risencrazy

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

MLK day at the park

What do you do when the kids are out of school, your husband has to work and everyone is going crazy inside?! We go to the park. A 'new' park. We skip the one closest to us that we can see from the sidewalk and walk to the neighborhood down the street for a much quieter and cleaner park to play. I thought it was much colder than it really was outside and we came prepared with coats, gloves, hats and shoes/socks.......you can see we quickly ditched all of those items to play in the cool sand and warm sun.

Dump out the sand toys and get to work making 'cakes'. (and try my newly found skills on the camera)

any chance for a photo-op - how cute is this kid?!

I was there too. :)

and the reason we like to put sand on the end of the slide.....

(she smiled!) :)

Monday, January 28, 2013

EmbellaSnaps™

Interchange your style with the EmbellaSnaps™ interchangeable embellishment system.
I love new things, crafts, gifts, etc. I love to be able to say, I did that! :) I'm also a 'need-to-know' sort of person. I love to know how a product came to be, a good back story will get me more interested than just trying to sell me a product. That being said, you can read about Natalie's mission (inspiring, right?!) and how EmbellaSnaps™ came to life. Now I don't know Natalie personally, but I do know her husband (we grew up together, college and then parted ways after that, but still friends). So thank goodness for facebook and being able to benefit from someone else's talent. :)
Here's how I got hooked on EmbellaSnaps™! If you know me, I'm not girly, never have been, working on that. A dress is the last thing I ever wanted to wear outside of church and well, fancy accessories have never been my thing. I didn't know if I would even be able to use the flowers she made, but I thought they were so stinkin' cute I just might buy them for my girls.

Well, I did something on her facebook page, shared a contest she was having or something and won 2 free flowers, but I had nothing to put them on so I wanted to order a headband for my girls. She sent that free too! We got the items and my littlest girl who is NOT girlie like myself, absolutely LOVES this headband and flower! She wore it for about 3 days before the my oldest girlie girl took hold of it. I wanted to show the flowers in 'action', but I don't like throw pillows and other things that will eventually be used in a pillow fight, tossed off the bed or beat up by my kids. :) I did however have a plain bag that needed a feminine touch. So check it out. It's super easy - the flowers attach to a magnet on the headband or in my case a bag too. It was simple to attach to the bag (took less than 1 min) and adds just enough girl-ness that I love it!!

Here's the white flower and then the yellow. So dang cute and fairly inexpensive (most of the flowers these sizes are less than $5!)

How cute would these be on a knit hat for the winter?! Now if I only had a hat to attach the flower too. Natalie said she puts an 'attachment' on her daughters shoes so she can interchange the flowers to match her dresses for church, family pictures or every day wearing (some flowers come in pairs - CUTE!)

Go to facebook and 'like' her page, try the website and create a new, simple, beautiful style!

testing, say cheese!

Sadly, I dropped my very nice camera on the pavement at the zoo back in December and broke the lens - it could adjust, but not smoothly and took some major 'breaking' to get it to even do that. I found a brand new lens for $45 on craigslist! Regularly $200! It's not a big zoom lens - it's the one that originally comes with the camera body and this person didn't use it - my benefit!! Trying it out in the parking lot of her apartment complex in Downtown Phoenix.

do you like Abbey's goose-egg on her eyebrow??

Having never had the instruction manual and not being a professional photographer, I decided to find out how to use it properly. I found some good videos on youtube, then went to work taking random pictures. (it's a work in progress)

I made the clipboards for Relief Society, will probably make some for the kids teachers for teacher appreciation too. Super easy once I got the spray adhesive and gave up on the mod-podge.