Photography Year One
It was last summer when I bought my Canon XSi camera.  At this time a year ago, I was pretty convinced that simply by having this SLR camera, I’d suddenly become a much sought after, talented photographer, simply because I had a fancy pants camera.  That hasn’t been the case exactly, though I do think that THE CAMERA itself has helped my photography. Here’s what I’ve learned in the past year.

Wikipedia is on my side. Are you?
Since moving to Tennessee back in October, it seems that we need to build an ark for all the rain we’ve had.   With all the rain, we’ve been singing songs related to rain like “Rain, Rain Go Away” and “I’m So Sick of all this @#@$%# Rain”  (what?  you haven’t heard that one?).  We’ve also been singing “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” and Tate and I are having a HUGE disagreement about the lyrics of the song. Here’s my version, verified by Wikipedia. It’s raining; it’s pouring. The old

Learning compassion in the church of Chick-Fil-A
All the children were scrambling down the tower of steps that led to the curvy slide at Chick-Fil-A, complaining and yelling about a boy sitting at the top being “mean.”  Parents quizzed their children, “who is doing what?”  “Where?”  “A boy?”  “He won’t let anyone go by?”   It was hard to decipher exactly the problem was with about 10 kids all talking at once, but it was clear that there was a boy who wasn’t letting the other children climb up the steps to the slide. The mood amongst the parents became indiginant.  Murmurs could be heard, chastising the offending child’

Prints
“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhood completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” -Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven That quote has squatted in every crevice of my brain, filled every pore, and hung like a weighted vest on my shoulders ever since I read it.  It’s been several weeks since I finished reading The Five People You M

This is a perfect example of oversharing
I recently did harm to my internal organs by eating my weight in jalapeno nachos at a baseball game. The next morning, well, let’s just say I was lucky to make it out of the bathroom alive. In our family, we tend to overshare and describe our bathroom events and this trip to the bathroom was no exception.  After I gave my gruesome recount, Tate scowled at me and pointed to our son.  “You know, you really should watch what you say in front of him.” Later that afternoon on a family outing, I took Carson into a public bathroom stall with me.  I carefully squatted over