Countdown to Christmas...Day 2

December 2nd saw much rain and dark skies which meant the natural light available was minimal. We waited until the girls returned from school in order for them to open up the second boxes.      

My girls were excited to see what box #2 would bring them today. It was a bit of a challenge to get the three chocolates into the tiny box, so Saffi was struggling to get the box opened.

  She kept trying on her own, but I finally had to help her out a little. 

 

The prize was worth it and the three children enjoyed their treats.

Sagey is happy when he's eating any kind of food. Most mornings, his first words are "Eat. Now."

 

 

After their sweet treat, it's time to open up the box for the toy treat.   

Letters for the mailbox.

 

Countdown to Christmas...Day 1

Wooden Advent Train from Oma

December 1st... the start of the big countdown to Christmas and the first day of opening one box each of two advent calendars this year.

The first is the Advent Train that the kids received from Oma last year. It is a beautiful 3-piece wooden train with 24 drawers that get filled with candies. The drawers are quite small but we try to be as creative as possible when choosing a treat for each of the kids.

  The first day brought three Kinder chocolates 

Little sister eagerly awaiting her piece of chocolate.

Meanwhile, Sagey was sleeping away the afternoon.

 

We waited a couple of hours until the sun was about to set in order to open the first box of the Playmobil Advent set that Oma sent the children this year.

 

It's a mailbox Day 1 is complete

Dear Facebook, you suck...

 ...my time, that is, and my creativity. So, I've decided to give you a break so that I can once again enjoy my life, realize my dream about having a clean house, read a book or two or three per month instead of the News Feed, listen to music, and start writing on my own website. Perhaps I might even give you a permanent break sometime in the future. It's something I've thought about many times over the past 2+ years since I've signed up for an account, as Facebook has become a sort of personal experiment of mine from which I learned much about human interaction in the digital age as I carefully observed, and at times interacted, with the pages I've followed.

It started with a personal account where I, as many others, posted photos of my children. Shortly thereafter I created a Facebook page for my business. Afterall, everyone has one. Right? The problem now IS that everyone has a page and the information overload is immense. How can you possibly follow the hundreds of pages you've added? Your Status Updates are glossed over, unless, of course, you're offering something for free. Why have an account at all? Why would I want someone knowing anything about me? Why would I care about someone else's "perfect" life? Because everyone else does it?

I'm sure many of you can relate to this 21st century social media phenomenom. You wake up and immediately reach for the iPhone to see what's new in Facebookland. Throughout the day, as you're waiting in line at the grocery store, the doctor's office, or sitting at the intersection waiting for the light to turn green, you check the News Feed for the latest happenings not wanting to miss out on any updates from your virtual friends. "Oh, but they're not virtual, they're real!", you exclaim. Sure, some of them might be friends from your past and others might have become friends along the way. I know that I've met quite a few very nice people I'd love to meet one day. In the evening, you then find yourself in bed, lights out, iPhone in hand browsing the News Feed before falling asleep. Communication is not as it once was and most likely will never be the same again.

I remember a time when people used paper and pen to write a letter to a faraway friend. I remember a time when people talked endlessly on the phone, chatting away about the weekend's get-together. I remember having an answering machine and getting home to see the red light flashing on the machine, the number on the display indicating the messages I've received while out. I remember the many nights I spent with music in the background, my special leather journal and .20mm black micron pen writing poetry and any thoughts that came to me. I wrote, reflected, thought. I remember a simpler time when people actually had the time to meet up, drink some coffee, and be free from distractions.

My children love looking at books - I hope that is never replaced by modern day technology.

Flash forward to today...2011. Almost everyone has a cell phone, even children. iPhones are everywhere you look. People are walking and driving while scrolling through emails and News Feeds. I remember when my husband first got the iPhone. His cell phone contract expired about a month before mine, so he decided he wanted to get the iPhone. That was the beginning of the digital newspaper at breakfast time - the replacement of the physical newspaper. I'm reminded of that "I Love Lucy" episode where Ricky puts the newspaper up to his face, ignoring Lucy as they both sit down to breakfast. Every morning, I'd watch my husband as he flipped through one Wikipedia or news article after another, Googling something that interested him, feeling as if I've been replaced. My husband doesn't want anything to do with Facebook despite my trying to convince him that it was a good idea. I'm starting to think he was right - there is not much to be gained except lost time. Then I got my iPhone. "Ding!"...let's run and see who sent me that email, breakfast can wait five minutes. Another "ding!"...oh, a sale just went through. Water for the Turkish coffee is on the stove, let's quickly flip through the News Feed since hubby is busy on his iPhone. Oops!, the water has almost evaporated in the meantime and I have to add more. Breakfast has been delayed for 10 more minutes.

We have this growing desire to let the world know our every movement, our every meal, the songs we're listening to NOW...our every everything. Then there are the photos. We're all guilty of them - myself included. Although I can relate to a huge pile (or in my case piles) of laundry that you have to wash, I somehow feel that is best left visually unshared. We also have the desire to one-up each other, although most will not readily admit to it. You have a new lens? Hey wait, I have a new camera! You have a new house? Hey, look at my cottage/guest house/studio/furniture/private jet...you get the point. 

When you venture out to the Internet, you have a story to tell and there is this sense of perfection that takes over. "My husband is the best!", "My children are so smart", "My life is perfect!", "I love my job!"... Oh, how we want to be liked. We try every day, several times a day, to get noticed, to be heard. It's like Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat: "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW!". At one point you might get worn out trying to keep up with the virtual Jones'. You've been sitting at your computer for hours editing photos, writing emails, sitting at your dead end cubicle job - all with Facebook in the background. You're bored. You need some excitement. You turn to Facebook. Maybe someone will have some controversial discussion going on in which I can participate. Maybe I can scroll through someone's photos while I wait for my cubicle neighbor to finish with her copying job. Maybe I can post something, anything, just so I get noticed.

My personal page hardly ever gets updated. My business page is filled with photos of my products and Status Updates left uncommented. I often wonder why Mark decided to name the Wall as such. Maybe he was thinking of the catchphrase "Let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks"- maybe someone will listen, maybe not. What I've observed thus far is that people simply do not want to take the time to think about anything for longer than the length of a Twitter update. Begging for "Likes", the "Look at me! Look at me now!" era of social interaction is how the world of Facebook works. If you don't have at least a thousand fans, you start to feel inadequate as you look over to your competitors who have somehow managed to gain a following of thousands or tens of thousands of "fans". 

Facebook is the modern-day soap opera. My husband once told me that Facebook would be dead without women. I remember even posting this as my Status Update that day on both my business and personal Facebook pages. I agree. So, Facebook, you can have all the "Likes" you want. I'd like to have my life back...my time, my creativity, my mind. My kids are growing up too quickly and I fear I have wasted too much time not making a difference in the virtual world when I can make a much greater difference right here at home.

If you think that you're not addicted to Facebook and that you can live without it, try it. Log out of your Facebook account on your iPhone and desktop/laptop for a week. Go ahead, try it, I dare you. I doubt many will be able to survive just one day without feeling that urge to scroll the News Feed.

In the meantime, go talk to someone face to face. Say "hello" to that cashier at the checkout who has to scan your items while you scroll through your News Feed. Interact. Live. Think. Don't let technology rule your social interactions. It's time to get back to a more peaceful way of living - introspection, rediscovery...Zen.

Estes Park, Colorado

Doing What I Love...and the Randomness of Life

White Sands, New Mexico

I've been meaning to post updates of our Summer road trip as it happened but technology and life got in the way. I did, however, post a few photos on Facebook from my iPhone. A few unexpected things came along the way - getting notified of a last minute opening in the night photography workshop by Grant Collier in Colorado Springs as we were enjoying coffee at Plateau Espresso in Alamogordo, New Mexico (thus changing our plans and hurrying up to Colorado) to "losing" Sagey in a large store to staying at The Stanley Hotel only because we arrived too late to check into the campsite and then extending our stay at the hotel for one more night just because it was so beautiful. We did happen to come upon a most wonderful pizzeria, Pizzeria Locale, in Boulder late that night right before we drove up to Estes Park. Unexpected occurrences...the randomness of life.

I have yet to upload the rest of my photos and to edit the ones that I like. With us having returned the week that school started, my priorities shifted and the road trip blog post(s) have been pushed aside - for now. I still plan on writing about it but it'll be more for the sake of our family to remember the two weeks we spent on the road together this Summer - an experimental road trip with a 5-year old (who actually turned 5 on the trip), a 3 1/2-year old, and a 2-year old. What surprised both me and my husband is how well the three behaved on the drive and the trip in general. It was a very long drive with limited healthy food options (or any food that one night when we drove through the land of nothingness) along the way. Eating healthy on the road is definitely a challenge, particularly when you're not very well prepared and don't know what to expect. 

Do what YOU love. Dare to be different. Don't just follow the crowd or you'll be swallowed up in the sea of conformity. The girls dressed their little brother in a dress and he didn't mind even a little bit.

So, the past week was filled with many events... from meeting the girls' teachers and getting the girls ready to start preschool and kindergarten at the end of last week to knitting a few more pieces for my shop, which has consumed the time I should have spent doing work around the house and which still so desperately needs to get done, to receiving my copy of Photographing Children Photo Workshop where I quickly flipped to two of my photos of my children that Ginny Felch was so wonderful to include in her newly revised book. Thank you Ginny for that! You'll never know how much I appreciate that opportunity. I remember buying her first edition back in 2008 and wondering how I could possibly be able to apply the vast wealth of information to photographing my own children's lives (this was right before Sagey was born). The shop is yet another story - one that's filled with frustration of its own from time to time, but only if I give it too much thought. It's supposed to be my creative outlet and I need to get back to that way of thinking about it instead of feeling as if I need to force new products out the door - if only they would fly out the door which might just motivate me to list the finished items instead of procrastinating. Alas, things are not always as we'd like and we have to make do with what we have.

The unfinished.

Also last week, we remembered my birthday and I had a flu over the weekend which I'm finally getting over. Yes, I said "remembered my birthday" because it's not a celebration as you once thought of as a child with balloons and a cake and presents. My husband tried to make breakfast for me but somehow it always ends up that I'm the one who makes breakfast for everyone else and cleans up afterwards (being the control freak that I am I guess I have that coming to me). I find it hard to understand how someone who can fix and figure out almost anything - including solving complex networking issues and building intricate Internet networks for companies worldwide - cannot manage to make Turkish coffee. How many times has he asked me "How many spoons of sugar do you add?" or "How many spoons of coffee?". I must have showed him and told him a thousand times (or so it seems) in addition to him seeing me make the coffee on a daily basis. Sometimes, but only sometimes, I envy those of you who get breakfast in bed - for Mother's Day, birthdays, and anniversaries. Then again, I'm happy with they way things are at the moment. "At the moment", only because you never know what will happen tomorrow. My father planned on and looked forward to traveling to Europe and across the States after retirement. He never planned on a life-threatening illness taking his life at the early age of 59. You might think you know what will happen in the future, but there is always that element of randomness, the unexpected. My life is far from perfect but it is certainly real. For the most part (at least within our home), my husband and I tell things as they are - take it or leave it. It was refreshing to meet this lady at a Starbucks during the last day of our trip who spoke her mind and wasn't afraid to do so...also an unexpected and random trip since the local "popular" coffee shop was apparently not open on Sundays and the other recommended one did not open for another two hours.

Besides photography and writing, anyone who really knows me knows that I love printed books. Ones that I can hold in my hands and flip through at random or read from the Preface and Table of Contents (yes, I'm that type) to the end (but not the Index). At one point, a couple years back when I decided to open up and focus on my shop, I stopped ordering and reading books - cookbooks, photography books, John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell novels, books on writing, psychology, and anything else that sounded interesting (such as The Lucifer Effect which I've never completed). A month or so before our road trip, I started venturing on Amazon again and discovered so many interesting books. Now, I'm getting ready to place another order for several more books, including a brand new release I just discovered earlier this morning entitled The Secret Life of Pronouns. It's not that I actually need any more books at the moment as I haven't had the time to actually sit and read, to the end, even one book (something else I need to work on). I thought I would be able to read during vacation and if I didn't suffer from motion sickness (car, boat, bus, etc.), I just might have managed to read at least one book. It's a good thing that I left behind six books from the huge pile that weighed down one of my backpacks. That being said, my plans for the rest of the year include actually reading the books I have ordered thus far and collecting more books to read next year. I also plan on working on recipes and focusing more time on photography - food, my children/our lives, and nature (hoping to attend the second annual Colorado Photography Festival next year - for all three days and not the one day I went this year due to us not making it to Denver on time). As for the shop...it might be time for a bit of a creative break. It might be just a week or for only a few days. Perhaps when my hand dyed silk ribbons come in next week I might find that much needed inspiration. Sometimes when things are not going as you'd like or you're creatively drained, you need to step away for a while and focus on something else that brings you joy. For me, life is random and unexpected - like our road trip. If it wasn't, it would be boring. Life is too short - embrace its randomness.

White Sands, New Mexico

A beautiful moment...the little things

What do you see when you look at this photo?

This morning as we sat at our wooden patio table outside in our warm Texas backyard for a late breakfast, my younger daughter climbed up on her chair and decided to feed her little brother the rest of his polenta. I thought, "How cute!", and ran inside to grab my camera so I could preserve this memory that will soon be lost - one I wish to remember for years to come and something our children will enjoying seeing when they grow older and have children of their own. I shared this photo on my Daida L'Orange Facebook page in an album entitled "The Little Things" where I often post photos of the moments of life's little things that we often overlook, the things we rarely stop to capture, but one day wish we did. In my opinion, photos don't need to be staged for a memory to be preserved and this was a perfect example of that. 

What I see in this photo is a beautiful moment between a sister and her little brother. What I didn't see, until someone pointed it out, was an inappropriate photo of a child wearing nothing but underwear. It was further suggested that it might not be prudent to post photos online of my children minimally dressed for fear that it might give a "sicko" something to "use". I'm truly sorry that this person and so many others have had such unfortunate and bad experiences which cause them to be so afraid to share such beautiful moments with the world. It's sad to see that one person can turn a cherished moment into something so ugly. I, too, was notified by a fellow prop maker one Christmas season two years ago that she had seen a photo of my baby Sagey somewhere "questionable". Did it bother me? Sure, but I didn't do anything about it as I realize that in this day and age of global sharing on the Internet these things do and will happen whether we like it or not. There are "sickos" out there but there are also many more people who do see the beauty in life. You, and only you, choose to share your photos online and in doing so realize that someone out there might just use your photo the "wrong" way. At one point, fear starts to take over and you might decide it's better to hide and not share your viewpoint of life with others. You stop sharing photos and start taking cover. It only takes one apple, so the saying goes.

I recall a photo I saw in Ginny Felch's book "Photographing Children" in the chapter on "Seeing the Light" of a young boy painting at an artist's easel while sunlight danced across his back. It is a beautiful photo of a lovely moment of a little boy, his pacifier, and his paintbrush. The similarity between that photo and my photo is that both children were minimally dressed - wearing nothing but underwear. Although I do realize that we all have a different point of view, it's truly sad when something that is so innocent and happy is turned into something that is "inappropriate" and "wrong". When you meet people, do you notice their skin color and race or do you notice them as a person, a human being, someone with whom you connect? When you look at photos of newborns, do you see a naked baby that should be covered up immediately so as to not cause an uproar or do you see the wonder and miracle of a new life?

Wouldn't it be great if we could just learn to see the beauty around us without the ugliness that abounds? To not be so concerned about what others are thinking and to learn to cherish life's beautiful moments? What kind of life would you lead if it was one of constant fear? Should we simply lock the doors, pull the curtains shut, and disconnect from the world? I, for one, will not be a prisoner to the ignorance of others and will continue to share my views of life and the world.

I agree that it's nice to see children all dressed up and pretty in photos with their hair combed just right and not a wrinkle to be found in their clothing. I'm sure you have many of those "staged" photos, but how many photos do you have of your children just enjoying the little things exactly how they are - natural and unstaged? To me, those are life's hidden and most cherished moments and ones that mean more to me than will any "perfect" staged photo. Life is real, it's not perfect. Capture the little moments while you still can. Oh, and if you happen to stop by our house during these hot Summer days, you will notice that our children hardly wear clothes. That is life in Texas!