moved moved moved!

Just a reminder that Chatting at the Sky has moved to www.chattingatthesky.com If you haven't updated your feed or re-subscribed, it will only take a second so please do! I miss you! To subscribe in a reader, CLICK HERE!

chatting at the sky has moved

Stories and snapshots of the holy and humorous persuasion can now be found here: www.chattingatthesky.com.

(If you have Internet Explorer, you may have to scroll to the right to read the posts...an issue that is still being worked on).

in which I tell you later

As it turns out, soon is a relative term. Thanks for caring about my new blog design. I've loved reading the comments and emails from you who have been waiting with me. I'm glad you all are excited too. We have to wait a little longer, as my fabulously talented, hard-working blog designer is not quite ready. I can't wait to tell y'all about her.

In other news, this weekend I'm having 22 high school senior girls to my house. All night. No, my house isn't big enough for that. Yes, it was my idea. No, I haven't lost my ever-lovin' mind. This sleepover is a product of a project I've been working on with Kendra (you know, the beautiful and talented cook from My First Kitchen?) I look forward to telling you more about it.

How about something I can tell you now?
BlissDom is next week in Nashville. If you haven't heard, it is a blogging conference hosted by the online magazine Blissfully Domestic. I can't wait to meet some of my favorite bloggers in real life. Last BlissDom was a blast, as seen here. I'll be sure to tell you about this years conference later.

Until then, I'm off to stock the bathrooms with toilet paper. I'm having lots of company tomorrow. And if you are reading this and going to BlissDom, say so in the comments if you'd like.

a new find

The new design is in the works and the big reveal is close at hand. And when I say close I mean close. I will wait to post more lazy photography tips after the change. So be sure to check back soon-like. In the meantime, click on the image below to check out one of my new favorite blogs:

Kelly is a new find for me and I am enjoying everything she writes. Even more, she is a fantastic photographer so I get doubly inspired when I visit. You can peek in on her photo blog as well.

Once you start to look at her awesome photos, you may not be able stop. Don't say I didn't warn you. Now come back soon and see if my blog looks different. See you then.

motherhood for the introvert

Shy was the word used to describe me in elementary school. That, and the girl with the freakishly skinny wrists. But then my family moved from the only town I had ever known to a new town several states away. Suddenly, my need for friends and fun outweighed the fear, and my life as a social butterfly began in full force.

That move was a turning point for me. I had lots of friends and I liked it that way. I wanted to be with people and always know what was going on. Still, I craved alone time but often skipped it for fear of missing out. As a result, whenever I took personality tests through high school and college, I was always pegged an extrovert. That is how I saw myself.

Years later, after I had children, I realize the truth: I am an introvert. People who know me in real life are sometimes surprised to hear that. I wouldn't call myself an extreme introvert, but I think I am returning to my kindergarten roots in a way. I'm no longer shy with people, but my energy is found only after time alone. The pressures of motherhood smoked the introvert right out of me.

Lately I've been thinking about parenting and personality. Sometimes it feels like I will explode from the inside if I don't have the opportunity to just be. Alone. Without the chatter. A girl needs time to do important introverty things like stare out the window, sit for no reason, or write bad first drafts without an agenda.

But having three small children at home does not allow for such luxuries a lot of the time. Instead, I improvise. I find little ways and crazy times to squeeze in the quiet.

How does your personality effect your parenting? What are some things you have discovered to help you maintain the balance between being who you are and being who those little ones need you to be?

Tips for the Lazy Photographer: Faces

One of my favorite things to photograph is people. Last week when I introduced this lazy series, I mentioned that I'm no professional. But there are some general things I have learned to help make people photos a bit better, no matter what kind of camera you have. This is also referred to as portrait photography, but that is kind of fancy so I like to call them face photos.

1. When photographing faces, get close. I know it seems obvious. But when I want the face, I want the FACE. Especially with kids. Grown ups tend to shake, giggle, or threaten physical harm when you get too close. But with kids, start out as close as you feel comfortable.Then, GET CLOSER. Bring the camera to the point where you feel uncomfortable. Then move in another inch. Yes, that is what I said. This is where a zoom lens comes in handy, as you can get close without being annoying.

2. Lose the background. In photographing people, I prefer the background to be blurry. It keeps the focus on the face. If you have a fancy camera like a DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex), you can control some of that depending on the size of the aperture. But if you are lazy or don't have a fancy camera, fill the frame with face and person so the background is unnoticeable.

You can't imagine how messy this room was when this photo was taken. But who cares about the room? You want to see those beautiful blue eyes.

3. Don't wait for the smile. Remember film? You had 24 or 36 chances to get a good shot. Those days are over. Click before, during and after the shot you want. Some of my favorites happen this way.
Provoking your subject with potty humor works sometimes too. In fact, I highly encourage it.

Related Posts and Link Love:

Tips for the Lazy Photographer: Indoor Lighting

Browse more face photography at I ♥ Faces.

And for those of you who aren't quite so lazy, check out Digital Photography School on aperture and depth of field (ie. blurry backgrounds).

i heart faces

I just discovered this new blog and I am fast falling in love with it. They state that the purpose of the blog is "to provide a photography sharing forum that focuses on the art of capturing faces and their various emotions." They have two categories: kids and adults. Each week, readers enter their favorite face photos. This week is Anything Goes week, so when I ran across this photo in my archives, I thought I'd give it a go.
You can enter through Wednesday at I ♥ Faces Go check them out!

transitions

Winter descended overnight and is still shedding her evidence all over town. As we prepare to witness the peaceful exchange of power in our country, the snow is a reminder of a greater truth. There is One who longs to bless, to blanket our days with peace and promises.
Even in the midst of war and conflict and opposing sides, there is hope. And between the snow and the Inauguration, I have 2 perfect excuses to avoid any productive activity and watch TV in my pjs.

The Man is at the game edition

Did I ever mention the results of the Weblog Awards? It was a strong third place finish for Chatting at the Sky. Thank you all for voting. Receiving 2,891 votes is no small feat. And even though I lost by a good six thousand votes, I am happy with a bronze medal finish. Would be even happier if I actually got a bronze medal. But whatever.

Speaking of Lost, it comes back this week, Wednesday on ABC. It is going to be a premiere event, so you won't want to miss it. I love it when they add event to the ends of things to make them more important.

I went shopping with June today. She has a wedding to attend next month in cold, icy, shaped like a mitten Michigan. And North Carolina June has nothing to wear to a fancy, freezing, Michigan wedding. So we shopped and we searched and she sparkled. But no luck. At least not in the dress department. I consider myself extremely lucky to have spent some time with June, though. She is full of wild hilarity, that one. She once asked Does this dress make me look dead? It did not.

So even though we didn't find a dress, we were able to enjoy a fantastic lunch together. Well, I enjoyed a fantastic lunch and June stirred her soup a few times because the woman has no appetite, as her migraine medicine has changed her taste buds so that soft drinks are paint thinner and food is uninteresting. At least she doesn't have migraines.

Speaking of migraines, I hope this post hasn't given you one. I know it isn't the usual type of post, but The Man is at the Tarheels game so I have no one to talk with. Aren't you lucky?

I hereby declare skates are from the devil

What has 16 wheels, four eyes and speaks fluent Whine?
The twins wearing the worst Christmas gift ever. Back in August when they first asked for skates, I am confident they had visions of gliding down a smooth road at warp speed, waving at smiling dogs and happy neighbors while holding pink balloons. That is not what happened.
Skates are trouble. They are heavy and bulky and hurty and not tight enough and waaay too tight. Not to mention they like, move. On their own. Still, everyday since Christmas, they have begged me to take them out. I finally caved, tired of hearing myself make up excuses like We'll do that later or It's too cold outside or Well, we need to wait for Daddy to do skates because Mommy doesn't know how or I don't speak English.
After 20 minutes of velcroing Barbie elbow pads, knee pads, wrist pads and helmets, we finally managed to arrive outside in the minus 17 degree weather. I walked at a snails pace, both girls hanging onto my arms for their very lives. They were lucky they had all that padding. After a few laps around the cul-de-sac, I declared it to be too cold to function.
I think gifts that require excessive work from Mommy and/or lots of equipment and/or wheels should be banned until kids are 12. That is my new rule. So, do you have any gift disasters?

Tips for the Lazy Photographer: A Series

Photography is not my profession. I have never taken a class or read a book about photography. I have never read the manual that came with my camera. I don't know a lot of the technical terms, I shoot mostly in automatic and I utilize only 20% of my awesome Nikon D80.

Even so, my friends ask me questions about photography and trust me to take photos of their kids. Just yesterday, my friend Melissa was desperate for some photos of her two year old. Long distance Grandma wanted to see her baby. She knew she didn't want to drag him to Wal-Mart and get the posed ugly studio shots. She also knew she couldn't afford to hire a fancy photographer to take candid shots.

So she called me.

I'm not fancy. I'm no professional. I don't have Photoshop. But I can relate with Melissa because I don't want to spend the money or the time to have someone else to take pictures of my kids. So I am learning to do it myself.

Today was a cold, cloudy, wet ground kind of January day. Taking shots outside was not an option. One might be tempted to think that because we are taking indoor photos, we must use the flash. One would be mistaken if one thought that.

The first step to better photos is all about lighting. Look around your house for the most natural, warm light. If the kid has the perfect outfit with the perfect smile but the photo is too dark, it is hard to work with, especially if you don't have Photoshop like me.
In my house, the brightest room is our sunroom. Lined with windows and skylights, this room provides great light during most times of the day. Cloudy days are actually better, as I don't have to worry about shadows.
If I knew more about the manual settings on my camera, I could control the light and exposure a lot better. And the photo would be better for it. There is no doubt. But I haven't the energy, time, or motivation to learn about settings. So I put my dial on the "P" for "Program Mode" and shoot away. Sometimes when the lighting doesn't seem quite right, I do something real fancy: I make the photo black and white.
If you don't have a sunroom in your house, no worries. Just open wide your front door and plop the kid on the steps in the foyer.
No foyer? No front door? No problem! Find a bedroom with a window, pull those curtains back, sit your baby in a red rocker with a couple of trains and shoot away.
You may not get a frame-worthy photo every time, but you will get lots to choose from: some for you and some for Grandma. And you don't have to leave your house or pay a dime.

Related Posts:
Unpacking Treasure #4
Tripping Over the Awesomeness

new look, old fears

I'm standing at the edge of change here on this Monday morning. And I don't want to jump.

It has been in the works for a while now, these changes. The first was hurried along a few months ago when a new reader commented, asking if I was a scrapper (scrapbooker? scrapbook doer?) too. As you know, I am not. But from the looks of my blog layout, you would think otherwise.

Which is why change is coming. I'm not sure exactly when, as the Weblog Awards have interrupted my anticipated flow of the first change coming to be. (I think voting continues through today.) But don't be alarmed if one day you click to chat at the sky and discover a change. The sky will not have fallen, but the clouds may have cleared a bit. In other words, I'm gettin' a new layout, y'all. Stay tuned.

The second change is a bit more fuzzy. I am beginning to accept the fact that I am a writer. There is nothing more terrifying to discover, it turns out. Except maybe if I woke up with no teeth. That would be more terrifying. Still, I am stuck in a staring match with myself and my future. I'm winning. Fear is the perfect excuse not to act because, you know, I'm afraid.

And so I wait. Not the God kind of waiting where you don't want to wait but you know it is what's best for you and then you end up glad for the interim. Because even though I know the next step, I am instead sitting in the dark corner of comfortable, biting my nails, stuck between ignoring it and embracing it.

I know that is possible to jump in and be free. But I'm not quite there yet. So I wait for a grown up to tell me what to do. For a boss or a teacher or a parent to come, take me by the hand and give me instruction. But I also wait for the truth to feel true and for the fear to subside. I am beginning to think neither one is going to happen.

I suppose I'm just going to have to trust. I knew it would come to this.

still voting?

Thank you all so much for voting for Chatting at the Sky in the Weblog Awards. We are holding on to a solid third place position, which isn't too shabby considering that the competition has wielded some pretty strong endorsements, not the least of which is Keira Knightly. You know, the hot actress? With lots of fans? And lots of computers?

Remember you can vote once per day per computer. Feel free to ask your readers to vote too, as I know my winning a very nice but somewhat meaningless award is certainly at the top of your bloggy priority list. Thank you June, Kendra, Dana and Daisy, Laura and Nester for already doing this! You are so great.

And just think: if all my readers AND all your readers voted once a day for the next four days, it could really make a difference. Throw in the entire state of Rhode Island and we just might win this thing.

Voting continues until Monday January 12.

Here's a peek at my ballot for some contestants in other categories:

Best Parenting Blog: Blissfully Domestic

Best Diarist: Velveteen Mind

Best New Blog: Blog Nosh Magazine

Seriously, this has been fun. The begging for votes, the shameless promotion, the general selflessness of it all is quite refreshing.

As a thank you for voting, here are some before and after shots of my house. (Do I know my audience or what?)
The twins room the day we walked through the house for the first time and our heads began to spin...
And the twins room after our Fairy Godmother showed up to ready it for the ball. Cleans up nice, huh?
The downstairs hallway leading to the kitchen before we moved in. Check out the wood paneling.
The downstairs hallway now...with a little peek into some recent cabinet painting. But that's another post. Curious? Good. Now go vote.

on being important

In the sixth grade, I had to write an essay with the title When I Get Older. The first sentence went as follows: When I get older, I will look tan like my Grandma.
The essay continued in an equally ambitious manner: I won't die my hair. I will be short and small. I won't wear bell-bottoms but I hate it when Grandma's look 21, so I won't dress in fashion either.

For a page and a half I described all the things I would be when I got older. I would have lots of friends, I would host Christmas at my house, I would spoil my grandchildren.

The kicker though, was the final sentence of the essay. I will be important. That was the climax, right after I will work in an office - clearly the fastest way to importance.

Everybody wants to be important. We may not state it that way, as I did in the sixth grade. But everybody wants it, we just define it differently. I wonder what important looked like to me as a sixth grader?
If you are a Wemmick, importance belongs to whomever collects the most boxes and balls, as described in this book by Max Lucado.
I suppose as a kid, important had something to do with neon rubber bands in my braces and a tire swing in the backyard. As I grew up, if I made good grades, kept the peace and managed to get a boyfriend then I felt important.

As an adult, I often think about where I am finding my importance. Is it my role as a mother? My relationship with The Man? My college degree? Perhaps a better question is this: who gets to decide what makes someone important or not? How do we define worth?

Max Lucado suggests purpose and importance is defined by the inventor. If he invents the thing, then he gets to say how it works, what its for, why it was made. He's not the only one.

hands across America

I am so impressed with the Internet. Last night The Man and I began watching Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (No, I have never seen it. No, I have not read the book. No, I do not know what happens in the end.) Anyway, at one point we took an ice cream break and I checked my email and peeked in on the voting. I have to admit, I had a moment. I began to think about all the people I've met since I've started a blog.

At the risk of sounding cheesy and stupid, I have to tell you that I was overwhelmed with thankfulness for my Internet friends. I got emails and tweets of support from a bunch of the coolest people in webland.
Take June, for example. My sister discovered her last year and quickly became a worshiper I mean fan. Shortly after finding June online, we got to meet her in real life and now she lives close by. I couldn't have imagined meeting Internetty people in real life a few years ago.

It wasn't so long ago I remember hearing the the phrase windows on the computer and was totally confused. The Internet was not a vocabulary word I recognized even my senior year of high school.
Contrast that with last year at She Speaks, I walk into a room full of bloggers and these two blogging sisters walk up to me in recognition. From my blog. From the Internet. I keep up with Megan and Jami through their blogs and I'm so glad I met them.

I didn't have email until my sophomore year of college, and even then I remember sitting in my dad's office at our house, waiting for AOL to dial up. It took seven minutes just to connect. And that didn't even include actually sending an email.
Now, people I meet online end up being friends in real life. Like Kimba from A Soft Place to Land. She has a sister who lives nearby and when she came to visit, a bunch of us scrambled to meet her for real like. And Jen, who I've known of for years, but only since she's had a blog have I really gotten to know her.
The ultimate crazy is this: I was so sad when my sister moved out of town. But then, oh joy! She started a blog and now we have all kinds of bloggy adventures together.

I never would have imagine writing on the scary internet. Or reading what other people write on the scary Internet. But now, I can't get enough of Jennifer P. and Mindless Junque and Chickadee and Through A Glass Darkly and Out on a Limb. And then there's that weird Twitter that I'm still trying to figure out, with friends like Fussy and Karla and Robin.

There are so many more. Bloggers and non-bloggers alike. So thank you. For not being scary. For writing and entertaining and being funny and supportive and thoughtful and useful and all the other 'fuls. And thank you for voting for this small blog. I promise to have a post tomorrow that doesn't mention voting. As long as you keep voting. Every 24 hours. Hallelujah and Amen.

vote now!

The polls are finally open! I have discovered that you can vote once every 24 hours for the blog of your choice. But if you're reading this, I really hope you choose Chatting at the Sky. Once. Every 24 hours. Vote HERE. You are awesome.

in which I embark on the campaign trail

Last Monday morning I got an email from my friend June over at Bye, Bye Pie. The subject line read: Congratulations!!!! I immediately thought perhaps I was pregnant and didn't know it yet. Here is what her email said:

I just saw that you are up for a Weblog Award!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How cool are you!?! Congrats, girl! Perhaps I should have added a few exclamation points there. Your cool-by-association pal, June

I had to write her back and ask her what in the world she was talking about. I immediately went to the website and after scrolling down for approximately 17 minutes, I found my category listed just after Best Latino, Carribean or South American Blog.

Chatting at the Sky was nominated in the Best Small Blog category and judges (real judges!) narrowed it down to 10 finalists. And can you believe it? I'm one of them!

In true American Idol fashion, the blog with the highest number of votes wins. The polls open sometime today and stay open for about a week. There is a countdown widget on the site, but voting will begin sooner than that. We will be able to see the voting results instantly which is kind of nerve wracking and cool and panic inducing all at the same time.

Now, for the moment I know you've been waiting for:
That's ME on the left and MY BIG SELF on the right, asking for your vote. I promise not to call you My Friends or joke about lipstick on pigs or befriend Rev. Wright. You don't even need to leave your house. Just click here to vote.

Thank you for listening, voting and putting up with me. God bless you. And God Bless America.