Category: LIFE

Us in pictures

We didn’t have any picture of us in our house until 10 months ago. We never had, even in our previous flats, even when we weren’t living together. It’s one of those things with no reason at all. It was just us as we were. Us as we were before Olivia was born. And then things started to change, in many ways. One of the things that happened is that we started to print out photos, get canvases printed out for us and all of them went on our walls. There is a narrow corridor in our house, outside the kitchen. We hanged all of our pictures there and O loves looking at them. She smiles at her own pics and tries to grab the other ones. 
And I just put some more up this morning! I printed out these new pics (the ones in the white frames) for G, before he went to SF back in June. Hidden some in his wallet and some in his luggage so he wouldn’t miss us too much. And now are on display, to fill our little narrow corridor with more of our memories!

Back to work!

And the day has eventually come, the day I go back to work after the most eventful year of my life! I wasn’t really looking forward to it and now that it’s here, I feel even worst than I imagined. The only consolation is knowing that little Miss O will be spending a lot of time with her dad, having fun and bonding with him even more than she has so far. I miss them terribly! I’m just glad that the walk to the office is a short and enjoyable one, making my day a little easier. And of course there is always the lunch break when I get to see them and kiss them, making the morning hours moving a bit quicker.

This week in pictures

So like everyone else on the blog sphere, from time to time I will be sharing a summary of my life through pictures. I take most of my pictures using my phone, it’s always with me and it doesn’t require much effort. The only phone app I sometime use is Instagram. I do love Instagram and its filters, the vintage feel is quite cool and you can easily turn uninteresting pictures in more appealing ones. My Instagram pictures are posted on twitter as soon as I take them, I usually give it some thoughts before shooting, trying to catch more interesting subjects. The phone camera is for everything else, including videos, and the pics stay on my phone until needed.
This week I’m sharing both Instagram and phone photos.
The Instagram topic for this week is the beach! We are having an unbearable heat wave and spending most of the day at the sea.
The rest of the time is spent having fun watching Miss O doing new things…like standing up holding on furniture and trying to climb out of her cot…so much fun!
The photo layout has been edited using a free iPhone app called “photosplit”….it does what I need and it’s easy to use. Shame about the app tag on the final layout.

A mini book for Miss O

 

Exactly one year ago we announced to our families and friends that we were pregnant. It was a magic  nine-month wait, with lots of ups and downs, joy and tears, excitement and fear (a lot of fear!). But it was all truly forgotten by the moment Miss O was born; there was no time to even think about how life was before. And so I’m glad I did have the time to put together a little book documenting how we spent the nine months before, what we did and how we prepared ourself to embrace her to our world from the moment we found out we were expecting. 
The idea of the mini book came reading elise blaha’s blog (the mini books guru!); I put it together using a variety of plain and pattern paper, cut to 4″x6″ and bounded using two 25mm rings. The front cover was made using a letterpress machine (I talked about it here) and the title, well, it speaks for itself…we did think about her for nine months (if not before!).
I managed to squeeze nine months in about 50 sheets, above are a selection of random pages from the book.
It will be our ‘how we were before you were born’ memory and a nice little gift for Miss O when she will be old enough to appreciate it.

Out and about

I’ve started to do things on the move…I had to! With a little one your time is not yours anymore. It took me time to realise it. I was fighting it at first, trying to do things as I used to, trying to fit her needs into mine. Well, after four and half months I finally gave in, and you know what, it got better, much better! I learned how to make the most of my time when baby O is asleep and getting organised so I can do staff easily. I started to take photos with my phone, so I can send them to friends and family or post them online straight away…there is no more time for downloading pics on my laptop, do the editing, creating folders, etc; this is now a monthly task! I put together a very small sketching set, easy to carry around and ready for whenever…if I want to post a sketch I just take a pic of it…no more time for scanning! And now the blogging task. I was hoping to increase the number of posts on the blog, but that didn’t happened either… so now I’m posting on the go using an app on my phone. Fine, the results are not the same, I admit, the app has a lot of limitations (a lot!!), but while waiting for google to make it better, I’d rather post as it allows rather than not posting at all.