This blog has been pretty quiet over the last month or two. Twitter has been easier to update (and Twitter updates Facebook, so it does double-duty). However, I’m not letting the blog go, because it’s my best journal/scrapbook archive (and favourite medium), so here is some catching up on kids and parents:

Xavier

In November, Xavier, 3, went to see his first movie at the theater. Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, in 3D! Which kid wouldn’t LOVE to see food raining from the sky?

Since September, Xavier has also been attending games and sports sessions for pre-schoolers at the gym. It must be loads of fun, because he seems to have a “what happens at the gym, stays at the gym” attitude about it, and pretends not to recall what games they played over there when he comes back…

Orléane

The last few months, Orly, 21-mos, is chatting and chatting. And chatting. She picked up language like it was her life’s purpose, and she’s talking and talking all through her days.

Halloween

At the months’ hinge, Halloween was celebrated. Fairies and skeletons came out to play.

(I was the Wicked Witch of the East from Oz, if you’re wondering…)

Wicked Witch of the East

Émilie

And at the end of November, my appendix acted up and had to be removed. This type of surgery is a common one, it went ok, and I’m getting better all the time.

A few more days of rest and I should be back at work, with a few additional medical anecdotes in my repertoire. Hey, wanna know what happens when a vein receiving I.V. solution bursts? Or when the nurses insist on getting you to stand up too fast after surgery?

Seriously, though, the medical people who took care of me have all been GREAT. Especially the night staff. Thumbs up to them.

Letters from the North Pole

The kids made drawings for Santa, to which I added notes for them. Xavier says he’s been nice because he shared his horse with the other kids at daycare, and Orly says she wants peanut butter toast as a gift.

…and we got letters back! The magic of mail.

That’s it!

December holds promise of many small joys, and we hope you’ll have a great time with the upcoming holiday season. Be well!

…and Saturday was the occasion of this pretty dress fitting me.

This is from Sara‘s clothes, and there haven’t been grand occasions this year, but I’m not going to outgrow it before I’ve been photographed in it!

(We can’t decide on the first BW version of this one, or this pretty soft one:)

Ciao, people!

• We had a boy in diapers, now we have a big boy in underwear (and the occasional Pull-Up).
• We had a babbling baby, now we have a chatty girl spouting 3 word sentences.
• We had a boy who could use ride-on’s, now we have a lil’ guy who can pedal 3 street lengths.
• We had a toddler who was happy to drop toys into a container, now we have a gal who understands concepts like “two” and “same”, who can follow instructions to go pick up an object and place somewhere in another room, and who can, at 5 in the morning, answer consecutive questions “You’re having a good sleep?” — “No.” — “Huh… You HAD a good sleep?” — “Yes.” — … and make her mother groan.

Notes: That conversation is a genuine anecdote! hehe… Seriously, I wanted to note, for posterity, that Orly started learning language with verbs, mostly — which I found interesting, because I think Xavier had started out mostly with nouns. It IS very representative of their personnality, though: Orléane is headstrong, playful and full of energy (not to say restless) to Xavier’s focused intellect. He’s 3, so we can’t say he’s “calm”, but I think it’s an underlying trait of his. He’ll be a mathlete before long…

Yikes! I almost forgot about those…

Frank set us up with a new file server with RAID at home (and if you weren’t sure about sticking a “nerd” tag on us, this new factoid may well have sealed the deal). Anyway, this should help me clear photos off my laptop’s HD, while keeping the archives a mouse-click away. Now, however, Frank is unloading the camera directly onto the file server sometimes, and I forget about these series of pictures.

I was looking at some gorgeous newborn pictures of a photographer’s on flickr — “Scuse me.. Hi! Can you come back in time and photograph my babies when they were still tiny?…” — and I couldn’t recall what happened to the pictures from a tiny home session we improvised with Orly a few weeks back. I found them on the file server!

They needed some Photoshop tweaking, so I tweaked. I found a couple of new tricks recently for enhancing images, which got me out of my rusty old ways. Soon, I’ll take the time to do some step by step manipulation to show you, but for now I’ll just throw it out there all mumbly-jumbly.

Here is the SOOC (straight out of the camera) shot.

Less-than-perfect interior lighting and colours, some blur, but Orly is sweet and cute, so I want to salvage the pic.

Going from memory, I started with the “Image > Adjustments > Exposure” feature to make the picture paler. Then I copied the main layer, set its blend to “Screen” and adjusted the opacity.

After that, I went to “Image > Adjustements > Selective color”, which is my new favourite thing to work with. For the colors “Neutrals”, I removed even more black, and I lowered the Cyan, too, to make the picture a little warmer. For the colors “Black”, I brought back some black. This made the details clearer and sharper. I’m pretty sure I added the filter “Sharpen > Unsharp Mask”, too, to make everything crisper.

I finished it by using the clone tool in her eyes — the reflection from the window combined with the sharpening had made her eyes look tearful.

Ta-da!

Then I used “Image > Adjustements > Black and White” to make it a tinted grayscale picture, and I really couldn’t decide if I preferred the desaturated one or not.

Here’s another one. SOOC.

I used a similar method to work on this one (same lighting, lots of blur), but I added a duplicate layer set on a “Soft Light” blend at 50% opacity to boost the colours a little bit. I also added some yellow to the “Neutrals” colors of the “Selective color” feature, for warmth.

AND, I used the clone tool to remove a big vein on her forehead, and a big mosquito bite.

Sweet!