Daddy's Day

Happy Father's Day to all the wonderful dads out there, especially the two big players in my life!

 

I was remembering the other day the skiing trips to Dodge Ridge that my dad would take my brother and me on. We'd wake up early in the morning, he'd drive us the four hours there, get us all suited and geared up, take us up and down the hills a million times, feed us and make sure we were wearing our sunscreen (no doubt he was remembering the thousand reminders my mom gave him to MAKE SURE THE KIDS WEAR SUNSCREEN!), then stop for pizza on the four hour drive home. Of course we'd ask way too often how long until we got home, but he always came up with a time and more than once we'd pull up to our street at the exact minute he predicted. I thought it was a superpower of his, but my mom thinks he either sped the last hour or took a round about way of getting home to make it at his predicted time. Thinking about it now though, that took real Dad skills to pull off trips like that and not lose it.

Jeff does the same with Elsa, packing up her Kanken and a lunch and her riding backpack, and taking her to Disneyland for the day. Granted it's 30 minutes away and they usually just stay for a few hours and it's the happiest place on earth! But still, it takes Dad skills to pull that off. He's much more brave than I am about taking Elsa on adventures. It's a Dad thing.

 I'm so thankful to have these wonderful dads in my life, love you guys!

Wants.

Tiered silk romper. I kind of feel like I could pull this off at a summer wedding. It's silk so it's fancy, and picture it with my hair up, bright red lips, sky high heels, and some fabulous bracelets. It would work right? I'm talking to you Jamie. Specifically about your September wedding. Yes? Hell no?

 Nico Wristlet. As my little handy clutch for the wedding I'd wear the romper to. Or out to an art show where I don't want to hold a clutch, and don't need a mom bag. It fits my cell phone and the essentials. And it's marked down $117!!!

Fairburn necklace. Sooo pretty those sapphire gems. I need some fun jewelry and this would really elevate a lot of my plain shirts.

Grey nubuck sky-high clogs from Swedish Hasbeens:

Navy blue seems more practical though:

They don't have the ones above in my size though so there goes that want. OOH! But lookie what is available in my size!! (37 if anyone wants to buy these for me)

I love me some Swedish Hasbeens. And surprisingly affordable on the SH website! These are $137 with free shipping to the US! Is it November 26th yet?

HALF A DECADE!

Today is the fifth anniversary of being married to my love. Awww... I can't believe it's been five years already! And then I totally can, reflecting back on everything we've done in the 8 years we've been together. A whole lotta life! Ooh, and also the over-5-year mark for this blog! Wowzers.

Haha, we so crazy! I love Matthew's face and body language here. It looks like he's about to start something with Jake.

We're going to celebrate with a dinner date at a hot new restaurant in Long Beach while Mandy watches Elsa. We don't really do gifts, but the 5 year anniversary is traditionally "wood" so this is my dream gift for you Jeff. All 10 of the wood Be@rbricks. If I had $20,000 lying around, I'd buy them for you in a heartbeat. Because you're mine. Love you baby.

Garden updates

I am on a blogging streak!! This ball is rollin'.

Our peppers are progressing... kind of. Only 1 habanero seedling survived in row 1, 2 of the 3 Asian chili peppers made it, one of the tri-color cayennes is going strong, none of the Caribbean Reds are still alive (dang it! Those were so cute too), and two of the Thai chili peppers are snuggling up to our old jalapeno plant. This is where we started so while they look puny up above, they moving in the right direction.

The lemon cucumbers are looking a lot more lush. I counted 7 little ones already and I'm trying to coax them up the trellises. The two jalapeños  in the back are doing well too. We're going to have jalapeños coming out our butts. Literally. Ew! Geez, Jeff is getting into my head. I apologize.

I just found out by the way that I had the trellises upside down for awhile. The reverse cone makes a lot more sense. Der.

And we can't forget about Jeff's little cayenne pepper plant! This guy is a tri-color too so we're supposed to get yellow, purple, and red ones from the one plant. If he's a showstopper, I'm going to move him to the front yard so neighbors can witness our gardening prowess.

Hope we're still on schedule for our chili competition party at the end of the summer! 

Rabun Gap!

We're going to Georgia! Specifically Rabun Gap, Georgia. SAY WHAT!? Straight up country. We're going to visit one of my besties, Brooke, and her boyfriend David who lives there now and B will be moving there in the next week and change.

We booked our flights today and I wanted to see how far away it was from Atlanta and this was the Google map that popped up:

Green means Forest in Google maps. That's all forest. And all the streets are named Wolf Fork Rd. Brooke is moving from a town called Pottersville in New Jersey, where her street name is also Pottersville Rd. Yeah. So at least she's used to small towns. David says that Wolfforks are the local name for their blood sucking mosquitos that they have. I'm going to bathe in Off! every hour that I'm there.

Look how much cool big city stuff they have around them though! Atlanta is like 2 and half hours away so I'm guessing it's around the same (eyeballing it) to Nashville and Charlotte, which is pretty rad. A lot of good road trips close by! I've been to Huntsville though when I worked for the Parkinson's Institute, and that is not on my list of places to revisit. Sorry Huntsville.

And look at how idyllic her new school is!

It's so scenic and charming. And the name cracks me up. Na-coo-chee-coo-chee-coo! David is already a teacher there and Brooke will be starting up in the fall. I am so thrilled and excited for her, and can't wait to see her all settled in. 

And I'm not sure what this is, but it was on the school's website, and I want to play on it. I bet they can make that happen. 

We're going to go in September but this is a trip that Elsa will not be tagging along on. It's an adult trip. Thank god for parents that want to come down and babysit her for four days!

Family Yearbooks!

I totally get MVP of the family for this one. I went through our 43,287 photos (estimate) from 2011-2013, selected the best of the best, divided them into folders named by the years 2011, 2012, and 2013, and made the completed years of 2011 and 2012 into photo books! I'm no scrapbooker, and printing all these out and handwriting cute little captions would have taken me forever and have the added bonus of driving me bat shit crazy, so I opted for making the photo books online through My Publisher.

 I used Elsa's birth announcement for the cover of our 2011 Yearbook since that was kind of the most major event in our lives for 2011, and a picture from Elsa's first birthday party for 2012.

I've used My Publisher before and overall I'm pretty happy with it. Here are my pros and cons for the service:

Pros:
1) The photo books I've ordered so far have all come out really great. The photos are super clear (even my kinda grainy Instagram/Hipstamatic ones), the covers are nice and thick, and the book options are totally worth upgrading for (I'll describe the ones I opted for below).

2) The printing and shipping process is very quick. I made mine last weekend (Saturday and Sunday) and both arrived today (Monday), just one week later.

3) The book making software is easy to use. I don't like any of their "themes" because they look too "scrapbooky" to me and they tilt pictures and add stupid captions etc, so I always choose the simple path with a clean white or black background. You can choose how many pictures you want in each page (and it pre-specifies how those pictures are laid out on the page to make them fit- super handy) and can add captions if you want them. It's a software that you download to your computer, so you make the books offline, and then when you are done, you click purchase and it connects you to the My Publisher website where it uploads your book and you pay for it.

4) They ALWAYS have coupon codes available for discounts. They do an "extra pages free" promotion often (I just googled "My Publisher extra pages free coupon code" and found one on a blog called PhotoBookGirl) which ended up saving me over $80 for each book. The prices are set for each 20 page book, and any pages over that are 99 cents each without that added discount so it totally adds up. With the options I chose, each roughly 100 page yearbook ended up costing around $60 which includes the cost of the FedEx shipping.

Cons:
1) My Publisher is merging with Shutterfly (and I guess Tiny Prints since they merged with Shutterfly too? Shutterfly is taking over the world!!) so hopefully these kinks will get worked out with the new management, but I had SUCH problems on two separate occasions with the software connecting to the server AFTER it took my credit card payment. The way it works is that you pay and then it uploads the finished book for finalizing, so as it uploads, the percentage complete ticks upwards to 100%. Both times, the server connection failed on me around 97% complete so the book didn't go to printing but the payment was showing up as a pending transaction on my credit card statement. ARGH!

Long story short- I called customer service and the guy acknowledged they were having problems with that and they were working on it. He said the transactions would not go through if there was no book uploaded to print and if there wasn't a confirmation code emailed to me and he was right. I was never charged for those pending transactions, I tried again and the connection eventually worked thus making these books, and he gave me a bonus coupon for my hassle. After I asked for one.

2) There are too many damn options with book themes. It's overwhelming. There may be some good themes in here, but I looked through a bunch and thought most were kind of cheesy. All the embellishments just take away from the photos in my opinion.

3) This is both a con and a pro. When you are done building your book and click to purchase, you are taken through a number of upgrade options for your book. You can get super gloss printing, premium papers, lay-flat pages, etc for extra money. If you select those options along the way, that's what you pay. If you do NOT select those options along the way, before it lets you pay for the book with no options, a pop-up screen says "HEY! Want these options for 50% off!?" And you say, yeah duh, I obviously do. And you get the discount. So wait until the end. You can always back track and get more options before clicking on the final purchase button. They also give you an option at the end to tack on an extra copy of your book for 50% off (or more), so keep that in mind too.

One of my favorite options that is totally worth the upgrade amount is the option for "lay-flat" pages. See how you can have the book open on the first page (above) and the first page doesn't flip back over? That's because of the lay flat. It's premium. I think they first offer it to you for $20/book but at the end they'll give it to you for $10. Definitely worth it.

Another option I really like is the "super gloss printing". It makes the pages almost laminated, so water wipes off, the pictures are shiny and clearer, yet the page is still thin like a photo book. It makes a big difference. We're going to have these books forever hopefully, so anything that will make them more resistant to tearing or age is worth it. Again, $10/book usually, $5 if you wait to the end. Special bonus, if you choose both lay flat and super gloss at the end, they're both yours for $12. That's what I opted for. DISCOUNTS!

 

These are the backs of the books, where you can also put a picture. The one on the left is kind of dark, and the one on the right is kind of washed out with a flash (Elsa and I look like vampires, and we haven't bitten Jeff yet), but those were both issues with the original pictures, and were not due to the printing. The pictures all came out true to how they looked on my computer screen.

All these pictures are to show you the different photo layouts you can choose from. You can put 1-12 pictures on each page.

You can also write something for the book spine, so I chose to just put the year for quick reference when we have 38 of them lined up.

Now that I have a system in place, all I have to do is select my favorite photos each time I upload pictures into my iPhoto and copy them into the year's folder so when the year is up and coupon codes for great deals are available, I can order them up into a new yearbook. Want to take bets to see how many years I keep this going? Don't bet against me, I will crush you!!

Fantastic Paint Jobs by Fantastic Dads

Jeff got a shout out on Apartment Therapy today for the Bird print hanging in Elsa's room! Jodi sent me the link for it which I would have totally missed because I don't follow AT on my reader anymore since they post like 87 posts a day and it overwhelms me. Too bad because they have great content too! OBV.

Jeff just started selling a smaller size of this print in his store, a limited edition of 50 for only $35 each! The prints are a really great quality too (much better than this blurry jpeg of the painting I pulled off his website!), and on lovely thick paper. Available in his store!

Boy stuff

The sewing sweat shop is back in business! After realizing none of the bibs and burp cloths that I had slaved over were for boys and not even gender neutral, I dug up this birdcage fabric I had squirreled away from an Urban Outfitters curtain panel on clearance and my vintage OP turquoise velour to make six and six. I think I have enough left over to make a hooded towel and washcloth set too but I need to test out the velour first to see how absorbent it is. I'm loving the combo though.

23 months

 Karen and her camera came over yesterday and she documented my *almost* 23 month old baby as she tore around the house with "Hen". I made the mistake of telling Elsa early that morning that Henry was coming over to play, and she kept running to the window and begging to party with Hen. Ever since Shalom's birthday party last weekend, Elsa wants to "pardy" with everyone.

I love these pictures and I'm so happy to have such a talented friend who enjoys snapping them and more importantly, sharing them quickly with us! Maybe I'll hire her for Elsa's 2nd birthday party...