Dreaming.In.Reality

There have been a few exciting things going on around here. Baby stuff, photo stuff, work stuff, website stuff… lets start with the baby stuff.

Lucien is now nearly 5.5 months old, he’s eating rice cereal a few times a week. We need to try to get him to eat it more often, he’s definately interested in eating, but he’s still grasping the whole concept of “over the tongue look out stomach here it comes”. He has moments where most of it goes in his mouth and stays there, but for the most part he wears it. Rice cereal is the new black. He’s also rolled from his back to his belly and then to his back again. Tummy time is finally becoming an acceptable thing to do. He’s talking lots more lately. Lots of babbling, putting sounds together. I keep trying to get him to say “Momma”. He’s also extremely fascinated by words. He gets very excited to see them and spends many minutes investigating your shirt if you are wearing one with text on it. He’s old hat at reading restaurant menus and he’s currently typing his autobiography on Daddy’s computer. We start our days by making coffee, fixing our breakfasts and then reading the world news and celebrity gossip. During the day we hang out either down in the den or upstairs in the nursery, sometimes we’ll hang in the living room where Lucien will kick around on his play mat or bounce in his jumparoo while I tinker on the laptop. Sometimes he naps, but lots of times he doesn’t. This kid just doesn’t want to miss a thing going on so naps are usually not an option. In the past 2 weeks or so, he’s realized how much it sucks to be cranky and tired though and will pass out eventually.

Photo stuff.. As most of you know I belong to a local photo club here in the city. They have competitions where you can win ribbons and scores based on the marks of 3 judges (#/10). These scores enable you to achieve a “rank” in the club, you move up in the ranks by your competition entry scores. X amount of ribbons over X score allow you to move up to the next level and this criteria changes depending on where you’re moving to. There is Junior, Intermediate, Senior and Master ranking. With the last competition I moved up from the Junior level to the Intermediate level. To move from Junior to Intermediate I needed 8 entries scoring 21-23 points each or 3 entries scoring 24 points or higher… To move from Intermediate to Senior I need to score 9 entries of 24 points or higher. I believe I have one entry from last year that counts towards my Senior rank. In any case, I have a feeling that I’ll be in Intermediate for a while until I buckle down and bust my hump for a while in the photo department. I’ve been sorta forced into getting my crap together for photo stuff as it is anyhoos, so I suppose I should start getting a bit more serious. For years people have been telling me to do this photo thing for a job or at least on the side, blah blah blah yes I know. But me=lazy. I’ll admit it, I’m a lazy moo. MOO. I spent a good portion of time yesterday figuring out what to charge people for photos, travel cost charging (actually I made other people do that after my brain shut down from doing the math), and what I would like to offer for what I charge. It’s still not finished but it’s more than I had. Which leads me to the next part. Galleries on my website, yeah I need to do something with that. Soon.

Work stuff. Long story short. I have a job at Canada’s favourite coffee chain. Currently I’m still in training. I’ve had one full day of that so far and I go back tomorrow for more CD viewing on how to be a coffee machine master. Thursday I have to go get shooz for work and I have my first real shift on Friday AM. I’ll be working 6-11a, M-T-W-F and then a weekend morning. I have playgroup on Thursdays. I’m excited to be going back to work. I need the money and it’s at a time that will allow me to have the rest of my days and evenings to spend with the baby and Kev. I will miss my early morning snuggles and morning routine with the baby, but Momma has bills to help pay and camera equipment she needs. Working the morning shift like that also allows me to go back to work and not have to have Lucien put into any kind of daycare situation which is optimal because well that is expensive and it’d be cheaper for me to have my debts and not work.

I have chosen some layouts for Wordpress. I had originally wanted to recreate one from scratch but quite honestly I want to make the publishing switch sometime in the next decade so I chose some that I could easily fix colours and a graphic without too much tinkering. I’ll be combining DIR and Picturing Reality because I cannot be arsed to run 2 seperate blogs anymore. So new layout, software switch and a good solid database combination and I’ll be happy.

So that’s about it.. here are some pics I did of the baby (and 2 of the dog) this week. I want to enter one in a photo contest (I actually have to choose 3 photos and enter by midnight tonight for the club as well)