My sweet Lucas, today you are FOUR years old!

In the last few weeks and months, so many of our family and friends have commented on how much you’ve grown up recently. You’ve lost your pudgy toddler stance and are now growing long and lean like your oldest brother. Your face is still sweetly soft, but most faint traces of the baby you were just yesterday are melting away. In this last year, you’ve moved from a crib to a bed and given up your soother — both a little later than planned, perhaps, but you can blame it on a mother who was not ready for you to grow up so quickly.

Lucas, you are a quirky fellow and an affable companion. We spend most Wednesdays together, just you and me, and I enjoy your company immensely. You are bright and observant and soak in the world around you. You are also extremely patient about having a lens pointed at you every day of your life.

This year in September you will start school, but you can already write your own name and you recognize numbers up to ten and most of the alphabet. We have to keep reminding ourselves that you are only three four, as you seem far beyond your years. The product of having two older brothers, perhaps?

You love crafts and art projects, but above all else you love to draw. You sit for surprising lengths of time each day churning out drawing after drawing of puffles from Club Penguin or Mario and Luigi or even the members of your family. Your figures are clearly recognizable, and you add details like skies and clouds and grass and flowers. I’ve been utterly charmed to watch you mimic Tristan, selecting a DVD box or a book and propping it in front of you and then painstakingly copying the pictures you see. At FOUR years old! (Oy, the amount of paper we recycle, as I try to hide your daily dozen or so sketches between the sections of discarded newspaper in the recycle bin! We’re endlessly grateful to Papa Lou for the reams of unused letterhead he has donated to your perpetual art studio!)

You’re a sweet and agreeable child, and one of my favourite peccadilloes of yours is a cheerful “Sure!” (which sounds more like “shore!”) when I propose something to you. One day before Christmas, we were in Costco and stopped for lunch. It was crowded and we shared our table with an East Indian woman who was quite taken with you. When she leaned in and asked if you would like to marry her little three-year-old granddaughter (“with hair down to here!” she said, pointing to her waist) I thought you would simply blush and turn away as you’re still not overly fond of strangers, but you gave her your best smile and that endearing “Sure!” You melted both our hearts!

You spend four days each week with your friends Maryke and Matthew at “Nana” Heidi’s house, and you have never once complained about going. You enjoy touring all the neighbourhood playgroups and drop-ins and storytime at the library with Nana Heidi, and through her you’re becoming a well-known Manotick figure – people I don’t know stop to say hi to you in the grocery store!

You love video games as much as your big brothers do. You introduced ME to Angry Birds, and you love Super Mario Kart too. Your favourite TV shows are Max and Ruby, Dora, Toopy and Binoo and lately Harry’s Bucket of Dinosaurs. You also love your books and bedtime storytime, and I think you prefer having Daddy read to you because you can always talk him in to one, two, three more books.

Lucas, I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of what makes you so adorable. This is a big year for you, as you head off to school in September. I watch your growing independence with bittersweet pride. It seems mere days ago that the whole of the Internet waited with excitement for the arrival of the Player to be Named Later. You’re not a baby anymore, but you’ll always be my baby, even when you tower over me on some not-too-distant day.

Happy birthday, my darling Lucas! We love you very much.

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3. A love letter to Tristan, age 7

You know what would make a really great Valentine’s Day gift? A gift certificate for a family portrait!

To celebrate love and families, I’m happy to offer this time-limited deal: a custom porch-portrait mini-session at last year’s price of just $100. (Yes, prices will be going up this spring.)

So what’s a mini-session? Here’s what you can expect:

• a 30-minute session on location outside at my place in Manotick, on the porch and in the yard.
• 10 – 15 custom edited proofs to choose from in an online gallery.
• one 8 x 10 or two 5 x 7 prints.
• high-resolution digital negatives of the prints you choose.

If you’re interested in purchasing a gift certificate or booking your custom family photography session, please e-mail me at danicanada (at) gmail (dot) com or use my contact form. There’s a lot more information and more samples of my family portrait work on my portfolio site, Mothership Photography.

The porch portrait sessions were a HUGE success last year, and I’m so excited to be able to offer them again.

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On Friday night, Simon and Tristan and I made the trip out to Scotiabank Place for our first-ever Ottawa Senators game. Can you believe I’ve never been before? I’d always had the intention to go, in a civic-duty kind of way, the same way you feel like you should haul your sorry self down to the Canal at least once each year for a skate. The parking thing seemed like a hassle, though, and it’s not cheap to bring a family to a game, and by the time we got out it would be way beyond the boys’ bedtimes, and (whine) it’s just so faaaaar…. yeah, I know. Pathetic, right? We are just so not a sports family.

Anyway, when the boys’ school sent home a note that they were organizing a Sens game night back in the fall, it seemed like a great opportunity to bring the boys out to their first game. Because really? Everybody ought to, at least once. While we’re not particularly sporty, Sens fandom does infuse kid culture. When Daniel Alfredsson visited the school last year, the boys talked about it for days, and even though we decided against enrolling the boys in hockey, they still love to play in the driveway.

I figured the whole game experience would be a little too much for Lucas, so I bought three tickets, and for most of this week Beloved and I engaged in a loose game of “I think YOU should take the boys because…” While the idea of the game seemed like a great time in theory, especially three months ago when we bought the tickets, actually hauling ourselves out there on a Friday night after an exhausting week seemed like more work that it was worth. In the end, I agreed to go to the hockey game if Beloved agreed to take Simon to his first reconciliation later this week. Seems a good trade to me!

I’d been dreading the parking situation, and it figures that Friday was the night Beloved had to teach late, so we couldn’t even leave particularly early. We left the house around 6:30 for the 7:30 game, and I was cautioning the boys that we may miss the opening face-off. Instead, we had absolutely no problem zipping right in to a parking lot and entered Scotiabank Place with at nearly 30 minutes to spare.

Our seats were WAY up in the 300 level, only three rows from the rafters. I think we may have sat in the same seats for a Tragically Hip concert a decade or so ago, and with Beloved’s fear of heights, it was probably for the best that I’d agreed to take the boys after all. It was a lot of fun sitting with the families from the boys’ school, though. I found out too late that our $25 tickets had also included a hot dog and a drink, which is actually a decent deal for the entertainment value of the night.

Funny, when the game started it took me a minute to get used to the lack of colour commentary. I’ve watched plenty of hockey on TV but I’ve never been to a live game before, and at first I thought it would be harder to follow the action without the commentary. I was surprised, however, at how captivating the live action is, even from waaaaay up in the bleachers. I was also surprised at how quickly the game flew by, even during the intermissions. Watching hockey on TV is something to be endured for the sake of finding out the outcome, I find, but watching it live is unexpectedly captivating.

The boys really surprised me, too. I’d expected them to be fidgeting and restless, but they were also completely engaged by the experience. Simon seemed to enjoy the cheering and the company of his friends, but Tristan spent the entire game sitting forward in his seat, his attention riveted on the action. He really surprised me the next day, when I showed him a picture from the game in the sports section, and he pointed out one of the Islanders and said, “Oh, there’s number 27. He’s the one that got hurt.” I was amazed not only that he had paid enough attention to notice his jersey number at the time, but that he’d retained it. Then again, little boys are known repositories of hockey stats and trivia, right?

I have to admit, I’m at heart a baseball girl. I can tell you why the infield fly rule is invoked, and when you should sacrifice bunt, and more than you ever need to know about the history of the game. I’ve read Ron Luciano’s entire oeuvre, and all of WP Kinsella’s too. Hockey, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery to me. I have a vague grasp of the concepts of offside and icing, and that’s about as sophisticated as my knowledge of the game gets. And yet, I had a great time at the game. Way better, in fact, than I had expected.

The boys were particularly excited when Spartacat made the trip up to the rafters to visit us in the third period. I stepped on a water bottle trying to catch this photo and had a bad millisecond of imagining myself tumbling the entire way down to the ice like something in a Looney-tunes cartoon, but Tristan was enchanted. “Did you see? He had his hand on my head! I’ll never wash my hair again!” Simon felt the same way about the hand that Spartacat had high-fived.

As we drove to Scotiabank Place, I’d told the boys we’d consider leaving at the end of the second period. With a 7:30 start time, we’d already be way beyond their bedtime at that point, and I was dreading the post-game traffic. I’d figured two periods would give us a good taste of the game experience, but still have us home at a reasonable hour.

The game flew by so quickly that as the end of the second period approached, I began to think we’d probably be sticking it out until the end of the game. And then, with just a few second left in the period, the Sens scored the first goal of the game, and I knew we weren’t going anywhere. The Islanders tied it up in the third period, though, and when we got to the end of regulation time we were done. We snuck out, and heard the wails of dismay from the parking lot when the Islanders scored the gamewinning goal a few minutes into overtime. Ahead of the crowds, we zipped out and were home by 10:30, with both boys asleep in the back seat.

If you haven’t been, you really ought to go. It was Metro family night when we went, and I’m already considering picking up a set of tickets for the family game night in mid-March. And maybe this time the Sens will win!

Surely I’m not the last person in the city to have ever been to a game. Have you brought the family out? What did you think?

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It’s a little bit ironic that now that I have a more comfortable versatile carrying strap for my Nikon, I’ve fallen in love with taking pictures with my easily-pocketable and much less bulky iPhone — no carrying strap required!

My parents got me the Black Rapid camera strap I’d requested for Christmas. It took me quite a bit of waffling to get used to the idea of carrying my camera suspended upside down by the tripod screw, and a few weeks to convince myself that it was safe dangling over my hip like that, but now that I have used it for a while, I love love love it! The accessory strap that comes with the D7000 was good, but the Black Rapid strap is longer, and makes for an easy cross-body carry without pinching the, um, girls, if you know what I mean. Not to mention the fact that when you’re a busty girl, most cross-body straps are a little less than flattering. I like to carry the camera resting just to the side of the small of my back, and the Black Rapid strap is fully adjustable. The only annoying bit is that when I’m walking at a good clip, I tend to somehow trigger the video feature on the camera, so I’ve come back from photo safari walks with photos interspersed with short bouncy video clips of my feet and people walking past on the sidewalk — all upside-down.

Ahem, all that to say, while they each have a place in my heart, I have been enjoying the convenience of mobile photography this week. While it’s not unheard of for me to take the DSLR with me to the grocery store, I didn’t have it with me last Saturday. I hadn’t realized when I left the house how sparkly and gorgeous the world would be when the sun shone on the ice coating all the branches from the storm the day before. I like this photo, but I love the quote I found to go with it: “Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake…” ~ Sir Francis Bacon

These were surreptitiously snapped in the Bulk Barn while I was shopping for candy Lego pieces for Simon’s birthday party. I put them together with a fun app called Diptic.

This week was Simon’s birthday, and we invited the Lego Guy back for another successful Lego party. He is really amazing — I think this party was even better than the one he did for Tristan’s birthday two years ago. Ian is a natural teacher and strikes a perfect balance between instruction and play. Simon happily declared this the “best birthday party ever” while I learned that you can host a party or photograph a party — but it’s a challenge to do both!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a perfect week. Lucas has been very sick since Wednesday — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite so sick. He’s had a fever that tops out around 102F and just won’t stay away, and a terrible juicy cough. I finally brought him in yesterday to see the pediatrician, and he’s got enough of a crackle in his chest that we ended up with antibiotics in case it’s pneumonia again (he had it not all that long ago.) It’s just not right seeing my energetic boy taken out like this.

And if you live in Ottawa, you know that this weekend is the official launch of Winterlude. I took a lunchtime walk on the Rideau Canal skateway (world’s largest, if not longest!) and got some fun shots with both the Nikon and the iPhone that Getty Images snapped up.

And last but not least, no piece of photographic gear is truly considered broken in until I can take it for a test drive with my favourite local attraction, Watson’s Mill in Manotick.

I’d say it passes the test, eh?

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My dear, darling Simon,

You, my middlest boy, are eight years old today. Of course, in your own mind you’ve been eight years old for at least as long as your older brother was that age. You may be the only eight year old boy I know who is dipping his toes in the ‘tween years!

My sweet Simon, you continue to be the family ham. You have a flair for drama, for humour, and for performance. You are warm and generous and like to see people happy. You impressed all the grown-ups in the family immensely just this weekend at your birthday party, when you offered completely without prompting to share the two months of Club Penguin memberships you received with your older brother, knowing that he wanted one as badly as you did. You are truly a kindhearted, generous soul.

School seems to come easily to you, as does making friends. Your last report cards contain nothing but praise. You also seem to think and speak way beyond your years. You are argumentative and challenging when it suits you, and relentlessly curious. While I know these traits will do you very well in the long run, I do have to admit that they’re occasionally exasperating to a parent.

The thing I most admire about you, Simon, is that you accept everyone as your peer and your equal. Whether conversing with an adult, a younger child or a teenager, you simply assume that you are friends and that you will be accepted as an equal. I think a lot of people could learn a lesson or two from this! On the same token, you do occasionally need to be reminded that you are NOT an adult and not privy to every conversation that happens between adults, and have been chastised for cheekily calling teachers by their first names.

You continue to be a fussy eater. You like what you like and you are stubborn when you don’t like something or you think you might not like something. You have finessed the “I can’t eat any more, my stomach hurts” excuse when there is nothing left but vegetables on your plate. You like spicy food and love that Daddy occasionally lets you drink pop with your dinner. Your favourite dinners are tacos, pizza and (sigh) McDonalds. You also like the idea of cooking and baking, and have asked to make your own lunch or breakfast several times, and you asked for and received an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas. You, my boy, are a child who was born to break stereotypes.

Your friends are Alexander and Mason and Olivia, and of course all of your big brother’s friends, too. You like Club Penguin, Super Mario Brothers, Pokemon, the Wii and the DS. You love to play board games and card games, but you also love your “Puffle” stuffies. You are less enthusiastic about active, outdoor games, but you are a much better sport about getting out and moving than you used to be, especially if there are other kids about. This year you joined Beaver Scouts and seem to love it, perhaps in part because Daddy has signed up as a Beaver leader to help out. I think we’re both relieved that we decided against enrolling you in hockey this year.

Sweet Simon, your endless warmth and affection more than make up for your occasional sharp temper and impatience with your little brother. You’re on your way to a larger-than-life personality, and it’s delightful watching you grow up. It’s also wonderful to simply spend time with you, and we love you very much.

Happy birthday, Simon my love. I wish you every dream your heart can wish — and with your creative imagination, there is no end to the possibilities that may bring.

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As I mentioned earlier, I had the chance last week to help out during a portrait session for adorable nine-day-old twin baby boys with Ottawa photographer Christine Denis. I finally had the time to sort through my pictures and pick out a few more favourites.

One of the best parts of working with Christine (aside from the simple pleasure of her company!) was learning how to set up some of the classic newborn poses. I’ve worked with babies a few times now, but never as young as nine days (!) old. If you’re working with newborns, it’s really ideal to take the pictures in the first ten to fourteen days if you want to pose them like this.

(I swear, even after looking at these pictures for days, I can’t help but sigh every time I look at that one. Maybe Beloved will let me have just one — or two! — more babies?)

The boys were so calm and docile. They slept agreeably for most of the session, allowing Christine to shift and settle them with nary a complaint. In fact, they seemed quite happy to be the centre of attention.

I continue to be a fan of wee feet and itsy-bitsy fingers.

I’d posted a version of this shot earlier, but I think I like this one better. The other one was a very tight crop, but I think this one works better to show how tiny the boys are, safely cradled in their parents’ arms.

Don’t you wish you looked this radiant nine days after the birth of your child(ren)?!

I think this one might be my favourite. So peaceful…

It was a genuine pleasure to take photographs of this sweet family, and I learned so much working with Christine. If you’re interested in booking a family or newborn portrait session, I’d love to hear from you. I’m now booking sessions for winter and spring 2012! You can get more information about sessions and prices on my Mothership Photography site.

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Oops, has it really been a week since I’ve put up a new blog post? That has to be a new record for me. Sorry about that, I’ve been knocked on my keister by a cold and a migraine and kindergarten registrations and the preparations for birthday season, which begins here this weekend.

I did still manage to keep taking pictures, though! The absolute highlight of my week was spending some time with the kind and talented Ottawa photographer Christine Denis, assisting while she took portraits of these nine-day-old twin boys. *melt*

Isn’t it almost enough to make you want to have more babies? They were so calm and docile and delicious, and I learned so much about newborn posing and portraiture from Christine. Wow, is it ever a lot of work, but oh my goodness, how adorable is this?

I’ve got a few more I hope to share later in the week, but I think those were my two favourites from the session. From warm and fresh to old and cold — I was delighted to find what I think is a pretty unique view of the Peace Tower when I was out on a walk downtown. This is the ruins of the former carbide mill on Victoria Island, build in 1892 by Thomas “Carbide” Wilson. I noticed the windows and shifted my perspective back and forth a bit (“zoomed with my feet” as they say) until I had the Peace Tower lined up in one of the windows.

We visited friends who foster reptiles on the weekend, and they introduced us to Edgar, the Florida King Snake. Tristan, Lucas and I thought he was pretty cool, but Beloved feels about snakes pretty much the same way Indiana Jones does. (“Snakes? Why does it have to be snakes?”)

The rest of the week was all-iPhone, all the time. You know I love my vintage typewriter, and I finally got a Hipstamatic print of it that I like.

This was one of the days I was home sick. It was literally the easiest shot I could compose, short of lying on the couch and shooting a picture of the ceiling. Lucas draws at least half a dozen or so pictures each day, lately almost always of characters from Club Penguin (which he is not, ironically, allowed to play.)

I’ve had these silk daisies as a centrepiece on the table for nearly a year and taken quite a few pictures of them, but never any I liked enough to keep and none that capture what I like about the colours and the glass vase and the bits of sea glass in the bottom of it. The late-afternoon light was hitting it just right, though, and I’m really happy with how this one came out.

And finally, a shot from the snowy, blustery drive home yesterday. I don’t know why I am so fascinated with rural mailboxes, but I am. Maybe I was a country girl in a former life? I called this one “mailbox minimalism”. I don’t ordinarily like the dark frame film on Hipstamatic but I think it works well for this one.

I promise to be a little more diligent about getting you some fresh content for next week!

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My friend Heather thinks I owe you a retraction. Remember this post, where I congratulated myself for my level-headedness and maturity in managing to pull myself out of a frenzy of consumeristic covetousness and NOT impulse-buy a new iPhone 4S? She thinks I owe you a retraction because I went out and actually did buy the new iPhone four days later. I think I deserve a medal for waiting for four whole days. And pro haggler that I am, I managed to wrangle a deal on my data plan so that I’m actually paying less per month for wireless than I was for our ancient non-data-plan Krazr, so we’ll save the price of the new iPhone in about a year and a half. Yay!

And oh my sweet lord, what a treat is the new iPhone 4S! I have only barely begun to figure out the voice-activated Siri stuff, but the camera? Wow! Well here, don’t let me tell you — let me show you!

“Hey, look Willie! Mom got a new iPhone!”

I went out for a drive on Sunday to take some pictures and started playing with Hipstamatic, an app I’ve had on my iPhone for more than a year but never warmed to. I’m kinda digging it now! (Do you like the digital sticky tape holding the collage together? I added that in Photoshop.)

This was the view from my office window when the sun hit an icy tree on Sussex Drive, also via Hipstamatic.

And this one is straight-up out of the iPhone, no app required. (I have been coveting a wide-angle lens for my Nikon so I can do this kind of big-nose distortion, but the iPhone’s angle of view is just wide enough to satisfy my creative urge for now!)

And speaking of the Nikon, I didn’t abandon it entirely this week. I’m glad I had it with me on Monday when this spectacular sunrise lit up the sky over the Byward Market. No colour enhancement on this one, I just pointed my camera and clicked.

You might have seen this one in my post yesterday. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but only recently had enough skill to be able to make it come out like I planned in my head. The text is actually added after the fact in Photoshop, which means I can put up just about any message I want. I’m thinking it might make a fun new blog header one of these days.

As I said on Flickr, stand by for the “I am so much more than just a mom with a camera” version. Speaking of which, I’ve made a few allusions recently to Internet drama. I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. I got tangled up in a war of words on a Flickr forum recently with Ottawa photographer Paul Couvrette, who called me a “mamarazzi” and criticized me for (among other things) undercharging for prints and making my pictures available online. While the criticism stung at the time, especially since it was more or less unprovoked and definitely overly vicious and personal, the apology he later posted was laugh-out-loud funny. I had no idea at the time, but apparently he had “personified [Dani] as an icon of the ill direction towards which I believe photography may well be headed.” Nice, eh? I’ve never been called an icon of anything, let alone the downfall of an entire industry. And I thought I was just taking pictures because it made me happy. So if I hike my prices next year, you can blame Paul Couvrette.

Mostly, though? I still just love taking pictures.

And hey, this made me feel a lot better. I got my Getty Images sales statement at the end of the week, and this picture from October apparently ran in the Wall Street Journal during December.

And this picture of Willie was bought by a company that makes greeting cards and calendars with titles like “Napping Cats of 2012.”

Hmmm, can you guess which one I’ll be adding to my “as seen in” portfolio? I mean, the WSJ is great, but the Napping Cats of 2012 calendar? Does it get more prestigious than that?!

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Mommyblogger, a photo by Dani_Girl on Flickr.

Cuz yanno, sometimes a picture does say it so much better than a thousand words could.

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I read somewhere in the Ottawa media recently that today, January 19, is the official “dead of winter.” Today is the date with the lowest average daily temperature of the entire year, and the average daily temperature creeps upward from here. So now we can officially say that winter is more than half behind us.

I was trying to pacify myself with that thought as I scraped that merciless ice off my windows at sparrow’s first fart yesterday morning in the rampaging wind. Summer is coming!!

Since winter is on it’s last legs (heh, maybe a little too optimistic?) you might as well get out and enjoy it during Manotick’s official winter carnival, Shiverfest! It runs next weekend, January 27 through 29.

There will be horse-drawn sleigh rides, a chili-cookoff, a photography contest, a trivia night, bands, reptiles, a kids’ play area and more! You can check out this PDF for details on the full weekend of activities.

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It’s a snow day here in Ottawa today. The buses have been cancelled and while the schools are still open, we’ve decided to let the boys stay home. I usually ship ‘em off as even in the most treacherous conditions I think they’re better off for a few hours at school than at home, but by a fluke of scheduling both Beloved and I were home anyway, so we let them stay home for a treat.

Now that the kids are older, they’re better at entertaining themselves even on a long day at home. They like to play board games, and we’ve always got a craft of some sort on the go. And of course, there are the ubiquitous video games.

Snow days are such a break from routine that it’s fun to find something unique to do. Just a few days ago, I blogged a few more of my favourite indoor activities, including bead crafts and scavenger hunts. If you’re feeling like comfort food, how about baking up some rainbow cupcakes? Or maybe just whipping up a batch of home-made playdoh?

It’s pretty easy to pass the day with older kids, but sometimes not so much with babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Conveniently, my friends at Fisher-Price just shared this awesome new tool for inspiring playtime with your kids. I remember how hard it was coming up with ideas on how to play with a baby, especially when Tristan was a newborn, but there are dozens – maybe even hundreds – of great suggestions here on games to play with kids from newborn to school age.

From the simple idea of tummy talking for babies under 3 mos to the classic “red light, green light” for toddlers to storybook theatre for older kids, there are tonnes of great ideas. I like how each game also has information about which learning skill you’re stimulating and even some basic safety cautions. Wouldn’t this be a great tool for a young babysitter looking for ways to interact with kids as well? I really wish I’d had access to this when I was a new mom!

As I’m writing this post, I’m remembering how long those early days could seem, home with a baby who couldn’t entertain himself with Super Mario Bros or endless episodes of Max and Ruby. Isn’t it funny how while you’re in them, it seems like those days will never end and suddenly you realize that they’re long behind you?

If you could make one suggestion to help another parent pass a long winter day at home with the kids, what would it be?

(Disclosure: I am part of the Fisher-Price Play Panel and I receive special perks as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are my own.)

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I am crazy busy this week. I don’t have time for Internet drama (but oh, there is drama) and I don’t have time for the forecasted 30+ cm of snow between now and Friday (seriously!) and I really don’t have time to talk at any length about coffee. But as we discussed on Twitter this weekend, it’s a simple fact of life: coffee sometimes trumps all.

I just got a press release from Tim Hortons. I am still not sure I’ve forgiven them for their Christmas cup faux pas, but I wanted to put this out there for your opinion. Apparently, they’ve broadened their coffee cup line so that starting next Monday a small is now an extra-small, a large is now a medium and an extra-large is four ounces bigger than it used to be.

From the press release:

Tim Hortons announced it will be brewing its biggest cup yet, with this month’s introduction of a brand new extra large cup. Beginning January 23rd, the new cup will offer coffee lovers across Canada a premium quality, extra large coffee at a value price. To accommodate the brand new cup, the names of the other hot cup sizes have shifted: the original small is now extra small, the medium is now small and so forth. The change in names of the hot cup sizes will apply to all hot beverages – guests will still receive the same amount of coffee for the same price, only the name of the size has changed.

I’m happy that they didn’t drop the small entirely, as since my last post on the subject of Tim’s cup sizes (hey, what can I say, I’m obsessed) I’ve grown kind of fond of the kiddie-size small — soon to be known as the extra-small. But do we really need to buy our in coffee 2/3 of a litre containers? I’m a hard-core coffee drinker and even I’m not sure I’d have many occasions to order THAT much coffee at a time.

What say ye, bloggy peeps? Do you need your entire daily recommended dose of caffeine in one 24-ounce hit, or is there such a thing as too big a cup of coffee?

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After a notable absence, winter has arrived with a vengeance in Ottawa recently. I can’t wait to get out and start taking pictures of the great snow dump we got yesterday — but I might wait until the temperatures warm up a bit beyond the current minus 30 with the wind chill. Brrrr!

But heck, winter lasts a long time here in the world’s snowiest capital city, so you kind of have to suck it up and get outside and enjoy it. Like this!

And then you have to stand by patiently and look cute while your mom takes your picture. Again.

Or maybe you ham it up a bit and hope she’ll go away and let you get back to playing in the snow.

And then you can go back to this.

Speaking of getting out in the winter, can you believe I’ve never walked the full loop from the Interprovincial Bridge to the Portage Bridge and back? It’s a gorgeous five kilometre loop and takes just a little bit less than an hour to walk, even if you stop every now and then to take a picture or five. I’ve vowed to try to do it once a week, weather be damned, until my jeans are feeling a little less snug.

(I’ve also discovered the Pano app for my iPhone. How have I missed this before now? This one was taken on the Portage Bridge, facing Parliament Hill.)

More Peace Tower shots. I can’t help myself!

From icy and blue to warm and soft — you might remember this shot from earlier in the week. Tristan spontaneously asked if he could read Lucas a bedtime story, and then proceeded to read to him for half an hour. This one is a keeper.

Heh. The boys pointed out that not only do my multicoloured toes match my jammies, but they both match my coffee cup.

Photo tip: to catch the cat staring directly into your lens, compose your photo and then scritch your fingernail against the side of your lens. Snap! (There’s nothing I can suggest to erase the vague look of disdain, though!)

(If you read an earlier version of this post, there was some misinformation from a hacked account in here. Carry on, folks, nothing to see here.)

I’ll let ee cummings have the last word on this one.

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I think I might actually be a grown-up now. This is such an astonishing revelation that it bears sharing here on the blog.

It started, as it usually does, with a fit of covetousness. I have an iPhone 3GS. I’ve had it for about a year and a half, since the eve of the release of the iPhone 4. I’ve always been rather proud of my thriftiness, buying the newly-reduced 3GS instead of the hot new toy. Never mind the fact that the iPhone itself is a mad indulgence.

At the time, I had no idea how deeply attached to the iPhone I would become. I call it my umbilical cord, and I have it with me always. I find myself using it to check Twitter while waiting in long queues at the grocery store, checking the weather sitting in the Timmies drive-thru on the way to work, and most sweetly indulgent of all, checking my e-mail in the morning before I even part the flannel sheets to let in the cold of a fresh new day.

I was perfectly content with my vaguely antiquated 3GS until several factors came together recently, launching me down the garden path to coveting an upgrade. Getty on Flickr started soliciting iPhone pictures, which reminded me to start taking pictures with it, and I rediscovered the fact that although they don’t compare in quality to the pictures I take with the Nikon, they do have a certain quirky appeal.

Then my friend Steve told me that his new iPhone 4S had an 8 megapixel camera (mine is a meagre 3 megapixels) and showed me some of the incredible high resolution and low-light stills and video he had taken. *drool* And Beloved mentioned his five year old Krazr (barely beyond a rotary-dial phone by today’s standards) was no longer properly holding a charge.

Given that I still have a contract with Telus, it seemed like a brilliant plan on my part to give Beloved the 3GS and get a 4S for myself. Over several conversations with Beloved, we evolved from him having zero interest in having his own iPhone to a sort of capitulation that yes, since the cost of the plan would be more or less the same and since his phone was becoming rather useless, in theory it may be feasible to consider upgrading my phone and having him use the old one, at some unspecified future date. He may have been agreeing in principal, but it was all I needed to write a contract in blood.

Poor Beloved.

Which is how I found myself spending the best part of an afternoon trying to wrangle a deal with first Telus, then Rogers, and getting myself increasingly tangled up in various plans and options. I was brazen in my negotiations, which were flatly declined by Telus. I had better luck with Rogers, though, and when we were suddenly looking at not only two iPhones and a shared data plan but a sweet incentive plan that included a ridiculously discounted Galaxy Tablet, Beloved was suddenly leading the charge for the acquisition of the new iPhone and plan with Rogers. The only fly in the ointment was the pesky factor of that contract with Telus and the $$$ I’d have to fork out to break the contract.

I could sense a long afternoon of horse-trading and hold music coming to fruition when the salesperson came back on the line with bad news — the online call centre didn’t actually have any iPhone 4S in stock. The salesperson told me that a bricks-and-mortar Rogers location could offer me a similar deal, though, and said although she regretted losing the sale (she’d at that point invested nearly an hour with me) I’d get a better deal with them.

So caught up in the frenzy of deal-making, plan breaking and instant gratification were we by that point that Beloved encouraged me to go now, RIGHT NOW!!, to the nearest Rogers store to ink the deal. Dinner? Schminner! Pick something up for us on the way home with my new tablet!

It’s at this point that I have to say I’m grateful there isn’t a Rogers outlet in Manotick. I hadn’t even made it as far as Rideau Valley Drive on my way to Barrhaven when the adrenaline subsided enough for me to see the ridiculousness of my mission. Nothing was on sale or time limited. We ought to consider our options a bit more clearly before proceeding. If we signed on to a Rogers family plan, we’d need to pay out the contract penalty with Telus, but the longer we waited the less the penalty would be. Maybe the iPhone 4S will go on sale when they finally get around to announcing the long-anticipated iPhone 5. Maybe we could just get the iPhone 4S straight up from Rogers without the family plan and work things out so they swapped the phone numbers. At the very least, we could wait until the weekend. I don’t need the new phone TODAY. I actually don’t *need* the phone in any way, shape or form, but I had worked myself up to an absolute lather of covetousness.

I was actually kind of relieved when I turned and headed to our local sub shop to pick up some dinner. This may be the first time ever that I’ve managed to pull myself out of a consumeristic frenzy of instant gratification. Other similar scenarios have ended in the acquisition of, off the top of my head, our first DSLR, my original iPhone, and our newest laptop.

I am ridiculously proud of this highwater mark in my life, an obvious truimph of reason over impetuousness. I think I’ve shown an exemplary amount of maturity. Apparently it *is* possible to resist the siren-song of instant gratification. Who knew?!

So proud of myself was I, I forgot to consider one important factor. Poor Beloved was crushed when I came through the door carrying only dinner. He was looking forward to playing with his shiny new toys tonight.

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I‘m still on the fence as to whether this is another 365 project, but I did take a picture (or five) each day this week. How can I stop taking pictures when there’s cuteness like this is my life?

Isn’t he so lovely? Oh my, but that boy will break hearts some day.

This last week was mostly about family, even though I did have to eventually drag my sorry self in to work at the very end of the week. I love the expressions on their faces in this one, ranging from indulgence to barely repressed impatience to impish mischieviousness. They’re so patient with me, my menfolk are.

I pulled over on the way home from work when I saw this murder of crows infesting a big tree off Limebank Road. I converted it to B&W, but it was such a flat grey day that it was almost there already.

The idea for this one arrived fully formed in my head one night and I’m pleased that it’s almost exactly as I’d envisioned it. (I can never seem to remember to wear makeup, and I don’t bother to shave half the time in winter, but I do have a soft spot for a multi-coloured pedicure.)(But, I should focus on either the polish or the camera, because while the picture is fun the pedicure is a mess with polish all over the place!)

This one started out as a completely different picture, which failed miserably in the execution, but did inspire me to put this together. I like it very much! The camera is a Polariod EE100, built in the late 1970s and rescued for $5 from a junk shop by me. The the scratchy look comes from a texture I found on Flickr. Apparently it (the camera, not the texture) will take Fuji pack instant film — I may have to try it out one day!

Early in the week we had a visit from the boys’ grandparents, Mimi and Pipi. I was taking out the garbage when I noticed Beloved’s dad out there in the snow without gloves, building a snowman to entertain the kids. Have I mentioned how much I love my family?

Grandparents cause the most delightful sorts of disruptions, don’t they?

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Tristan just asked me if he could read Lucas a bedtime story, instead of being read to by Beloved.

These are the moments that make it all worthwhile. Blogged because I want to remember this one.

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I have been posting my pictures on the Internet forever, going back to the first website I built back in 2000 or so, and I’ve always known there were inherent risks. I’d always figured, though, that the biggest risk would be that someone takes one of my pictures and misappropriates it.

However, as I’ve become more serious about photography, I’ve realized that there are a lot of ways you can unwittingly give someone (or more nefariously, a big corporation) the right to use your pictures in any way they choose, commercial or not. Did you know, for example, that each time you use Instagram or Hipstamatic or TwitPic, you have granted “a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content”? (Taken verbatim from the Instagram terrms of service you agreed to when you signed up for the service, but the others are pretty similar.) They need a certain amount of rights to display and back up your pictures, but these terms seem to go above and beyond what would be requried for that.

So what does this mean? Well, most importantly it means that they can use your picture or any part of it in pretty much any way they like — advertising, derivative works, etc. It also means that if you happen to go pro and start licensing your images through a stock agency like Getty Images, you’ve limited the kind of licensing model that can be assigned to that photo. The photo loses some of its attractiveness to certain buyers who might want (and pay big bucks for) an exclusive license. And this isn’t just limited to fine art photography — you might be at the right place at the right time and capture an editorial photograph that a newspaper, magazine or television station might pay to use, but once you sign away your rights, you instantly lose control of a significant part of your negotiating power.

For more information on social sharing of pictures, copyright and licensing models, see Jon Boyes great blog post on the subject. There’s also been a huge amount of discussion on Facebook and photo rights, and more recently on Google +. It’s a minefield for sure!

And if you’re an amateur shutterbug looking for more, ahem, exposure for your pictures, you might want to think twice before submitting your pictures to any photo contests. Read the fine print and you’ll find that a lot of contests are simply what photographers call “rights grabs” – watch out for wording in the rules and regulations that says you grant the contest organizers any kind of royalty-free license if you have even the faintest aspiration of licensing that photo at any point in the future. For example, the rules and regulations of National Geographic’s 2011 photo contest has this clause at the bottom of a long page of jargon:

By entering the Contest, all entrants grant an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide non-exclusive license to Authorized Parties, to reproduce, distribute, display and create derivative works of the entries (along with a name credit) in connection with the Contest and promotion of the Contest, in any media now or hereafter known, including, but not limited to: Display at a potential exhibition of winners; publication of a book featuring select entries in the Contest; publication in National Geographic magazine or online highlighting entries or winners of the Contest. Entrants consent to the Sponsor doing or omitting to do any act that would otherwise infringe the entrant’s “moral rights” in their entries.

Even something as simple as uploading your sunset pictures to the Weather Network will require you to sign away your rights:

You hereby grant to PMI a world-wide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute and sub-licence any and all material or information submitted by you to this Web site or by e-mail to PMI and/or to incorporate it in other works regardless of form, medium or technology. In addition, you hereby waive any moral rights you have in any and all material or information submitted by you to this Web site or by e-mail.

So what does all of this mean? Just be aware of what you’re agreeing to before you allow someone to use your pictures. You may not care where they end up or how they’re ultimately used, but I really had no idea about most of this stuff until recently. You may find that entering that contest will be more valuable to you than keeping the rights of a photo you cherish, or that you’re comfortable sharing your iPhone snaps via TwitPic, and that’s entirely up to you. It’s making an informed decision that counts!

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When I was in Toronto for the Blissdom Canada conference, I had the chance to speak to CBC’s Ira Basen about mom blogs, sponsorships, advertising and working with brands. It was an interesting conversation, especially as I tried to mentally juggle my relationship with Fisher-Price and Mom Central Canada (the sponsors who brought me to Blissdom Canada) and my own strongly held opinions on the matter. You can tune in this Sunday to CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition to see how it all turned out. Here’s the aperçue from the Sunday Edition web site:

There are four million mommy bloggers in North America, women sharing with other women the trials and tribulations of bringing up babies and making more and more money at the same time.

In the past decade, social media for mommies has gone from a nurturing, supportive, chat-across-the-back-fence virtual village to a massive marketing vehicle for everyone from toy companies to the makers of minivans.

On the site you can also hear a quick promo of the show, featuring one of my biggest bloggy crushes and the woman I coincidentally befriended on the shuttle ride from the airport to Blissdom, Bonnie Stewart. Thanks to Judy Gombita on Google+, here’s a list of some of the others featured in the documentary:

PhD In Parenting – Annie Urban http://www.phdinparenting.com/
5 Minutes for Mom – Janice Croze http://www.5minutesformom.com/
Common Cents Mom – Hollie Pollard http://commoncentsmom.com/
Crib Chronicles – Bonnie Stewart http://cribchronicles.com/
Mom Central Canada – Cora Brady http://www.momcentralcanada.com/
Fisher Price play panel http://www.fisherpriceplay.ca/moms/
Child’s Play Communications –Stephanie Azzarone http://childsplaypr.com/

Judy also quotes Ira Basen’s summary of the 27-minute documentary:

“It is basically about the pros and cons commercialization of the social media space, and mommy blogs are the best example of that. On the one hand, the bloggers who have chosen to monetize their blogs by hooking up with brands via sponsorships, sponsored posts, compensation etc., are being rewarded for the work they do and are providing a service that many readers must find valuable. On the other hand, as one person (Bonnie Stewart of PEI) says in the piece…

‘There are people now who are perceiving that social media is a great way to build platforms so that you can get a corporate job being a brand spokesperson for Kraft Foods, but they are not necessarily as interested, and possibly not even as aware of the creator/consumer model on which original social media was based. I’m not sure that the “I’m here as a consumer of opportunity, in a space that’s crowded with marketers” is social media. I have a feeling that that might just be an interactive way of getting eyeballs and shilling for traditional corporate interests. And if enough people allow that to become the norm, then I think a lot of the power and potential of social media goes away.’

Heh, you can totally tell why I have a blog crush on Bonnie after reading that, eh?

I’d almost forgotten about this and was pleased to hear that it wasn’t relegated to the cutting room floor. If you’re curious, tune in this Sunday to CBC Radio One. It’s currently scheduled to run at 9:13 am, barring interference from pesky world events and breaking current affairs. You can stream it from CBC Radio, too, or catch the full-length podcast after the fact.

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With back to school starting so late this year, it seems like Christmas was ages ago. I don’t know about your kids, but at our house the kids are twitchy. Most of the gifts have been examined and played with, the family visits are past and the Christmas decorations stashed away for another year — and we still have a couple of days to kill savour together before the kids go back to school.

Are your kids getting squirrelly too? I thought I’d pull a few ideas from my archives to share, in case you missed them the first time around.

1. Digital camera scavenger hunt

You don’t need to use a camera for this – the low-tech version is just as fun – but the kids love the added element of the camera. Maybe they got one of these for Christmas? Make up a list of things outside like “blue car” or “tall tree” or “mail box” or whatever is in your neighbourhood, and then set the kids free to find the things as a team. It can be as short or long a list as you think they have the attention-span to complete, and by using the camera you don’t have the problem of what to do with the stuff they collect (a problem we’ve had with other scavenger hunts, and on a daily basis simply because my kids are natural scavengers!) Rainy day or freezing cold outside? Make it an indoor scavenger hunt with things like, “Daddy’s socks” and “blue shampoo bottle.”

2. What’s in the bag?

You need a bag about the size of a shoe box for this. A fabric bag is best, like a shoe bag, and a recyclable shopping bag works well, too. You have to do a bit of advanced legwork for this one. Collect a bunch of stuff that has interesting shapes, sizes and textures. Dinky cars, a carrot, a bar of soap, a sock — whatever! One at a time, put an item in the bag and see if your child can guess what it is by feel alone. So simple, and surprisingly entertaining. We always end up laughing.

3. Beads

Don’t just buy bulk beads from the craft store, though; bring them to an actual bead store and let them pick four or five “special” beads from the bins, and then make up the difference with pony beads or other plain beads. You can also get a mixed bag of discards… my boys loved the ones that looked like crystals in a bag I thought was rather uninspiring. Letter beads are also a hit if you don’t mind forking over a bit more cash. And make sure you don’t choose the cord that is plastic and stretchy – it’s impossible to knot. Get nice thready cord.

When they finished making necklaces for everyone in the house and bracelets for Granny and Papa Lou and the rest of the extended family, all the Webkinz got new collars and we made enough bookmarks to last a year. You can also get little key rings to make backpack decorations. My kids LOVED the bead craft!

4. Treasure maps

This is similar to the scavenger hunt. One year our nanny made up a treasure hunt for each of the boys for their birthday gift, with ten rhyming clues leading them throughout the house. If I didn’t love her before this, when I read the work that had gone into her clues I knew she was terrific. Sample: “Under the place you sit to dine, you will find clue number 9!” The treasure at the end can be something small, because it’s the hunt that makes up the fun. If you’re feeling less wordy, you can just draw a treasure map with a nice big X that marks the spot.

5. Magazine cut-out books

I could spend hours doing this when I was a kid. Find some old magazines and catalogues destined for the blue box, and some construction paper. Cut pictures, words and letters out of the magazines to create a little story book. So simple, but creative and entertaining.

How are you planning to spend the last few days before the kids go back to school?

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I‘m still on the fence as to whether I will be doing an official 365 (erm, 366) project in 2012, but I still seem to be taking a picture each day, and I do enjoy writing these posts, so let’s keep on keeping on for now. I posted a boatload of pictures over the last week, partly because I have had time to go through my archives and find some new favourites and partly because I have not really put down my camera at all this week. And really, how could I resist this ridiculously photogenic time of year?

This is what our Christmas looked like:

One of my favourite gifts this Christmas was a creative aperture kit for my Lensbaby. I’ve done shaped bokeh before, but this makes it very easy by providing a bunch of different cutouts you just pop into the Lensbaby, so any out-of-focus areas (known as bokeh) take on the shape of the aperture. Here’s the effect the heart-shaped one had on the tree lights:

And here’s the star-shaped one with the neighbour’s Christmas lights. (There is a part of me that worries about being known as “That weird woman with the camera” in my neighbourhood.)

It can be more subtle when the lights are not as bright or contrasty. You can see the faint stars in the right fence post on this one, too:

Here’s what it looks like on the camera:

Not for every day, but a lot of fun when used sparingly. And speaking of bokeh, here it is without the shaped aperture. The glass ball is part of a decoration my mom bought for me ages ago — in fact, it was in my first 365 picture back in 2009. I keep meaning to play with it more:

On a side note, if you’re killing time and looking for something cool to watch, check out this amazing time-lapse video that combines shaped bokeh, a glass globe just like this one and Los Angeles. I found it after I’d taken all these pictures and laughed at how they all came together in this video — I’ve watched it a couple of times and really love it!

Snow Globe Los Angeles from All Cut Up Films on Vimeo.

I’ve been noticing these lights on a fence in Manotick since the beginning of the season, and that gorgeous snowfall on Christmas day made for the perfect conditions to finally capture them. I love this picture!

And no week in pictures would be complete without at least one portrait, right? Here’s Lucas, hard at work. He’s spent most of the week at the table doing exactly this: cutting, colouring, gluing and drawing.

I’m not quite sure yet if this is another 365 project or not, but one thing is clear — I’ve no plans to stop taking pictures any time soon! This post is getting a little long, but I thought I’d cram in this last one while it’s still fresh:

Happy 2012 from us to you!

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