Just checking in...

I am alive. I have not fallen off the face of the earth. And apparently I think we are funnier than anyone else thinks we are...not surprising.

Here's a 2 second update on what we've been doing...

Playing

Gardening (my plum tree looks like a weeping willow it is so covered in fruit. I'm excited!)

Painting indoors

Chair-rail-ing (I'll post pics soon!)

Picture-ing

Scraping (the outside of my house for painting...oh, it is just the worst. My back is killing me tonight. But I'll be happy to have it done in 2 months...if I'm lucky)

Exercising

Stressing

Yoga-ing (anyone else do Yoga? It's my new favorite thing. It's hard!)

Baking (we are on the count-down to summer. The season the rest of the country loves and I dread (minus the garden part) which means I won't turn my oven on for about 4 months)

Potty-training (not going so well as of today)

Grass-growing

Cleaning

Traveling

Pruning

And that about sums it up. I have been so busy that when i think "oh, I'll sit down and blog" then something else (or someone else) throws itself into my path and demands my attention. It's insane! And i don't see any calm in the near future. Except Monday's and Friday's at 10am. At Yoga!!

Things went from bad...to worse

what happened when I tried to take a decent pic of us on the couch tonight...(**don't mind the extremely greasy foreheads, cheeks, and noses**)

Dear Friends,

I'm sorry I've been a horrible blogger. Can you forgive me? It's something that is on my list of things to do. But then I think...I think I'll enjoy taking pictures of my kids, or watching Lost with Spencer, or cooking something new. But I really do have good intentions. I think, "Tonight I'll sit down and unload all the pictures of my darling boys and tell all the stories I've been blogging in my head and brag about how cute and fun my little stinkers are." And then somehow it doesn't happen. Blah, blah. Excuses, excuses. Get on with it, Burk.
Well the week before last we were SICK. I mean, something NASTY has been going around and we got it. And felt quite crappy for days. Carter somehow escaped it. But we rarely stay at home all day, every day and during this time, we did. Seriously, 3 days in a row i didn't even shower. It was gross. And I forgot to brush my teeth until about 2pm. So during this time at home I thought I'd double-task and start potty training Nolan. And to spare you all the nasty details he is doing really and only peed his pants...3 times today? But they were all at home. No problem-o at the gym or park. So he gets two thumbs up in my book. And I just cannot get over his legs. They are so cute. I LOVE the baby fat wrinkle that still hasn't smoothed out at the top of them and I LOOOOVE how they bow our from the knee. I also secretly love the excuse of letting him run around in his undies.



Easter couldn't have been a more perfect day. The weather ruled, I loved listening to General Conference, and we got to spend time with family. The EB came and the kids were SOO excited to find their baskets and the eggs outside. Nolan SCREAMED every time he found an egg. We made it inside with 99% of our eggs. We found the last one 3 days later. Eww.









Nolan is hilarious. He picked up this egg and then for some reason decided he didn't like it and put it back down. I tried to get him to put it in his basket and he screamed and ran away.


We whipped out the bubble wands the other evening and as I was taking pictures I was struck with the beauty of the moment, the evening California breeze and the gorgeous sunset and I put my camera away and sat down on my grass to blow bubbles with my kids. And I thought about what a picture-perfect life I have and how I didn't want to take pictures of it right then, but just enjoy it and allow my kids to enjoy ME.




(can you see the intensity in these eyes?? p.s. he's getting freckles and moles. can you see the ones to on the right side of his mouth? (his left) Poor kid takes after his mom.)

I went to register Carter for Kindergarten for the SECOND time today and I still have to go back bc his shot record isn't up to date. But it really got me thinking about not having him around all day next Fall and I had this sinking feeling in my stomach and I miss him already. I know I will get used to it but he is Nolan's best friend and my baking buddy. And I just want my kids to stay little. Please, someone tell me they'll never grow up and leave home?? (or please tell me again that when the time comes I'll be gladly shoving them out of my house!)

We have been working every day in our garden.


Weeding, eating, planting...I love that my kids go in the garden and pick fresh fruits and veges and eat them right there and LOVE them. Strawberry season is upon us and I have to watch them like a hawk or Nolan will got pick all the ones which are hardly pick and down them. And he loves his squirt bottle. He played with that thing for like an hour and a half.

So this is why I've been a bad blogger. Don't hate me. Love that I've been trying harder to enjoy life. It's going oh-so-quickly by.

HOW HAVE YOU ENJOYED LIFE THIS WEEK??

I hate Spring...

but it sure is pretty. Why do I hate Spring, you ask?

Because I sneeze about 248 times a day. Seriously, my allergies are killin' me. It's even too bad for the Neti pot. I've taken Zyrtec and Claritin. And Flonase. Someone out there have a secret weapon? Please???

I am sick today and therefore did not even step one toe outside until this evening, when I went to gather some sanity in my garden. Have I ever told you how much I love my garden?? Yesterday we prepped for planting in a couple weeks. We picked the fruits of my some of my labors from last October. I had no idea if these things would actually pop up but they did and it's awesome to have a spring garden. I'm going to make it a new tradition!


So this is what our garden looks like now. Weedless, (almost) and bare. A fresh start. This year's garden will include sugar snap peas, carrots, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloup, casaba melon, butternut squash, zucchini, yellow squash, cabbage, strawberries, grapes, cilantro, basil, and hopefully some stuff off of our trees (peach, plum, apricot, pear, pomegranate). Mmmmm...It's almost worth enduring the heat of summer for.


I love having fresh flowers in the house. This was from a couple weeks ago before my allergies went insane and i was able to tolerate them inside. I love how kids simply see a flower as a flower. Whether it's a weed or a blossom, to them there's one simple fact...it looks pretty so lets pick it and take it to Mommy. Here they tore off some of the honeysuckle vines and brought them in for me. So cute.

These bright red Geraniums completely clash with m kitchen. I love them.

And they rest are just boring ol' pictures from the garden. But they are so pretty, no?

What do YOU love/hate about Spring??

Catchup and a Lesson 4

I was gone for 5 days (see here) and spring came.

What the heck! When I left it was cold, blustery, and cloudy. Then I returned to this.

It's SO stinking pretty. This is all in my backyard, too! Plum trees and peach tree, to be exact. Just looking at these pictures makes me have to sneeze. UH. My allergies have been seriously wicked. And I do NOT look cute when I have allergies. I look like a WEIIIRRRDOOO. Plus I sneeze about 500 times a day and people look at me like I'm contagious. But I have been using a little device that has made my life SOOO much better and I have to tell you about it, just in case you suffer like I do. It's called the Neti pot and it looks like this:

http://www.herbspro.com/images/productImg/Neti-Pot-Ceramic-60135.jpg

Yeah, you stick that little nozzle up your nose hole and tip your head to the side and the saline comes out the other side. And it's weird. For probably the first 5 times you use it. Then it's like heroine and you can't go to bed without flushing your nasal cavities. Anyway, I have some generic brand called "Nasal Cleansing Pot" so I don't think it matters which you get. But if you have a cold or allergies, try it! Then let me know how it turned out (you'll be thanking me)

It doesn't get green in Southern California very much but this year we've had a decent amount of rain. So this spring we are enjoying beautiful fields of green where there's normally only tumble-weed dust bowls. Behind my in-law's house there's one of these said fields and I went out to take pictures of my kids/nieces/nephews the other evening. The lighting was gorgeous and they had the best time pretending like they were animals playing in the wilderness and hiding from each other. It reminded me of when I was a kid. And I was a bit melancholy for the days I used to run across the field that divided my house from my best friend's house in bare feet and play until the sun was completely gone and I'd hear my mom calling me in. So I stayed and let them play until it was dark and cold and then we had to come in.
But this leads me to my lesson on the shots most people love and those are sun-flare shots. I have no idea if you can get something similar from a p&s camera. I've never tried. I don't think you can. But shooting into the sun is one of my favorite things to do because you get such varied results. Plus it adds character to your pictures and helps to capture the feel of the moment more. Here are some recent sun flare shots I love:








( I LOVE this shot even though it's not something someone else would look at and think was really great. But because of what was happening. Nolan was trying to get on this big ball and kept falling off. Carter thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen and was laughing hysterically. You can see Nolan's feet at the bottom there. They are always making each other laugh.)

So here's my best lesson on getting good sunflare shots with your DSLR. Before you start, decide what look you want the picture to look like. Depending on how much flare you want, open or close your aperture. The more closed (higher number, right?), the more it will look like a sunburst, or like a star. The more open and it will look like a blob of sun (like in my pics. I like to shoot wide open). Also if you want more in focus, close it up. If you want more of a background blur, open it.
It is said that you usually get the best flare with a cheap lens, which is a good thing if that's all you have.
Your camera will most likely have a hard time focusing on someone when the sun is blaring through your lens. Use your hand to block out the sun, focus, then remove your hand.
Overexpose. Usually quite a bit.
Move around very slightly and take a lot of pictures. Move so the sun is peeking out from behind the person's head then move a little more so something else is kindof in the way (like a tree branch), then so it's at the top of your frame. Just try a lot of different positions.
Never look at the sun (shut up, I know I'm not your mother)

And there you have it. I have never used a reflector for sun flare shots but I know some people do. Plus I know of one photographer who wears white to her shoots and lets her shirt act as a reflector. I still haven't tried that one.

Finally, practice a lot. It's taken me a while. But I love the look.

Good luck!

The Little Red Chair

If there's one thing I really, really hate...it's clutter.
My house is tiny and therefore clutter will not be tolerated.
At the end of every day I pick up my house and clear it of clutter.
At least once a month or so I de-clutter closets, drawers and cupboards/cabinets.
I LOVE storage bins/canisters. I have them everywhere.
So I consider my house pretty uncluttered.
Until I read the Bearnstain bears book with my kids about "too much stuff", I think it was. Then it got me thinking. And as I started on a de-clutter rage a couple weeks ago I came across this old chair and thought...why the crud do we have this thing? I picked it up off the side of the road like 3 years ago, fixed it and painted it and my kids never use it. (it was intended to be a "time-out" chair and turned out to be too fun) Plus we have TWO rocking chairs and the new one (gifted) is MUCH nicer than this one. You can see my reasoning.
So when they weren't looking I very discreetly snuck it out to the "curb" (*we have no curb- just pavement) I had set out a few other things from the garage that morning that took no more than 15 minutes to get picked up. I thought I was in the clear.
We did our normal afternoon routine- lunch, nap, movie...and I didn't think about the little red chair again. I was patting myself on the back and happy thinking that thing was LONG gone. Ah...de-cluttered. What a blissful feeling.
Until the kids went to play outside before dinner.
And it was still there. By the curb. I tried my HARDEST to explain why it was there and how life was going to be so much better without that chair (and it was going to improve someone else's life to have it!).
And I was stubborn. There was NO WAY that chair was coming back inside.
Then I saw Carter standing by the fence, just looking at it.
"He'll get over it. It's just a chair" I thought.
I thought he'd get distracted and go play. But he just stood there looking at it like he was going to lose a piece of his heart.
And all the sudden......I gave in.
I told him if he really wanted it, he could keep the (unnecessary) chair.
We pulled the chair back to our side of the fence. Back away from the dangers of the world. It was his again.
And he sat and rocked in it and was happy.



WHY must it always be so hard to give in?

Lesson 3- understanding lenses

Is everyone bored to death by now? I sure hope not.
Here's a quick post on lenses. While a good camera body is seriously important in what your pics turn out like, what you mount on that body is equally as important (or more!). Now, like I said before, its up to you how awesome you really want your pictures to look, what's in your budget, what you'll be using your camera for, lalala...Most people won't be able to tell a huge difference between a lesser DSLR and lens and a professional body and lens. I can and anyone with experience can as well. So here we go with lenses....
There are a few classifications you need to know:
Superwide angle lenses
Wide-angle lenses
Normal range lenses
Telephoto lenses
Macro lenses
These are your basics and here's the cliff's notes on each one. (btw, each of these kindof overlaps the next and depends on the size of your sensor- whether it's cropped or not. So there's no definite boundaries.) Superwide are like a fisheye lens. They are popular when you are trying to catch a group of people (like at a wedding) but really distort the image and gives it almost a swirled effect. So you certainly don't want to use this for portraits or people will look really weird.
Wide-angle lenses are in the range of about 18-50 on a lens. It means you'll capture a lot of picture with that lens. Imagine you want to take a picture of the Teton mountains with the snake river and all the pretty scenery. You'll want a wide-angle lens for that to get it all in there. If you don't have a wide-angle lens you'll just have to hop in the car and drive further away to get it all in the picture.
Normal-range lenses are kindof like how we see things with our eyes. My 50mm lens is like this on my un-cropped sensor. If I put my camera up to my eye it looks like what I see without the camera. Now on my cropped sensor it looks closer up than what I see with my eye-almost like it's zoomed in. The range of these is ABOUT 40-70mm.
Telephoto lenses are those longer lenses and they go from about 85-300 or more. These are what you want to take on an African safari so it seems like you were right next to the lions but really you were far away. Or a sports game. Or if you don't want your kids to see you and you can take some candid pics. But be prepared to be sitting across the yard because any closer and you'll be getting some sweet nostril shots.
Finally, macro lenses are special because they can focus SUPER close-up. All lenses have a certain distance they can focus at and marco's blow them out of the water. You want to use these to take pics of bugs or hairs on bugs. They are also good for food pics and to show textures and things in food.
There are two ore classifications of lenses you MUST know before you fall asleep and they are 1) zoom lenses and 2)prime lenses. Prime lenses do not zoom. This is really weird for people who have grown up with a p&s because it's hard to fathom not being able to zoom in on the camera. Some people love them and some aren't so big on them. They certainly take more work and you have to move a lot more because if you want to zoom out, you have to walk away from your subject. And vice versa. Obviously. But they are sharper. So there's the pros and cons. I have one zoom lens and one prime and I like both of them. You'll have to try them both out before making your decision.
Okay, I think that's it. In response to Michelle's question about a good all-over lens, it really depends on what you want to capture. Get a wider-angle lens for a vacation. Get a 50mm prime or 85mm prime for a great portrait lens. Get a telephoto so you can feel like a super-spy. Plus they look really cool and in Canon's line go white when they are especially expensive. Ooohhh.....Ahhhh.....
Hope that wasn't too painful!