good luck!!!!!

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Disclaimer: I was provided with my own Easy Canvas Print to review. All opinions are my own.

The reason I really need to figure out Photoshop

All I need to do is actually watch the tutorials that my BIL put on my computer and I'll be able to take Noah from the first picture and add him to Emmy from the bottom pic.  Then I'd have the greatest Christmas morning picture!

Photography

I love photography.  I love taking pictures.  I always have my camera on me.  I love being able to capture my life (and my kids's lives) on my memory card (I kinda miss having real film).  I've always been fascinated by the art of photography.  My dad is a pretty good photographer, as in he's real good.  Growing up, our upstairs bathroom was a dark room for a while.  Then he stopped working on it and life got in the way I guess. Now that I have kids, my fascination with photography has heightened.
The Hubs recently coordinated my favorite birthday present ever, my new camera.  He got everyone in on it so I could have it.  I was torn between a DSLR and a fancy point and shoot with all the qualities of a DSLR.  I ended up choosing a fancy point and shoot (Canon PowerShot SX30IS).  I love it to pieces.  I mean LOVE.  I'm doing online searches for cute camera straps and camera bags.  I lug it around everywhere, even though I'm known to have cameras small enough to slip in my back pocket.  But you know what....no matter how much I might look like I know what I'm doing, I have NO CLUE how to use my camera or maximize it to it's potential.
Devastating, I know.
My dad was nice enough to try to explain things to me.  He's even willing to work with me to get basic photography down.  He saw the pictures that we had done of the kiddos and said to me....you can take pictures like these.  That is what I want.  I want to have the knowledge and skill to take amazing pictures.  Do I want to have my own photography business? No.  Do I want to take professional quality pics? Absolutely.  That is the ultimate goal.
So I've done some googling (Google is my BFF....for reals) and stumbled across a 31 day project on taking a better photo.  It's all about learning the camera, learning the basics, and taking it one step at a time.  I think it's just what I need (besides a translator for my camera manual...have you ever read one?  Impossible to understand).
So here's to struggling with my camera.  To feeling like I'm dumb for getting confused on what each number and dial means.  To getting frustrated with every blurry picture, every horribly lit picture, until I get the one perfect picture.  To that one perfect picture becoming the way my pictures turn out on a regular basis.  

Oh and if anyone has any helpful tips, suggestions, websites I can check out, feel free to send them my way.  I need all the help I can get!

A quick photo recap of the past 2 weeks

Boy have I been slacking on the blogging front!  2 weeks have gone by and no updates.  I'm sorry about that everyone.  So to catch everyone up to speed, I'll do a quick photo recap.

First we start with 2 weekends ago, at Noah's school fair.  Fun Fair has been around longer than I can remember.  I remember spending the entire weekend there because that's what you did.  Now that I'm a parent  of the school, I'm obligated to go.  Everything's come full circle.  Once a student, then alumni, now parent.  Strange.  But anyways, his PreK class, along with the K/1st graders, did a performance of 2 songs.  One was "I like Me" and the other was about a little ghost.  Here's a few pics:

The whole group

With his self portrait

I'm a little ghost and I say BOO!!!

Then we celebrated my Grandpa's birthday.  It was weird not having him around this year but I hope he liked his balloon!

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Then we had our big Disney trip.  We're passholders so we go a lot.  Our kids have grown up spending time at Disney.  But this time was different.  It was the first time that Emmy really had fun I think.  Being 2 and talkative, she was able to laugh at the rides, say hi to all the characters, and just have fun.

I love this castle!!!  I can stare at it forever! 

This face is priceless!!!

She was Snow White all day!!

She loved meeting Minnie but hated Mickey...like cried whenever he looked at her

She loved looking at the Princesses faces 

Her second favorite of all time!!!

Think she's worn out?!?!

Digging up some dinosaur bones

Just hanging out with some random girls

Mulan was one of their favorites!!!

I know this was a ton of pictures but it was the fastest way to catch everyone up to speed.  Plus I just adore my kiddos so I love looking at their pics!!!  This weekend is busy for us....pictures tomorrow AM, a wedding tomorrow night, and then housework all day Sunday.  Hope everyone has a great weekend!!
GO BULLS!!!!

What a Great Day!

I almost changed the title to this post because it reminded me so much of The Fresh Beat Band.....a crazy show on Nick Jr that my daughter is OBSESSED with (the songs are really catchy though...don't tell anyone I said that).  But I couldn't change it because that's exactly what today was...a great day!

I knew it was going to be good when I opened my inbox and found an email from Shutterfly for a free photo book.  For those who don't know, I absolutely love Shutterfly.  I love everything about it.  I love their cards.  I love their photo books.  I love their photo share sites.  I should be a poster child for them! (and I am, by no means, getting any compensation for saying this.  I just love Shutterfly this much!)  My creative juices started flowing and I instantly started planning out an NYC photo book! 

The day continued to get better when I got to Noah's school.  The aide in his PreK class is a photographer.  She's actually the photographer we used for our wedding.  She did all the yearbook pictures for the school.  I was talking to Noah's teacher and she yelled over, "Want to see the cutest picture?" I, of course, answered with a sassy reply "Oh you have a picture of me?"  When she showed me Noah's picture, I was in love.  His school picture is absolutely amazing.  He's never smiled as big and bright as he did for this picture.  He looks absolutely perfect.  She was so thrilled when she saw his prints that she knew she had to show me herself.  It's amazing how a great picture of your child can make your entire day that much better!  

I've been working on our photo book all day.  Yes, I said all day.  Not because it's hard but because the program has been a little slow.  But slowness will not tamper with my happiness.  The book is absolutely awesome!  I'm so excited to actually have it!  I think it's going to be a great way to remember and cherish our trip.  And it will look awesome next to the photo book of our honeymoon!

But that's not all!  We took the kids out for a little shopping tonight.  We stopped at Bath and Body Works for the awesome owl Wallflowers I posted yesterday.  While we were there, the Hubs found me a few more owl items to add to my collection and we found a new scent for the fall.  I wanted a pumpkin scent and the Hubs only likes caramel.  What did we find?  Pumpkin Caramel Latte!!!!  OMG it's fabulous.  So we are now Pumpkin Caramel Latte'd out!  Its our hand soap in the bathroom.  It's in our wallflowers in a couple rooms.  It's a great scent and I'm just thankful the Hubs loves it too! 

Oh but the fun doesn't stop there!  Oh no it doesn't!  I am proud to say I finally own a hot glue gun!  I am so excited over this little bad boy.  There will be crafting-o-plenty going on in the Crimella house!  I can't wait!!!

Tomorrow will be a continuation of the fun!  I'm finally getting a new bedset for our bed.  Ours is a hot mess right now.  And I'll be using coupons so its even more exciting!  And my USF Bulls take the field again!  Looking for win #3 tomorrow against FAMU.  Wish I was going to the game so I could watch the halftime show.  FAMU's band is out of this world!!!

But all that excitement makes for one tired girlie.  I hope everyone had as great a day as I did and have an even better weekend!!!

My birthday came a little early!!!

I'm so excited!!!  My birthday came a bit early....20 days early to be exact!  The Hubs got everyone (aka my parents and brothers/girlfriends, his parents and grandparents) to go in together on the camera I've had my eye on!  They wanted to make sure that I had it for our big trip this week!  All I can say is LOVE.  Like tons of hearts love!  Now I just have to figure out how to use it!  I've mastered a few of the settings (my favorite being the fisheye lens) but I need to be a pro for my NYC pics!!!

Here's the little beauty:

Canon PowerShot SX30IS
SWOON!!!!
via

I can now perfect the self portrait!!!
via

I'll be happily snapping pictures all week!!!