Last Day of February

I'm short on time, but not on pictures, so we'll just cut to the chase.

I'm hoping by not addressing my lack of blogging, you won't notice that I haven't posted in two and a half weeks. So just skip over the previous sentence.

Make this last hour and half of February great. And wonderful. And of course, fabulous. Make everything fabulous.

My Future Children

No matter your age, as a rule of girlhood, we are entitled to planning out our future families. From baby names, to our weddings, you'd be lying if you haven't put any thought into the two and everything in between.

As nerdy as this sounds, I follow a few 'mommy blogs'. At least give me the benefit of the doubt as almost all of them are photographers, but I enjoy seeing their cute little kids with their cute little outfits that make the cutest little pictures.

Anyways.

I commonly come across posts where they express the fact that the way they parent now and the way they intended to parent pre-children are polar opposites. After reading about my hundredth post of the mentioned above, I've come to an idea. Similar to the whole writing letters to yourself craze, I'd like to write down how I hope to parent. I'm sure it will give me a good laugh in about twenty years as my parenting style now is most likely similar to the style of every girl on 16 and Pregnant (okay, hopefully not that bad) but I feel it could become helpful when I'm managing teenagers as I am teenager.

Honestly I'm proud of myself for coming up with such a could-be-useful idea.

So here goes nothing.

*********************************************************************************

First of all, I'll never. I repeat never, ever, ever, ever, EVER, force my children into doing something they don't want to.

Well maybe when they're like five and I'm trying to enroll them in like soccer, but come on, if you can't tie your shoes then you're probably not too sure on whether you truly like something. I'm talking when they're middle school aged and older. As a formerly forced into several things over the past few years from their parents high schooler, I'm setting this one straight. It flat out sucks being shoved into doing something by your parents. If anything, it makes the said child hate whatever they are being encouraged to do. Therefore, no forcing.

I'm going to allow my children to eat all the Steak and Shake, ice cream, and soft drinks their little bodies want. Okay maybe not really, but I'm not going to be one of those no gluten, no sugar, nothing but water, only foods that are good for you mothers. My children have every right to enjoy a good Happy Meal every so often and I'll be darned that they get that privilege.

This one there better be no exception with. My children will ALWAYS be well dressed. They're gonna have those cute little clothes that send every women into baby fever whether I can help it or not. I loathe seeing little kids in weird, ugly clothes. Like they're only going to allow you to make their outfit choices for a short amount of time so you better enjoy it. And even when my kids are older, they're still going to have cute clothes. I'm just going to have fashionable children period.

I'm going to be one of those uber crafty moms too. I'm not going to be the "look at the blanket I weaved from my hand crafted knitting needles and the organic yarn that I got from the sheep that I shaved and processed into yarn all by myself while my kids were playing with wooden Legos I carved while I was pregnant with them" mom, but I'm at least going to be able to throw one hell of a party. Like we're going to have birthday parties, half birthday parties, a party for every holiday on the calendar, and just because parties. And I'm going to spend hours of Pinteresting to make said parties amazing.

Of all the parenting topics that I've covered, this one most likely has the least probability of happening. I want to give my children the opportunity to travel. I want to take them places, Disney World, New York, the beach, everywhere. And I want to go all out on my vacations. We're going to go out to eat for dinner every night, do things with the thoughts of "wow what a great opportunity" not "wow that's a lot of money" and we're just going to have plain old fun. We're going to make memories and take pictures and buy worthless tourists junk just because we can.

When my kids are in their teens, I swear to never criticize their music choice either. This hasn't been a personal problem, but it has been with many of my friends. I swear we don't listen to extremely weird music either. Like I assure you that you've heard them all, like top ten on iTunes and everything. Songs have and will always use cuss words and not every song is going to have some amazing meaning, but if it makes my kid happy then so be it. As my mom has always said, her favorite song used to be The Bitch is Back by Elton John and she didn't turn out to be a bank robber or anything.......

.......and my mom has spoken. Case closed.

And that my dear is just a snippet of how I want to parent my kids.

*********************************************************************************


I'm sure the said above will not all happen, but I like this idea. Maybe in twenty or so years I'll be able to write a sequel and tell ya'll how it really turned out. If not, I'm sure it'll make a good laugh.

(Friday Phone Dump kinda didn't happen last week. Sorry about that.)

Cloudless Skies

I hate the line, 'It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.' I swear I've read that same line in every book I've ever read. Did I miss the day in art class when they stated that a cloudless sky is pretty? Like seriously, clouds are what make the sky.

Clouds are beautiful.

I just recently learned how to utilize the HD feature on my iPhone's camera. An amazing idea that creates extraordinary photos if you ask me.

Clouds are breathtaking.

Clouds are gorgeous.

And we had some pretty amazing clouds last Sunday in case you didn't notice.

*Insert random plant that has nothing to do with clouds but looks really pretty here*

I hope to live through many more days where the sky is just bursting with clouds, an extraordinary view for those lucky enough to notice it. I guess that's the difference between photographers and every one else, the small things catch our eyes.

Have a fabulous day.

The Best of January

Sometimes I feel that a single post doesn't give a beautiful picture justice. Most of the time I want to show it off over and over again. To feed my urge, I want to do a monthly post about my favorite pictures from the previous month.

Since I had a lack of photo shoots last month, I'm going to extend it to January and December.

I want to re-shine the light on my favorite photos and I may even do a 'Best of 2013' at the end of the year, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I had a blast collecting photos for my black and white project. I've already snapped a dozen more since then, gearing up for another post on the same topic.

My trip to the beach brought me a lot of insight on how I plan on spending the future, and some amazing pictures as well. I love how the seagull pictures look like paintings. When I would look back on this post I often thought that the first two looked 'over edited' although all I did was run them through a filter. Then there would be other days where I thought they looked absolutely perfect. I guess I have an ever changing critical eye, one that I hope will benefit me well into the future.

I've probably taken a dozen pictures of the same bird's nest, but this one still prevails as my favorite.

I got a lot of fantastic pictures out of this post.

This is probably my second favorite picture from the same bird's nest.

This post gave me some spectacular pictures as well. I love looking back and seeing how far I've come and how much more I can go. It gives me a real push to keep up what I'm doing.

I hope ya'll have a fabulous week.

Better Things to Come

My phone reads that it's Saturday, meaning I'm a day late and a dollar short of a Friday Phone Dump, blog post, and a mile long list of other things that were supposed to be done yesterday. But I mean absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

I guess making memories was my priority Friday. I spent the time from when I got out of school until ten last night at my school's basketball games, cheering on friends and smack talking the other team (we got a little mean and went a little crazy, but hey, that's what the student section is for).

Not to mention I have a book project due in English on Monday and I'm only like 50% of the way done with my book and have no component of the project part even done. Thankfully my years of experience in the art of winging it are about to pay off.

I know I'm unforgivably behind in the blog posting department but you've gotta cut me some slack. All week in class I've been hit with amazing ideas for a post in the middle of a lesson but there's just not enough hours in the day.

I'm planning on coming back with a bang this week. I've got two photo shoots that need to be blogged about and a new idea for what I hope becomes a monthly post. Great things are to come.

Friday Phone Dump:

Not my best phone dump either, but my dog is just super photogenic. And cute.

Hope you're having a fabulous Saturday.