3 hours ago
The Scent of Rain by Kristin Billerbeck is a Christian chic-lit novel about a girl named Daphne. Daphne is a perfumer and professional "nose", who is left at the altar. She finds herself alone and stuck with a job in Ohio that she took in order to start her new life with her now ex-fiance. As if that wasn't bad enough she loses her sense of smell and is unable to do this new job, but she has no where else to go so she heads to Ohio, hoping her sense of smell will return before she actually has to start any work. Her new boss is a handsome widower . . . and that's all I'll say to avoid spoiling the book, but I'm sure you can guess the rest!
I actually really enjoyed this book. The characters were likable, and even though not a lot actually happened in the book, it kept me wanting to read it. I've read other books by Billerbeck, and this is probably one of my favorites from her.
I have to say that I felt like some of the conversations and the flow of the plot were a bit confusing. Some of the details that could have been a bit more dramatic or added more of a mystery to the plot seemed to just be mentioned in passing. I felt there was more potential there that wasn't tapped.
That said, Billerbeck writes chic-lit, not mysteries, and as chic-lit, I liked this one. It was a light, enjoyable read. Nothing too deep or suspenseful, and it met all my expectations in a pleasant way. It was one of those books that you can pick up and enjoy and that you look forward to reading, but that is also easy to put down while you do other things - a good beach or vacation read. Or a good mom-of-a-toddler-who doesn't-give-her much-time-to-read read. Whichever the case may be!
Note: I received this book for free from the publisher through their Booksneeze program in exchange for this review. This is my honest opinion.
The other day Wyatt was taking a nap, and I decided to turn on the TV to see what was on. And for those of you who have been reading for a while, yes, we got cable back! It was really good to take a break from it for a year, and we probably will take another break in the future - but there is so much going on this year, like the Olympics and the election, and we decided to get cable again for now.
Anyway, I came across this show about women who hide their pregnancies, so I decided to see what it was all about. But one of the stories stood out.
One of the girls on the show decided to hide her pregnancy because a few months before she had a son that was stillborn. And when she shared this heartbreaking news on Facebook, hoping for some support, she got a grand total of 6 responses. Out of 300 Facebook friends.
I found that to be so sad, and I honestly didn't blame her a bit for not wanting to share the happy news of her pregnancy after getting no support from her "friends" on Facebook or in real life. I'm not sure I would want to share anything for a while after something like that either.
And it got me thinking - is this what the world is coming to? A place where people can't muster up the energy (or even just the courtesy) to reach outside of Facebook in the face of a tragedy? Worse than that, that these people couldn't even reach out properly within the confines of Facebook? I find that so disturbing.
One thing that I dislike about Facebook is the fact that it does promote apathy when it comes to friendships. It's one of the reasons I took a Facebook break not long ago, and why I limit what I share on it now. I don't like the thought of someone just checking my Facebook page to see what I've been doing when they could call or e-mail me directly. If they want to feel like they are interacting with me, the only effort they have to put out is one click on the "Like" button.
I think it creates a false sense of friendship, one where someone can get all the benefits of knowing what is going on with their "friend" without having to put out any actual effort to find out. Where they can feel like they are being a "friend" to someone without doing anything but clicking a couple times and hitting a few keys.
Obviously there are exceptions to this, like in the blogging world (all of our interaction is online by necessity!), or in the case of people who combine Facebook interaction with real life interaction, which I think is good.
But it is not fine to see something so tragic happen to your friend and comment on Facebook but never follow up with them in real life to see how they are doing. It is not fine to see an announcement of something so tragic and be so lazy in your friendship that you can't even take the time to type out an "I'm so sorry."
That is not okay. That is not a friendship. And it frustrates me that someone could have the nerve to call themselves a friend to someone when they can't even be there, in the flesh, when they are needed most.
At the end of the show this girl reconnects with her friends, tells them the truth, and it appears that these friendships are on the road to healing after that. And I'm sure they probably did reach some level of trust again. But I don't think those people can ever reach the level in their friendship with this girl that they could have reached if they had just been there for her in the face of tragedy. They've forever missed that chance. And that is sad.
I guess I say all this to remind you (and me) to take the time to be an outside-of-Facebook friend to someone this week. Because the people who can reach outside of social media to touch someone else are the ones that are the true gems in the midst of all the people that social networks call our "friends".
I don't want to just be a digital version of someone's "friend". I want to be a supportive-on-social-media-and-in-real-life, all-in, gem of a friend to someone.
I want to be a friend worth having.
When we planned our second gender reveal party we decided it would be good to include a few games again - just because not everyone knew each other, and games make everything more fun right? Right. We like to include games at parties in our family.
I came up with a few games for our first gender reveal, but I wanted to come up with some new ones for this party. Here are the new games we came up with!
First things first . . .
Split Up The Teams
It's a lot easier to make any game fit in with your gender reveal party if you make the games about "Team Boy" vs. "Team Girl". We had everyone pin on a bow or tie depending on what their guess was on the gender of our baby, and then teams were then formed!
Old Wive's Tale Quiz
I found a list of Old Wive's Tales that had to do with the gender of the baby, and I turned them into a quiz. Then I printed up multiple copies and had all the guests take the quiz testing their knowledge on the Old Wives' Tales!
If you would like to use the old wives' tale quiz I created, you can click the link above to view and print the document! If you use my quiz and write a blog about your party, please make sure to link back here! And leave a comment too because I'd love to check out your post. Thank you!
If you would like to use the old wives' tale quiz I created, you can click the link above to view and print the document! If you use my quiz and write a blog about your party, please make sure to link back here! And leave a comment too because I'd love to check out your post. Thank you!
I also included a sheet of paper that told how my pregnancies fit into the Old Wives Tales - but without revealing the answers to the questions. So for example, one of the questions was
"You are having a boy if your cravings are . . .
A. Sweet B. Sour/Salty"
So on the sheet on my pregnancy I just said:
"Sweet or Salty/Sour Cravings?
1st pregnancy: Salty/Sour
This pregnancy: Callie has been craving both."
It doesn't give away the answer, it just tells how I fit into the Old Wive's Tales on gender (and my pregnancies didn't necessarily fit nicely with all the Old Wive's tales, so it could also add an extra challenge in that way).
I think it was fun for everyone to be able to check the sheet on my pregnancy, not only for the quiz, but also to give them clues when they were guessing the gender (though I think most of the guests came with their guess already in mind)!
My mom won the Old Wive's Tale quiz, and I made sure to have a prize ready - games are just more fun if there are prizes. I kept it simple this time and just did a gift bag with Sugar Babies and Yankee votive candles in the "Soft Blanket" and "Vanilla Cupcake" scents (which I thought fit nicely with the baby theme). If a guy won I just told him to give the candles to his wife/mother!
Last time we did Starbucks gift cards for five dollars as prizes, which were a big hit as well, so you can just pick any prize that you think people would like and that fits into your budget!
Group Quiz
We did a group quiz as well, and I did a little research on baby stats and made a quiz on them - ex. What is the most popular month/day of the week for babies to be born, states with highest and lowest birth rates, when someone may be more/less likely to have a boy/girl etc.
Here are the sources where I got my information so you can make up your own questions:
(Note: The stats in that last article are mostly for the year 2010, which were the latest stats available at the time I made the quiz - for more recent statistics, try googling "birth statistics" and whatever year you are looking for.)
If you are interested in seeing the questions I used, you can click the link below to view and download the quiz! If you print this for a party just print it in black and white so the answers don't show!
However, please note that these questions are based on the statistics in the year 2012 - by the year 2013 the statistics I used to create this quiz will no longer be accurate. But you can get ideas from my quiz on how to form your own questions with currents stats.
However, please note that these questions are based on the statistics in the year 2012 - by the year 2013 the statistics I used to create this quiz will no longer be accurate. But you can get ideas from my quiz on how to form your own questions with currents stats.
We had the teams split up into "Team Boy" and "Team Girl" again and fill out the quiz as a team. Then I told the answers and the team with the most right answers won! We actually had a tie, so we had to flip a coin and Team Blue won the coin toss.
I think it's nice to include a little prize for these group games too, just to make it more fun, so we bought a big bag of mini candy bars and handed them out as prizes.
This would be a nice way to include the He/She Hershey bars like we did last time, but we ran out of time to make those this time so we just bought a variety bag! But here are the He/She candy bars as an example of what you could use as prizes:
Football/Baseball Throwing Game
Like I said earlier, you can almost make anything a game if you go the "Team Boy vs. Team Girl" route. We wanted to include a game that was a little more active and that the men would like, so my husband hung a tire on one of the trees out front, and we had a football/baseball throwing competition!
(Ignore our old truck in the background.)
We gave each person three throws, and then we kept score for Team Girl and Team Boy. You could also make this game a bit more casual and just let people mingle and do their three throws throughout the party.
If the teams are uneven (and they probably will be), you can either have each team pick three players to compete, or you can let everyone throw and then divide the total points by the number of team members and declare the team with the best average score as the winners! We gave everyone on the winning team mini candy bars again as a prize to make it a bit more fun.
Gender Revealing Scavenger Hunt!
For the big reveal we decided to do a scavenger hunt, so it added another game for our party! I grabbed a book of nursery rhymes and turned them into "clues" for different hiding places around our house. I tried to emphasize the key phrases in the nursery rhymes by making the words bigger or a different color.
First Clue:
This led the guests to our water spigot at the back of our house - we tucked the envelope behind a pipe on the side of our house right next to the faucet!
Second Clue:
For this clue we hid the envelope literally "on the wall" by tacking it up on the wall behind the towels in our bathroom. This ended up being one of the hardest envelopes for the guests to find!
Third Clue:
I was originally just going to stick the envelope in the oven for this clue and make it easy, but since we were using the oven to keep some of the food warm I ended up hiding it in the drawer underneath the oven instead, which made it a little harder.
Fourth Clue:
We tacked the next envelope onto one of the trees on our property! This one could have been really hard if we wanted it to be, since we have a ton of trees around our house, but we set boundaries for the clues to make it a little easier.
Final Clue:
This final clue led to a package that held the answer as to whether we were having a boy or a girl! We hid the package in our wood stack!
The person who found the package was given a prize (the same gift bag that I mentioned earlier), and we also let him open the package to reveal it to everyone!
And it's a GIRL!
Voting Board/Guessing Right
We did this last time too, but I thought I'd include it in this post as well. We decided to give everyone a prize for guessing the right gender, so in that way guessing correctly became a sort of game! We bought full-sized candy bars and made sure we'd have enough in case the teams were split unevenly (which they were - a good 75% of our guests thought we were having a girl). I think it makes it more fun to come to a gender reveal if there is a little reward for guessing the right gender!
And those are the games we played at our second gender reveal party! All the games turned out well, and everyone seemed to have fun with them - which is really the point in including games in the first place!
If you want to see more gender reveal party game ideas, check out the games we did for our first gender reveal party as well!
This was the second gender reveal party that we have thrown (click here to check out our first gender reveal party), and I was pretty happy with the way it went! We decided to make it a sort of end-of-summer barbecue/gender reveal party, but I still wanted to do some of the fun little gender reveal details.
We had a voting board and little tags that people could wear according to their guesses - blue ties for boys and purple bows for girls. I stuck with the blue/purple color scheme from our invitations for all my decorations, and I think it tied everything together well.
Derek and I painstakingly traced and cut out each of those ties and bows, but I have to give full props to Derek for the way he drew the lines on them - I think that detail definitely made them look finished and intentional! I didn't know my hubby was so artistic. I also made up a sheet that explained the differences between my first and second pregnancies, pretty similar to the info I posted in my Old Wive's Tale post!
It just so happened that all my cravings this time around fit in nicely with a barbecue menu, so we served some of the items that I craved during this pregnancy! I made a little card so the guests could see everything I craved and make an educated guess as to whether it was a boy or a girl.
I didn't get pictures of all of our guests (even though I tried!), but here are a few with people that I suspect won't mind being shown on the blog!
First row: My mom and sister and aunt and cousin (and me of course)!
Second row: My friend Danae and our baby bumps!
Third row: My friend, Ashley, and me!
My little guy did great, and got passed around all over the place!
My sister with my son on the left, me and him on the right:
We did a few different games, which I'm going to cover in a separate post, but here are the teams (Team Boy and Team Girl) discussing their answers for one of the group games:
For the big reveal we decided to do a scavenger hunt! I made up clues based on nursery rhymes, and the final clue led to a package that would reveal the gender. It started to sprinkle so we had to hurry through the outside clues a bit, but I think it turned out well!
1. Derek and I read the first clue.
2. Ashley's husband found one of the clues.
3. Danae's husband found the final package, and opened it . . .
And it's a girl!
We are so thrilled and excited to be expecting our first daughter!
After we revealed the gender we served blueberry and strawberry cheesecake for dessert (cheesecake was another one of my cravings)! Then we got a chance to visit with everyone and enjoy the rest of the party, which was nice.
Scott and Danae also ignored the clear instructions on our invitation to not bring presents. But we kind of ignored the clear instructions not to bring a present to their gender reveal party too, so I guess they get a pass!
Honestly, it was so sweet of them to bring us a little gift, and when I opened it, I wanted to cry. . .
Danae knows what it is to wait for a little one, and she knows what we went through to get this sweet baby, so the onesie was perfect and really touched my heart. We are so humbled and excited that God blessed us with this little (girl!) miracle!
I'll do a post tomorrow with more details on the games we did for our second gender reveal party (they aren't the same gender reveal party games that we did last time), so check back then!
. . . and spice, and everything nice!
We're having a sweet baby GIRL! We are so happy and excited!
More details on the gender reveal party to follow!
When we decided to do another gender reveal party, I originally wanted to keep it more low-key, since this is the second gender reveal party we've done. We decided to do a barbecue with close family and friends. But then we decided I needed to do invites and games again, and I realized just how many close friends and family I wanted to invite, so the whole low-key thing went out the window! What can I say? I can't help myself.
However, I still liked the idea of making it more of a end-of-summer barbecue *slash* gender reveal party. I've been wanting to do a barbecue this summer, and I thought combining the two would give it that more low-key feel that I was originally going for.
I knew, however, that I didn't want to put pressure on myself to make the invitations again like last time (I handmade gender reveal invitations for Wyatt's party), so I went on a quest for some invitations. I originally looked into making them on Shutterfly or Tiny Prints, but that was going to cost me around 40 bucks! No thank you.
I decided to do a little search on Etsy, and what should I spot but the perfect gender reveal party invitation. Seriously. Who would have thought that someone else would have decided to do a gender reveal barbecue too?
See? It's perfect.
I ordered this invitation from a shop called PuzzlePrints. It came as an image file, and then I printed it up from there.
Originally the invitation was for a first-baby gender reveal, so I contacted the owner to see if she could change it up to reflect that this was our second baby, and also to see if she could include Wyatt in the invitation (though I wasn't sure how that would work, so I gave her an out in case she couldn't fit it in). But she was able to include all the details I wanted and I think the changes she made were perfect!
The owner of PuzzlePrints (Laura) was really easy to work with. I was also surprised when I checked my e-mail shortly after ordering and already saw the completed invitation in my inbox! I'm talking within the hour. I was very impressed with how fast I got it, because it let me order the prints quicker (and the invitations were already going out late, so time was important).
I love the way it turned out! I still had to pay to have the invitations printed (since I don't have a working printer in my house), but I think the total was much more reasonable for something so personalized. It would be super-reasonable if you had your own printer!
I felt like the envelopes that came with the invitations when I printed them were a little plain , so I bought some scrapbook paper to add some pizazz. This is the finished product:
I was really happy with them! Tip: When I went to have them printed I also included a sentence on the back saying "No gifts please, just bring yourselves!", because I forgot to ask Laura to add that to the front. Because you don't want people to feel like they have to buy you something for a party like this, you know? That's what baby showers are for. Just my thoughts on the subject!
If any of you decide to order an invitation from PuzzlePrints, Laura has offered a free thank you card printable with your purchase when you mention my blog! PuzzlePrints has beautiful invitations for birthdays, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas parties, wedding showers, wedding anniversary parties, baby showers, and of course gender reveal parties. And she takes custom orders too, so I'm sure if you are looking for something a little different she could come up with a perfect invite! Personally, I have my eye on her ugly sweater party invitations if we decide to have another one this year!
I'm so excited to have our "BaByQ" gender reveal party on Sunday! Stay tuned for the details, coming next week!
So, if you've been reading for a while, you probably remember that Photoshop Elements and I started out with a love-hate relationship. Let's face it, it's a confusing program, and it takes a long time to figure it out! It took me a year of having it to really start using it, and even then it was pretty limited use.
I was this close to just giving up on it when I discovered Photoshop actions! Basically you download an "action" and install it into Photoshop Elements, and then you can just click the action and it does all the work for you! It also ended up being a win-win, because not only did it save a ton of time, it helped me figure out the whole "layers" concept a little more when I started adjusting the different layers of the actions I was using. I decided I loved the whole action concept, and I went on a hunt for more free actions.
These are a bunch of actions for Photoshop Elements that you can get for free! I know some of you have Elements as well, so I thought I'd be nice and share some of my free action finds. Hopefully you'll find some that you like from the list of websites below. I definitely have my favorites, but it's fun to experiment and see what each one does with an image. I would suggest messing around with the opacity of each layer after using an action, because a lot of them end up being pretty strong, and you can customize it to what you want better if you adjust the opacities.
Without further ado - here are some places around the internet where I've found free actions (there are over 100 free actions here)!
(more freebies become available when you subscribe to their newsletter)
(for subscribing to newsletter)
(for liking on Facebook)
(for liking on Facebook)
The above actions are the main ones I've downloaded and used, but the following page has more resources for free actions that I don't have listed here. I haven't looked at some of these sites yet, so I might have to check them out myself!
After you download the actions, you have to install them into Photoshop Elements. I feel like the Texas Chicks explanation is a little simpler and clearer, but I included the CoffeeShop explanation as well because it's more detailed if you are having problems with one of the steps. And just a little tip: The action files have the file extension .ATN, and sometimes include an .XML file too. The action downloads usually include an image file (.PNG or .JPEG or .PND). Make sure to transfer the .ATN file, the .XML file, and one image file.
Installing actions in Photoshop Elements - Texas Chicks blog
Installing actions in Photoshop Elements - CoffeeShop blog
And after you install them into Photoshop Elements, experiment and have fun with your photos!
And just as an example from one of our Christmas photos last year . . .
Original Photo:
And with different actions applied to it:
1. Ice Pop from CoffeeShop blog
2. Butterscotch Vintage from CoffeeShop blog
3. Little Miss Muffet from Oh So Posh Photography
4. MCP's Mini Fusion
5. Vanilla Pop from Paint the Moon
6. Pioneer Woman's Cooler
7. Urban Grit from CoffeeShop blog
8. Vintage Blush from Coffee Shop blog
9. Whisper Linen from Oh So Posh Photography
And there are lots more that I don't have time to show you! You can get a ton of different looks by combining actions too, and you don't have to spend a lot of money buying action packs (which can be rather pricey).
Though just between me and you, I love the look of Florabella's action packs, but I haven't brought myself to spend the money to buy one yet. And they unfortunately don't have any action sampler packs.
I hope you have fun with some of these free actions from around the web!
P.S. Actions are fun, but they are even better on photos that are already good in-camera. If you have a DSLR but struggle with getting off the automatic settings - I've got a GREAT resource for you! Erin from Digital Photography for Moms has a great program for teaching you how to get the most out of your camera.
Check out *Guided365 here!
Check out *Guided365 here!
*affiliate link
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
