Jazz hands.

Yesterday the second grade put on the Black History Month program. It was awesome. But every program our school does is awesome.

Margret was in the Ragtime Melody part. She sang. She danced. I cried.

Yes, I cry at all kids' performances. Their sweetness and earnestness and silliness just gets to me.

I mean, seriously. Look at that kid. She's amazing. How could I not cry?

Because my studio is already way too crowded.

For the past two days, the little girls have decided that the best place to do homework is right next to me. So they dragged the table from the playroom in here and got out their homework boxes (with pencils, crayons, eraser, etc.) and then asked for snacks. Because they do not know how to do homework without snacks.

The arrangement does crowd things in here, but they have jumped right into the work and gotten it done quickly. So I'm not complaining.

Messing around.

Yep. New header. Not sure I really like it yet. But I've been dickering with everything else. Might as well do some damage here. I'd really like to get rid of the gray on the sides. I've looked through the code and can't seem to find anything. Did I mention I barely know html? I need to have John take a look, but he's always afraid he'll break it and I will go into a coma. Which I probably would.

And the owner of a new pair of glasses is...

Margret!

I've noticed that she has been squinting at the tv when she's trying to read captions, so I thought a visit to the optometrist was in order. Plus, I hadn't been in a few years. We went Friday and came back with the news that she could stand to wear a pair, while my prescription had barely changed.

I told her she could pick out her new frames, but that I had veto power. I gave her a few guidelines to consider (squarish, brown) and she found these, which really are cute.

But what she really loves is the leopard print on the inside. I like it, too.

The new standard.

For the last several weeks I've been organizing my scrapbook albums. Well, actually, I've been organizing hundreds of layouts that have never even been close to an album. All those years of being on design teams and submitting to magazines meant I had stacks of layouts all over the place. And no time to store them.

While I haven't given up on "pro" scrapping, I have taken a break for a while. And after the busy fall photo season, I decided to clean up/reorganize my office. Which meant the layouts needed to find homes. In a spontaneous burst of spending, I bought some of the above American Crafts D-ring albums last year and I LOVE THEM. In fact, I will phase out the other D-rings I as I slowly purchase new ones. They hold a ton of layouts, and I can use both 12x12 and 8.5x11 page protectors in them. I bought my original four online, and I just discovered Hobby Lobby has them in stock locally. They're only $20, and less with a coupon. I'll be making several trips to HL in the next few months.

Over the next week I hope to make labels and get them into their final resting spot -- on top of the computer armoire in the den. By the way, what do YOU do with your layouts? And where to you store them? I currently have 13 big albums (only five of the ACs) and they are way too big for standard bookshelves. Tell me what works for you.

Don't forget about those holiday cards.

Wow. It's really been that long since I've posted? Well, I've had to edit a Baby's First Year session (gorgeous baby; I'll be posting some photos soon), and sadly, I had a Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep session also. And I talked to both Margret's and Audrey's classes for Career Week and did mini-shoots in their classes with the kids getting to act as my assistants. So I needed to edit all those and make prints and disks for the teachers.

On Friday a friend stopped by with several projects, including her Holiday Card book. Which is great because I still haven't done mine, and a few people have contacted me but haven't sent me their stuff. Not that I'm in a big hurry. But if you are thinking about getting a book done, this would be a great week because I'm already in the groove of working on them. Here are the details. Just email me if you have any questions.

One last thing: I spent three hours at the eye doc/optical store today. Can you guess which Lambert will be sporting new glasses this weekend? Leave your answer in the comments.

I wanted you to be the first to know...

My new website is ready to go. Please go take a look at www.marcilambert.com and let me know what you think. I'm sending out other announcements, too. So plan to be inundated.

Happy Chocolate Day!

I'm sure most couples are thrilled to be able to celebrate Valentine's Day on a Saturday night. Me, not so much. I do not care for crowded restaurants with overpriced specials. Although we usually eat out on Saturday nights, we switched it up and took the kids to Sonic for lunch. Then we made a big, beautiful dinner at home (steak, baked potatoes, edamame).

John requested a chocolate cheesecake, claiming that it has been two years since I've made one. He may be right. So I was happy to make one this afternoon, using one of my grandmother's cheesecake pans. I don't know exactly why, but I love using heirloom cookware. I made steak in John's grandmother's cast iron pan. I love it.

I wasn't sure the girls would go for the chocolate cheesecake, so I made them chocolate dipped marshmallows with sprinkles. I melted two squares of semisweet choc, dipped the marshmallows in and dipped them in bowls of sprinkles. Easy peasy. And kid-friendly.

We're about to tuck the children in bed for the night and enjoy our peaceful house. Hope your day was great.

Margret's Valentine.

Mission completed. Margret and I finished her Valentines before dinner tonight. And I think they are lovely.

Valentine sweat shop, 2009 edition.

We've encountered a few bumps in the road this week. On Tuesday night, Audrey was highly whiney and crying at the drop of a hat. For her, that means she's probably getting sick. And I just attributed it to her developing cold. However on Wednesday morning she woke up early and complained of a sore back, sore belly, sore chest. Hmmm. This is a kid who has been through eye surgery twice and refused all post-op pain relief. If she hurts, it's real.

So I kept her home and took her to the doc with a vague "she's got a cold and says her back hurts and I just know something's not right." Turns out she's got an ear infection and a UTI. And now she has another antibiotic to take. Sigh. But she's much more perky this morning and is back at school.

Yesterday afternoon, I realized that we need to get cracking on Valentines for school. In years past, I've just given them flat cards and let them stamp and sticker. I decided to give more guidance this year and came up ideas for both. Audrey's card is above. She wanted a folded card and had planned to draw hearts and write "Happy Valentine's Day" on all 18 of them. I asked her to make one drawing which included the words. I scanned, printed (thank you Epson Artisan 800), trimmed and adhered them to the cards. Because it would be 2010 if she did them individually. She did sign them all herself, though. And she made a special card for her teacher.

Margret agreed to doing a tag, with a heart, flower and brad. She picked the cardstock and I found scraps of coordinating patterned paper. My plan was to just cut the hearts out, but Margret wanted something...more. I suggested that we emboss them with UTEE and make them shiny and she was all for it. So I spent like an hour last night working on that part. But they do look pretty cool.

Today after school we'll assemble them and I'll post a final version. Leave a comment if you've posted your Valentines. I'd love to take a look.

Good stuff around the blogosphere.

I keep seeing bits of goodness in my web travels, so I'm going to share them with you.

My dear friend, Sarah, is giving away a bunch of Jillibean scrap stuff on her blog. All you have to do is share your favorite soup and be the winning number.

My dear friend, Jennifer, is showing off her monogramming and sewing magic here. I want to have a baby just so I can order something. Just kidding, John. Maybe.

I just found out the Laurie, one of the teachers at the preschool where my kids went, has started a cookie company. OMG these look delish!

Need crafting and organizational tips, all in one place? Try Tip Junkie. I don't know the girl who runs it, but I wish I did.

Finally, if you are a local artist and need studio space, check this out: Artists in Memphis. Makes me think of my painting days, back in art school.

Got anything artsy or crafty to share? Leave a comment, please.

The Adventures of Busy Bee.

I mentioned Busy Bee in a post below. Busy Bee is a stuffed animal that lives with Audrey's kindergarten teacher. Busy comes in a knapsnack with a binder of his adventures with other kids through the years. The idea is to do things with the Bee, photograph them and put them in the binder. Last night while the girls played and John had the basketball game on (Go Tigers!), I put together our pages.

The six pages are pretty simple. I used the same yellow cardstock for each page. I had taken about two dozen photos over the week, so I narrowed down the best ones. Here's where I tell you again how much I love my Epson Artisan 800 printer. I printed a few photos in 4x6 size, with a white border (I could have chosen borderless, but I liked the pop of white for this project). The rest I printed on 4x6 paper, but with the 2x3 size checked, giving me two photos per sheet. I trimmed off the excess paper on some of these and made an even border on all sides, like the cooking photos below.

After I printed and arranged the photos, I picked some Ki Memories paper (white, with black letters) and Basic Grey (yellow, with a bit of texture) and added them to the edges of the pages.

I did the journaling in MS Word, with Fuzzbox for the titles and American Typewriter for the text. I measured the space for each journaling block and made sure to allow room for them to go to the edge of the pages. Then I rounded the corners on two sides.

This is Audrey's portrait of herself and Busy Bee. All I did was trim it and add photo corners.

Finally, I added yellow flowers to each page and used black embroidery thread to make french knots.

All of these scans were done on the Epson, so I'm going to also praise it for its ease of use. I opened the scanning application, hit preview so I could set the borders of the image, then hit scan. Within two minutes I had six scans sitting on my desktop waiting to be resized for this post. Ridiculously easy. You can click on these pages to make them larger. And feel free to leave a comment for Audrey!

Muddy's Bake Shop.

This was going to be a post about our crazy fun time going to Muddy's Bake Shop this afternoon. You see, Audrey has "Busy Bee" from her class this week. Busy Bee stays with each kid for a week or so and you do things with Busy Bee and photograph them and make scrapbook pages for a class binder. Totally up my alley: fun kid things + photography + scrapping. Done.

So I decided we would take Busy Bee to Muddy's, and we would meet some friends there. But I wouldn't tell the girls where we were going. I drove into the parking lot and they were puzzled (Margret's been once, Audrey has never been). Margret thought we were going to a restaurant. At the sound of that, Audrey started crying.

And I'm all, like, Dude, we're going to get cupcakes. And she's all, like, wah wah wah! And I'm like Dude, nobody cries over cupcakes. Look, there's our friends. Audrey: wah!

Sigh. So we go in and order the plate at the top: a Prozac (in the front, for me, and I think I need about fifty more), a Tomboy (chocolate cake with peanut butter icing, my second favorite, for Margret) and a Traditional (with blue icing, for Audrey).

Come on. How can you cry over cupcakes like that?

Audrey did finally get over herself and start eating her Traditional. She likes to lick all the icing off first. The girls settled down, but then managed to wind themselves back up and made a ruckus in the bathroom. We decided to sit outside, and then the kids went back in to get water and Margret ended up spilling a big cup of it and poor Miss Kat had to mop it up. Not the fun, relaxing trip I had in mind. So we are probably banned for life.

Which is a total shame because I really want another Tomboy before I die.

More playing around with the camera.

With my new office arrangement, I have a big, comfy chair next to a window with north light. I predict there will be many portraits (and not just of myself) done here. I used my 50mm 1.8 lens, which means I have to stretch my arm out as far as possible and this is all I can get in the shot. Here's a tip: when you're doing the outstretched-arm self-portraits, drop your front shoulder as much as possible, and hold the camera up a little higher than your eyes and point it down a bit. Oh, and take a bunch of pics.

Fruit.

Just playing around this morning. We are still attempting five fruits and vegetables a day, although I think I'm winning. I've got more biz planning in the works for today. Website copy will go to John later. Next up is planning email newsletters and updating my client/potential client database. Send productive vibes my way, please.

New pics.

So. That last post had a lot of words and no pictures. Let's change things up with this post.

As I've mentioned a million times, I've been redoing my home office/studio. I've gotten rid of tons of clutter and rearranged the furniture and it looks wonderful. I promise to do a full post with pictures once I get my last project taken care of.

One of the new things is my wall of work. Last week I hung a large bulletin board and started pinning up my favorite shots, in a rather random way. I also ordered some canvas prints (photos that are printed on canvas and stretched over a wood frame).

And I just love the canvases. This is one of my favorite families below; I've worked with them for a few years. We had a great (and cold) shoot at the Brooks last fall and I loved the way this one turned out.
I also ordered a maternity shot, a newborn shot and baby's first year shot, shown below. Coincidentally, both these little boys have the same name, but are unrelated. And that's not their mama. But I love all three!

Several of these photos will be popping up in my new marketing materials, which I'll also post about soon. And yes, canvas prints are available for all my clients. The new website will have complete details. Prices range between $100 and $300, and I don't think you'll be disappointed. I can't stop looking at mine.

January was "no unnecessary spending" month.

We agreed at the beginning of the month that we would try to spend as little money as possible this month. After December's excess, we figured it would be somewhat easy to try to save some money (especially because we were able to pay cash for all of our Christmas spending - a first for us!).

Our plan was simply to delay anything we didn't really need as well as we could. Here's how it turned out:

What we did spend money on (above and beyond mortgage, food, gas, utilities):
- $90 for two prescriptions when the girls had pinkeye. Yes, we have insurance. The first prescription of the year for each person is outrageous. We also spent another $8 for Audrey's antibiotic for strep at the end of the month.
- a new battery for my car. If the Toyota dealer had done its job in December and checked the battery, this expense would have taken place earlier. We got jumped by AAA (free) and John went to Autozone and installed the battery himself (free).
- $10 in bingo prizes. We had a family get-together in January and I didn't have enough stuff in my stash so I took the girls to the Dollar Tree to get some more.
- $3 in bath scrubbies. I had tried disinfecting the girls' bath sponges after the pinkeye incident but boiling left them stiff and un-absorbent. I got one for me too.
- $4 for a blank journal as a blog prize. I used a coupon at Michael's.
- a birthday present for a friend of Audrey's. I usually let the girls pick the presents they give instead of keeping a stash.
- more fruits and vegetables. We also had a plan to try to eat five a day. I have no problem spending money on healthy food, although I still try to use sales and coupons as part of my buying strategy. I did find myself making extra trips to the grocery store to replenish midweek.
- $150 for HVAC service. We had a cold snap in the middle of the month and I noticed the temperature was not rising above 64 degrees one day. I called for service and the guy changed our completely filthy air filter. Within minutes the house got warmer. The guy did some other maintenance things and I had him bill me for a full year, which means we'll get another visit in the spring to prep the AC for the summer. I should have done this in the fall.
- pizza for Pizza Night with friends. We take turns hosting with two other families and it was our turn. I briefly considered homemade pizza, but decided I didn't have the time to do it. I also had lunch out with friends a few times. I consider these more than just meals; it's socializing with people that we are very close to and I'm not willing to give that up. On the other hand, we were invited over to friends' houses a few times and I was able to pull out some of my stockpiled brownie mix to make. $0 spent on that.
- $20 co-pay each for my mammogram and Audrey's strep visit and $30 for John's allergist appointment. Gotta pay for healthcare.
- $60 for the kids' artwork. Okay, I know they can stay at home and draw/paint, but the school had an art fair and for a mere $30ish each I could buy a framed original of my child's art. I tend to do most fundraising stuff, because it's such a good school and I don't have to pay tuition. And the frames are great -- very easy to switch out artwork.
- $18 for a dozen cupcakes. I finally got to Muddy's Bakeshop and I bought four cupcakes for Margret's teacher's birthday, four for my friend's birthday and four for us. And they were fabulous.
- a bigger chunk of money to our one remaining credit card. It was a pleasant surprise to realize in the middle of the month that we had more money than we expected.
- a handmade gift for a friend expecting a baby. Beautifully done and well worth it.
- I continued to have a few business expenses and paid for those, but I tried to keep them to an absolute minimum (new business cards through Vistaprint was an inexpensive solution). One splurge was to get four canvas prints to hang in my office. They were on sale and I had a coupon code. Can't wait to see them up.
- postage. I had to mail some Paperback Swap books, and a few other things. I use the media mail rate for the books whenever I can.

What we did not spend money on:
- pinkeye prescription for me. Based on the advice of an eye doc friend, I let mine go for a day or two and it cleared on its own. If it hadn't, I would have gotten the medicine.
- dinner out on Saturdays. Normally we go out every Saturday night as a family. This month, we picked one place where kids eat free and another time, we picked up food and brought it to our house. We also drink water instead of soft drinks when we are out. After we hosted pizza night on a Friday, we stayed home that Saturday and had soup and grilled cheese. It was great. And as I mentioned above, we were invited over to friends' a few times and didn't spend anything on that.
- not as much Diet Coke. John and I love the stuff. I worked on cutting down to just two a day, and drinking water with lemon the rest of the day. It was an easy switch.
- fitness. I don't think we would have followed the trend to sign up for a gym membership in January anyway, but having WiiFit at home is the best fitness option for us. We can do yoga, aerobics, strength training and balance games in the privacy of our den. In pajamas. At 9p, if we wish. The activities are fun, short and perfect for competitive people who like to try to beat their family members' scores. Santa brought us plenty of Wii games and we did not purchase any more during the month.
- going to Starbucks for more salted caramel hot chocolate. Not that I did this much in December, or ever. But I certainly thought about it.
- every random thing the girls asked for. We reminded them that we were cutting back this month and they generally respected that.
- someone to do our yard work. We get the occasional knock on the door from someone who has noticed we are the only people on the block who have not raked. It would certainly be easier, but we just waited until a nice Saturday and went out to do it ourselves. Okay, John did this with the girls. I went grocery shopping.
- one gift for a friend was found in the prize closet. We received a duplicate game and it seemed perfect to pass on in this instance.
- movies. We rarely go out anyway, and we have a Netflix account (one movie at a time, unlimited for the month). With my new Mac, I can watch select Netflix movies at my desk. I've spent a lot of time reorganizing/cleaning my office and have watched several for free. I also signed up for Redbox. I get a code sent to my cell phone every Monday and I can get a free movie rental (I go to the Redbox at a nearby Walgreen's). In fact, I can get a free movie for every debit/credit card I have. And I have until 9p Tuesday to return them.
- fewer satellite tv channels. We took a look at our package and went down to the next lowest priced one. We still have the channels we watch, but have shaved a few dollars off the monthly bill.
- books. I'm still using (and loving) Paperback Swap. When I cleaned the girls' bookshelf, I found a few duplicates and listed them. In a matter of days they were all taken and I have more points for books for me. And those will be completely free. Margret read all of the books she got for Christmas, so I took her to the library to pick up a few more. We go to the Library every week in the summer. I think we may need to start going more now to keep feeding her reading habit. I also have some generous friends who have loaned me books (which I am quick to read and return).
- a budgeting tool. John found mint.com, a site where you can link your financial accounts and watch your spending. You can also set up a budget. We have our accounts linked and have started working on a rough budget. I think it's the next step in working on our spending.
- any magazine subscriptions that came due. I had one 'spensive scrapbooking publication that I decided not to renew. It's a good magazine, but I can live without it for now.
- snow day entertainment. We received a gift that I hadn't given the girls yet. When they were home for a snow day, I busted it out and it provided some playtime fun.
- organization tools. January is a prime time for "organizational solution" sales. I spent about two weeks rearranging/reorganizing my office and I didn't spend a dime on it. And I love my new space.
- at least a hundred other things that popped into my head during the month. It's amazing how often that "buy me" feeling comes over me. I usually resist, but not always. This month I had to constantly remind myself that I didn't need to pick up stuff at the Target Dollar Spot or grab more marked down Christmas stuff. I deleted sales emails and tossed most of the Sunday flyers. I admit that it was tough, with the after-holiday sales.

On the 31st, I stopped at Target to pick up some free 3D glasses for Superbowl viewing. The instant I walked in I was overwhelmed with the "I must buy something" feeling. Margret and I walked around, looking at various things but we left with just the free glasses. Whew.

Overall, I will call this experiment a success. It was a way to halt the spending spree that comes during the holidays and appreciate what we have. And it was a way of getting out the habit of buying whatever pops into our minds. I don't feel deprived at all. We had lots of fun together as a family, had plenty of food to eat and company to enjoy. We struck a good balance of activity and rest. Admittedly, we did defer some purchases to February, but I hope we continue to carefully consider how we spend our money. If you have any money-saving tips, feel free to leave them in the comments.