365 Photos_July Photo A Day

This past year I have been on a challenge kick. I would look on the internet for different monthly challenges to get into to distract myself a little. One kind that I took a liking too was photo challenges! At first I was just finding random lists on Google search to accomplish challenges, until I stumbled onto this blog:

I'm not going to lie, I thought the name was funny but I love her blog. I like new recipes to try and she has plenty of them. Especially since she is in a different country and all. Anywho, she does a monthly photo-a-day challenge and I have tried and failed every month to follow the list she has. Here is next months list if you're curious:

I like her lists. It's not too specific, leaving room for creativity and imagination. So in July I am challenging myself to actually finish a challenge and I am using this blog as motivation. When the month is over I will post all of my pictures up and let you guys see how I did. I post them daily to my Instagram along with my sister Nicole too. And it's cool if you want to join in the fun. I mean taking one picture a day isn't so hard lol. I just get lazy sometimes.

Interview With An 8 Year Old

Me and Alyssa (my little sis in law) were sitting around one morning and I decided to interview her for fun. I saw some questions online that I thought would be fun to ask her a few. Her answers where simple but I want to see if anything changes when I ask her the same questions next year. Sounds fun huh?  Here are some of her answers.

What's Your Favorite Color:

RED AND ORANGE

What's Your Favorite T.V. Show

SCOOBY-DOO AND SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

Who Is Your Favorite Singer

CHRIS YOUNG AND JUSTIN BIEBER

What Is The Grossest Thing You Can Think Of

POOP

If You Could Be Any Animal What Would You Be

AN EAGLE

What Is Your Happiest Memory

WHEN MY DOGS, PUP AND LETTIE, SAVED ME FROM A CAR

-her dogs literally pushed her out of the way, how awesome is that

What Do You Do For Fun

HANG OUT WITH MY BUDDY

-that's me!

What Is Your Favorite Thing To Do In The Summer

GO SWIM WHEN IT'S HOT

What Is The Nicest Thing You've Done For Someone

WILLIAM COULDN'T WRITE HIS NAME SO I WROTE IT FOR HIM

-William is her classmate that has special needs. She watches him like a brother.

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up

A HUNDRED DIFFERENT THINGS

-she was very indecisive with that one lol

Favorite Food

CHOCOLATE

I Love When Mom/Dad Cooks..

BEEFY NACHOS

One Word To Describe You

HAPPY

What Are Your Pets Names

SABRINA (puppy), NATHAN, NADIA, AND ROSE (her cats)

What Would You Do With A Million Dollars

SPEND IT

-apparently I asked a dumb question lol

She is a very interesting little girl that is has an answer for everything. Even the things you don't ask her about lol. I love her to death and love hanging out with her though. We have fun when we get together. There are times when I just want to sit around with the other adults but half the time she is not happy with that one bit. Undivided attention is her M.O.

Hope you enjoyed my little random questionnaire. I have the whole weekend off so I will be taking pictures for sure to share. Looking up aperture and shutter speed settings this time around! Pinterest is the best place ever for that. 

What a Brown Noser

I am the people pleasing type of person by default and I absolutely hate that about myself. My whole life I always said yes to everything people asked because of what I thought they would think of me if I said no. That is definitely a recipe for disaster. You know when you have those friends that ask you to take them somewhere then tell you they don't have any money to give you for gas after the fact? Yea that happened plenty. I am just saying, it is draining to do what everyone wants you to do. So I came up with a solution, just say no. Well that didn't work because I felt I needed a good excuse to go with that 'no'.

Fast forward to this past week. I have learned how to say no like a pro without breaking my brain for a good excuse out of whatever situation it was. Let's just say my new job has taught me quite a few things lol. Sometimes I think we are put in situations to learn new things whether we realize it or not. I kinda like that about life, everything you do has a purpose/meaning. Even the little things.

So forget about what people think, I have been driving myself crazy with that for too long. I will probably still  think about it to an extent but I have officially come to my senses. It blows my mind how fast I caught on lol. We will call this a break through!

A Few Fab Photos: Rex

Isn't he the cutest! My bestie, Samantha, got a new puppy and named him Rex. He is a pitbull-american bulldog mix I believe. He is the fattest, laziest, sweetest dog I have ever seen. I just wanna steal him away, but since I can't do that I just took some pictures lol.

I got a quick pic with my phone yesterday. I just love those spots on his little nose!

Plans For The Future

If you've read my recently added About Me tab you will know that I have a bucket list for myself. I have a things for lists lol. Me and my older sister in law put it together some months ago with plans of doing it all together. People have told me I am too young for a bucket list but I think it is the most fun project I've attempted so far.

I have made the goal to finish this up before I retire and see how far I get. I even put my list on popsicle sticks for fun.When I accomplish one I write the date on the back of the stick. I have successfully done 4 this year:

See a ballet

Shoot a gun

Caverns

ziplining

I was excited to start on my list so quickly! My husband finally let me put a hand on one of his many guns to use as my first weapon fired. Yes, I live in Texas and had never shot a gun before then lol. I don't really like them but I wanted to learn how to use at least a small one. I don't want to get in a position where I bring a knife to a gun fight ha! (horrible joke I know lol)

For Alyssa's 8th birthday we took a trip to San Antonio and saw the caverns there. It was pretty awesome. My little buddy has a huge thing for rocks. Let me just say she was in heaven. Lucky me they had ziplining there too so I took advantage of the situation. It was amazing!

For the ballet I saw my little second cousin in her ballet based off of a Pixar theme. I think it counts even though the ballet was for small children. It was super cute! Too bad I didn't get a picture of that. I want to go to a real one though with professional ballerinas. That kind of makes me wonder what a boy ballerina is called? Let me google that....

Cavalier is the answer I got. That's cool. Learning new stuff every day!

The last item I did off of my bucketlist was a couple of months ago so I haven't done anything in a while. But I am definitley on the lookout for more to add to the list :)

Anywho, I hope everyone had a wonderful Tuesday! I myself worked a double today totalling 16 hours of hard labor. I am pooped. But I thought I would write this out before hitting the sack. Hope the rest of your week is awesome!! 

Visiting Lil Sis + Flower Photography

The other day I got to see my little sis like I had hoped but things didn't go quite as planned. We were supposed to draw with chalk, which is hard to do when you don't have any chalk in the first place.We still had fun spending time together despite being chalkless. I feel like I haven't seen my little buddy in forever. I brought Zeus and Charlie along too. Alyssa has a little puppy that they love to play with, so it was an all around good time for everyone.

=

Another thing on our bucket list was picking wildflowers. So we searched in her yard and stumbled upon the saddest group of yellow flowers (those aren't sunflowers are they??) I had ever seen lol.

We ended up not picking them afterall. They were mostly wilted and buried in tall grass that I did not want to find a stray snake in. Plus there was an extra large puddle of what looked like black water nearby that Zeus was very interested in. We had to spray him down after noticing his whole left half was covered in black guck.

Coincidentally he loved the water being sprayed in his face. Good thing too because before the day was over he had gotten into the black puddle again, requiring yet another spray down.

We found more flowers that I decided to take pictures of because these were clearly not meant to be picked.

I was getting picture taking happy with the last one. Those are just the berries on one of their many evergreen trees. 

After taking pics we decided to have a little scavenger hunt. Thinking up things to find was much harder than I had expected but Alyssa found everything on her little list. She is such a smarty for an 8 year old.

I took the time and actually edited these pictures. I even experimented with putting my name on them. After putting my name on them though, I realized people usually put watermarks on their photos, not just plain text. I am wondering if there is an easy way to watermark pictures. I want to do it to my good ones :). Any suggestions would be awesome since I don't seem to know what I am doing lol.

Portrait Of a Mother

Remember that youtube channel I told you I watch (Bumps Along the Way), well they put out a video during mothers day that I really like. Yeah I am a little late showing you guys but hey, better late than never!

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It's really sweet and you know how I just love to share things with you guys0.

Today I am going to try and cross off another item on me and little sis' bucketlist: Draw with Chalk!!
I haven't done that in ages! Pictures to come for sure :)

Happy First Day of Summer

It officially the first day of the summer but it has been hot in Texas since the beginning of last month! lol. I didn't realize the significance of today until I read another fellow bloggers post!

Me and little sis have barely put a dent in our little summer bucketlist sadly. My job makes it difficult since I only work in the afternoons. That wasn't the case in the beginning but change happened as usual, so we won't fret, just accomplish as much as we can.

This summer I do want to work on editing pictures and taking them too. There are techniques I am finding on Pinterest for picture taking that I am going to try out in my spare time.

An inspiration of mine is a friend I have known since grade school! Shannon is an amateur like me but has been at it for quite sometime. Check out her fan page for Qualls Photography on facebook. She is trying for giveaways and everything. I think you will really like her work! 

Anywho I am going to catch up on some youtube videos and enjoy the rest of my coffee while it is still early. I hope everyone has a great rest of the summer break, and if you work like me I hope you have a great summer period lol.

I love My Sons

My boys are super sweet when they just wake up in the morning. I mean they are sweet all the time but they are way more calm in the morning after sleeping all night lol. So I took advantage of the situation and snapped a few quick picks of my babies.

I have a busy week ahead with the daily grind of work. Did I ever mention how I hate working. It's because I am in a job that is not very pleasurable to be at. Ugh, but it puts me one step closer to my goal which I will talk about in another post I am sure.

Just thought I would share a simple post with you guys! Hope you liked the pictures

I Am Officially Crazy + F.R.I.E.N.D.S

I am the most curious person deep down inside and sometimes my husband gets fed up with me and my millions of questions. I am one of those "why is the grass green?" kind of people.

So yesterday I was thinking about a few child related things and thought about how many children are born in a year. Then I took it a step further and wondered how many were born in a day, no, a minute, no every second! The thought astounded me and I mentioned it to Jer and he looked at me like I was a nut case. "Do I look like I tally mark every time a baby is born in the whole world?". That is a very valid point in his case but I didn't expect him to have the answer anyways. I turned to my almost trusty friend google. The only thing about google that is keeping us from being besties is, when you ask something you are more than likely going get answers from different people. So sometimes I wonder if the answer they give is legit. Except for that one question "How far is the moon from earth."...you've seen the commercial have you not? lol.

Anyways the answer amazed me.
Daily-370,000 born
Every minute-255 born
every second- 3-4 born

Holy shit is all I have to say. That is a lot of human beings. Those numbers made the yearly average of new babies to be 133 million! So many people brought into this world, it almost seems selfish to bring in a new life but that is a whole other subject entirely. I am now educated in how fast we populate the world. I didn't look into deaths but I haven't really had an interest on that yet lol.

Other than my baby obssession, I have came up with a different challenge for myself:

Finish every season of FRIENDS!

 My husband has me beat on this one, his sister owns all of the seasons on dvd. Lucky fool lol. I have been watching them out of order on Nick At Night for a while now and have decided it was time to watch them appropriately. I bet people have watched them all over and over again, I am going to dub myself a newbie because I am sure I haven't seen half of the episodes lol.

I will let you guys know how it goes with my Friends Update!

Pregnancy Photography

  Here are a couple of pics I took of my bestie when she was pregnant with her first born cutie! Little Jr is 8 months now and I can't believe how fast the time has gone. I was looking through these pictures and I of course bounced thoughts of the future around in my head. I can't wait to take pics of my round belly. I just felt like showing off a few pics. That's all for tonight folks.

Click Here For Motivation

I have a guilty pleasure on the internet! It goes by theberry.com and I used to scroll through it practically on the hour everyday. They have lots of stuff of new stuff to look at daily. One of my favorite things that they put out is Daily Motivation!

I am not a health nut but when I read and see these it makes me want to eat healthier and start working out at least a little.

Plus it's not all about health, it gives so great motivational things on just being happy and being yourself! It's time for me to head to work and I read this one this morning. I think I started the day pretty good with it !

I am wondering if there are more websites out there like this! hmmm

Baby Buy For the Future

Watch this and be amazed!

I may be a little late on this but I saw an ad for it on youtube while I was watching my subscription to Daily Bumps yesterday. I went nuts lol. I think what amazed me the most is how you can turn it all the way around and make it function as different strollers. I know that for a fact I want one. But for 400 bux at toys r us I might not get my wish. That is kind of expensive for a stroller, but for all those features I am not too surprised.

I actually saw this ad last year and had totally forgotten the name of it and never saw the ad again until that fateful day yesterday!! I freaked and made sure to get the name and everything. JJ Cole Broadway 360 stroller is what it is called and you already know it is going on our baby registry when the time comes!! lol

Cross It Off The Bucketlist

So me and Alyssa have been hanging out these past couple of days, which happened to be my days off. We decided to try our hand at camping. Apparently it isn't on our buckelist but I could have sworn it was.

Everything went pretty smoothly at first. The guys put up the tent because I certainly don't know how to put one up. This is literaly my first camping experience. I didn't want to tear it up so I left it to the professionals.

So it was all set up and we went to the fair for a little while to walk around and indulge in a funnel cake and a candy apple. When we got back me and my lil sis got our things together and made our way to the tent. Unfortunately there was a stray cat meowing its head off close by, freaking her out to the max. I guess scary campfire stories made it worse because no more than 20 minutes we were our there, she was ready to go back in the house. Yes we set up in the back yard lol. I wanted to be close to a bathroom if need be. 

Ah well. It was fun while it lasted. We were all surprised it wasn't me that wanted to come it. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of the outdoors and I did not anticipate the bugs and other possible critters awaiting us  and our camping adventure. It's okay though, we set up in the living room and finished the night off with Despicable Me instead.

And the Winner Is...

First of all let me say how excited I am to have even put my picture out in the first place, as nervous as I was to do it. Thanks to big sis in law I entered one of my photographs in a contest at the county fair here in my town along with hers.

We entered in the same category (people) and she got 1st place! I couldn't believe it! Guess who came in 2nd!!?:

Me! I can't believe I placed!! Someone actually liked my photography enough to give me 2nd and participation! lol. I was too excited when I saw that ribbon! Alyssa was too! She was like: "They like my face!" lol.

So our pictures will be on display all week long for the fair and we pick them up Saturday along with prize money (ooh!). I am so glad I took a chance on this :D

Walking Dead Update...and Guess Who's Pissed

I finally finished season 2 and was at the edge of my seat the whole time when the farm was attacked! I knew it was only a matter of time before something crazy happened. I was kinda hoping Andrea had died in the mess but I didnt get so lucky. How horrible of me lol.

I know I seem to be taking my sweet time with this show but I actually finished it a few days ago (season 2). This is where I got a little upset with Netflix. You might already know my predicament if you have netflix too, season 3 does not exist on there yet. So I have to postpone my watching or find a new way to get back to my show. The cliffhanger ending really makes you want to watch the next episode too. There is this huge building a few trees aways from where the main characters are camping out that they don't know about yet. Andrea was just saved by some hooded figure with zombies on chains (weird). Rick finally revealed what the CDC guy whispered to him at the end of season 1. Aaah! It kinda of stinks because my bestie that lives down the street from me has the 3rd season recorded on her tv but my hubby is watching the show too and I don't want to get ahead of him.

Hopefully netflix gets it together and puts it up soon, but I was told it will happen when season 4 comes out. For a scaredy cat to scary shows, I sure am into this one lol. Go AMC!

Daring to Be Different

So it's fair week here in my little town and the only reason I go now a days is to buy at least one funnel cake and see old friends. Most tend to move from this country town, but for some reason the fair brings them back for a week to reminisce.

This year I am trying something different. My sis in law Nicole told me about a picture taking contest. She is going to try it out this year and she asked me if I wanted to. I told her I didn't know but she convinced me that I had plenty of pictures to choose from and that I should enter just for the fun of it. This is the pic I chose. So far, to enter, it has to be blown up to 8x10 I believe, put on  a foam board, and place in a sheet protector. The cost is 5 dollars and yesterday I finished up all of the requirements to enter. We are headed to the fair this morning to submit our entries and  I am extra nervous. I never do anything like this. I just take pictures for fun. Negative feedback isn't my friend but I know as a human being we need that to grow and learn. So fingers crossed that I win, or maybe place!! I will tell you guys the end result.


See who won the photo contest HERE!

Meet the One and Only Zeus

 Meet our pride and joy Zeus. We have had him since he was 6 weeks old. I have never had a great dane before or any dog that is over average height and weight. So of course I thought it was only right to document his growth. Once a month I take a good picture of him to see how well he has grown. My recliner was to be his background but he is officially too big to just sit pretty in it anymore. In fact he is so rowdy I can barely get a decent picture period lol. Let me be the one to tell ya, he is alot of work but he is so loveable and wants to be next to you all the time, making the hard work worth it. He needs his daily walk for exercise and it goes without mentioning that he eats his fair share of dog food plus some lol. But I thought I would share how fast he has grown in 8 months. These aren't every picture but this happened between the end of November to now!

I miss this little guy. I could hold him like a baby back then!

There is Mr big stuff sitting in my backseat after a walk at the park. I don't know if I will be getting anymore great danes after this one but I sure don't want to get rid of Zeusy. Charlie would be upset too, they are besties and family!