Spring Time Odds and Ends

I have a few things I have been meaning to post about. They don't really relate to each other, except that they all happened this spring. So I will start with the most recent. This is what my girls did yesterday:

We are finally getting some nice weather this spring. It has been so warm the last couple days the girls begged me to put up the bounce house. We had a non official swim party with most of the neighborhood girls. Non official meaning: the bounce house is pretty much a magnet, put it up and kids will come. Just a funny note about this picture the first one I took Kaylee was on the swing set playing something else, but when she saw the camera she headed right over. She is the one running on the side of the bounce house, that girl never misses an opportunity to be in front of a camera.

Neighborhood Spring Cleaning Party

No pictures on this one, but I have wanted to post about this for awhile because it ended up being a fun idea. My friend and neighbor Irene came up with the idea to have a spring cleaning party. At first I was reluctant, I didn't know how well it would work, but it ended up being a great idea. This is how it worked: you get together about four or five people, more would be too many and you would probably want to split up, then you take one day and go to each of the houses and spring clean. Of course we didn't spring clean the whole house, but we did the basics like baseboards, walls, doors, and blinds. It only took about 1 hour to do each house, and it was so much fun to be able to chat with friends while you get your spring cleaning done. I haven't had so much fun cleaning blinds.

Basement Bathroom is Finally Done.

This has actually been done for awhile but I've had better things to post about. We ran out of money last fall when we finished part of our basement so the bathroom sat on hold with just a toilet and a tub. When we got our tax return this spring we used part of the money to finish it up. This is how it turned out:

Shaun did a great job with the tile. And now we have got a bathroom to go with our extra bedroom. So now none of you have any kind of excuse for not visiting. We will be expecting you shortly.

Fun with Photo Shop Elements

When I was in Idaho this weekend my friend asked me to take some photo's of her new baby. We also took pictures of her two boys. I'm only a novice picture taker, with a nice camera. I like all the practice I can get. It seems like the more pictures you take, the more you learn about what works and what doesn't. I mostly learn what doesn't. Luckily even though I've got a lot to learn about taking pictures, I am getting pretty good at Photo Shop, so even mediocre pictures turn out pretty good once they are edited. I thought it would be fun to show you a few before and afters of my photo shoot.

The Before:

The After:

So, mostly I just cropped this one closer and removed the background color, then make the background darker.

The Before:

The After:

Can you believe this is the same picture? Same thing as before: I cropped this a ton, then I used the cloning tool to get rid of any brown in the background. And finally I used Gaussian blur to get rid of the texture in the black shirt and smooth everything out.

The Before:

The After:

This one didn't require a lot of editing: But two things that editing really helped with. First, cropping fixed the off center problem, and second I wanted to point out another cool feature of photo shop: skin tone correction. I use it in all my photo editing, see how much better the skin tone looks in the after pictures. Such a small thing makes such a big difference.

The Before's:

The Afters:

I was really excited about the editing technique I learned in these to pictures. We didn't want the chair red because it didn't really match the boys clothes. So I was just going to remove the color from the chair and make it a grey color. But I started playing around and decided to use the blue from their sweaters to color the chair. Some of these tools are just like magic.

Temple Pictures

I drove by the temple on my way to check on my crafts and decided to take some photo's so I could play with the editing. I've wanted a good one of the Idaho Falls temple to hang on my wall.

The before:

The After:

Okay I showed this technique a couple weeks ago but its a good one, you really should try it.So I cropped it then remove a couple cars. Then I applied the Old Photo affect and added the writing on the bottom.

Happy Easter

We had a quiet but fun Easter. The weather did not want to cooperate for an Easter egg hunt, but we did manage to color some eggs and the Easter bunny hid the girls baskets with some yummy candy in them. I'm sure we have had general conference on Easter before, but I can't remember the last one. It was nice to just be able to relax at home and listen to a the apostles talk about Christ. My vote is for general conference on Easter every year.

We colored about 36 Easter eggs. Sydnie had fun throwing her eggs into the dye. She cracked all of her eggs, but it is always nice to have a few to eat while you are coloring them.

The Easter bunny came on Saturday morning this year. He left bunny footprints for Sydnie to follow and left clues for the older girls to follow. They all had fun finding their baskets.


The #1 requested candy this year was bubble gum. So the Easter bunny left them lots. Sydnie couldn't wait to did into her bubble tape.


Even Lu Lu had fun on Easter. She had a lot of fun playing with the empty Easter eggs.