A Sage Closet......

Spent my day photographing, describing and posting items for a Sage Closet. A Sage Closet is my little eBay business. It's not a store yet. I haven't made enough money yet to justify the expense of a store yet. Right now I'm focusing on Sage's baby clothes. I have held on to everything, but when we decided not to have another child I had to find something to do with them. So I thought why not make a buck from them. 

I'm an avid thrifter and am a bit snobby about my selection. I love to find cool designer and high end department store brands for next to nothing. Now, I will buy a discount brand if it's something cool, but the higher end brands hold up better. Cool is cool, though! Most of these items are still in great shape and still have a few more seasons in them. I could resell them to a resell shop, but they give you nothing for them. I could just donate them, but my hubby and I have been bickering about me finding a way to bring in money. Even though I am working to make the photography my career, the eBay store brings in money now. It's not a lot right now.

Looking for fun....

Activities on rainy days can sometimes be limited. I have a bad habit of getting lost on the laptop and letting him get lost on the T.V. I do get into my inspiration days where I spend the day in the kitchen cooking or crafting. I doesn't matter where I go, my little shadow is nearby getting into mischief. Being an only child he is great at playing by himself, but it's always more fun to have someone to play with. I took this with the natural light from a sliding glass window. No flash. I love how this came out. He had found the binoculars in the explore bag.  We looked at them together for a while, but true to form I eventually want to play his way. He was checking them out in all ways. So I started snapping pictures. When he started looking through them correctly, he began insisting mommy picture.  I was so proud of my boy.  When I said cool he asked to see the picture and was like "KEWL!!!", giggled and took off. It was a proud moment. 

Moments like this I always love the feel of vintage snapshots. The ones I remember from my childhood. On my snapshots you will find common themes of increasing contrast, vignetting, and applying a cross pattern effect very lightly. I love that old school warm glow. The rounded corners give it a bit of authenticity. 

It was a steady rain that day. Still a little cool, because it was early in the spring. He was dying to go outside and play. It was a perfect day for puddle jumping, but I wasn't feeling the cleaning that comes after an afternoon of puddle jumping. We had played all afternoon. Singing, dancing and exploring, but now he was ready to go outside. So the game quickly became how far can I take it before I get in trouble.

Thank goodness on this day, he decided not to take it too far....

Everybody Walk the Dinosaur......

Well so much for our camping trip. We are suppose to have thunderstorms all weekend. Shade! Maybe we'll go to COSI and see the Titanic exhibit.

On the weekends we have to keep it low key. The hubby works third shift so sleeps during the day. During the week when it is just me and the Grim, we romp around the house with Salvador Dogi like wild things. These days are some of best times.

One of the best times was right after I got the Rebel. Sage doesn't usually pose, but on this day I was totally  engrossed in my new toy. I was taking photos of the dog and random things just to get a feel for the camera. I thought I would give Sage a break.

I guess he is so use to me having a camera of some form in his face, that the fact I was photographing everything except him did not please him, because he just broke out into song and dance. His rendition of Walk the Dinosaur. When that song first came out in the 80's I never dreamed that it would entertain me so much. I was too cool for myself. I would never find such an asinine song so entertaining. It is sung so much in my house now that I have almost learned the words. My how things change.

But I digress....

I start to hear boom boom alalack boom. I go in the kitchen and he is standing in the middle of the room singing his song. (Thank you Ice Age 3). I couldn't keep from laughing, and he was loving the attention. He's becoming such a ham. We carried on for a good while with this silliness. I joined in for a while. We don't photograph that though. 

I love creating selective colour photos. They are perfect in situations like this where the background is cluttered and what you want the viewer to focus on is getting lost in it. Simply pick a dominant colour to use as your pop on your focal point. The PJ's were the obvious inspiration, and the perfect distraction from my messy creative space. The devil is in the details with this effect. Take your time and don't be afraid to get up close. This is perfect effect for those silly moments. It is also perfect for singling people or action in photos with a lot going on in them.  I save this discussion for a later date.....

After our dancing we settled for a snack and I set out to get some things accomplished around the house. Leaving the gremlin to his own devises, and awaiting our next exploit. 

A little rain good....but let's not get carried away.

It rained all night last night. It must have gotten bad, I woke to no power this morning. Luckily it was back on before noon.  I don't guess we're going to pick peas this week. They're not covered in straw that would just be a muddy mess. Maybe next week will be drier. These are some rain photos I took on one of our explores.....

The weekend before Memorial day Sage and I travelled with my husband while he was on the road. He was working in Memphis and I'm from the area. I hadn't seen my family for awhile so we went along for the ride. On our trip back from Memphis we ran into heavy thunderstorms around Louisville. Actually the tornado sirens were going off and the warnings were being issued. We had Sage calmly watching a movie in the back, my husband was cursing and driving determinedly to get us out of the city, as I used what juice was left in my camera battery after Dino world, to keep me calm taking photos of the rain on the window. I'm actually quite please with how they turned out. 

I'm so crafty I make people.....

My son Sage is the greatest thing I've created in my life. Born only four days after my birthday, he was the best present the world has ever given me. Don't get me wrong we have good days and bad just like any mother and child. He is energetic, very creative and has an almost Stewie like quality to him. ( I guess I should have watched what I said when I was pregnant.) But I wake up everyday happy to have brought such a beautiful soul into the world.

I waited later in life to have a child. My husband and I wanted to be in a good place to when we had him. I don't know how good of a place we were, but when it came to the appointed time we had set to start trying my husband obliqued. Actually, I got pregnant two months after we started trying to conceive. We think it was on Halloween night in Salem, Massachusetts. The best souvenir I ever came back from vacation with.

I wish I could say that my pregnancy was a magically uplifting experience, and that I love the experience of being pregnant. I can't necessarily say that was the case. I wouldn't trade that time for anything, and having a life growing in me WAS magical. What was going on with my body wasn't. I got pregnant at 36 I have to admit I wasn't in the best of shape.  I had quit smoking after almost twenty years and gained quite a bit of weight. That summer I had begun to work out and eat better. I was pulling the weight off. That didn't last long. Once I was pregnant I gained weight and gained it fast. I joked that I had a gravitational pull. I attracted little petite women to me and they orbited me like moons. There was one in particular that every time I passed her at work she would just follow me circling me talking to my belly. It was flattering, but a little strange. I actually had to change doctors because of it. My original doctor scolded me and recommended Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. I left his office in tears. They switched me to his partner after that. I was relieved. I still had to see the original doctor one more time. That would end up being an ordeal.

I do have to admit I didn't experience much in the way of morning sickness. I only had a few horrible moments. I was working by the cosmetic and fragrance department at Macy's so a little nausea was to be expected. During the last few months I was diagnosed with the onset of Gestational diabetes. So I had to start seeing a specialist. The funny thing was I had three doctors and none of them could decide what I needed to focus on. One, as I had mentioned, had an issue with my weight, my second OB GYN was terribly concerned with my diabetes and the diabetes specialist was concerned with my age. My husband thought they were all over reacting. So it can only be imagined what a thrilling time this was. During my last few weeks of pregnancy my blood pressure began to rise so I was put on bed rest. At the end of my first week on bed rest I had to go back to my original doctor because his partner was out of town for a conference. We had discussed inducing before he left and decided I wasn't ready. Well, when I went to his partner he decided that I needed to be induced. I asked him if I needed to cancel my appointment for Monday at the office he said no he would take care of it. He didn't.

He did make the appointment with the hospital, and we checked in at our appointed time. The problem was he didn't bother to tell the other doctor. I should have known to follow up. We get there, check in and they get me started on the inducing drugs. When they contacted my doctor he was livid and concerned because I had missed my appointment that day. He knew nothing about the inducement.  I'd never seen such a mild mannered person get so postal. He was angry at me at first, then when I explained how insistent the other doctor was, his anger moved to him. We could hear him outside the door on the phone yelling at him. I saw that doctor one more time, his head was totally down in shame. He examined me, in the presence of my main doctor, and was forced to admit the mistake. On the third day of the inducing, with no signs of change we opted for a C-section. Not the way I wanted to have my son, but the results were the same. I had created a beautiful little person and my life would never be the same again.

A brief introduction..

Who am I?

I'm a stay at home mom of a wonderful, but sometime mischievous toddler and the wife of loving, but often mischievous husband. Both are the loves of my life and my driving force. My husband travels with his work so most of the time it is just me and my son. My family all live at least a nine hour drive away, and my husband's family is three. Because of that we opted for me to stay at home with our son. It just wasn't cost effective for me to return to work. So I became a domestic goddess. Since leaving the workforce I have struggled with trying to find myself. I always had some kind of job, unless I was in a school situation that didn't allow me to work. So for almost the past three years I have been struggling to find a way to contribute to the family. I know that raising a child is reward enough, but it doesn't help pay the bills.

I've been trying to find a way to incorporate my skills with a way to bring in an extra cash flow. I'm sort of a jack of all trades, and have ideas galore. It's just the implementation I have problems with. I love to cook, bake, garden and craft. I tried my hand at cake decorating for awhile. I'm pretty good at it, but I just couldn't find a passion for it.

I still make them from time to time for friends, but as a business I just found that the time that it took from my son wasn't worth it. I kicked around other ideas up-cycled crafts, paper making, and scrapbook supplies just to name a few. I did actually start selling on eBay.  All my ideas seem to lead me back to one thing. Photography.

Photography has always been a love of mine. Since about the age of 9 I can remember being a photo bug. My first camera was a disc camera in junior high. I graduated to a pink leClick camera in early high school. Nothing remarkable in these days, no child prodigy work. It wasn't until high school that I my interest started to  be peaked, developing in to a romance in college. The romance dwindled for awhile, but since the birth of my son it has developed to a near obsession. 

This is my journey, in no particular order.....