Project Edit 365

I love this blog – and I love posting – except for when I haven’t posted in a while, then I get overwhelmed at not posting – and I feel like my first post back has to be an amazing one – and my life has been so busy with “mommy” things lately that I don’t have an amazing one in me.

I have had an amazing idea recently though. I think every photographer, professional or amateur, struggles with managing all of his/her pictures. We take thousands of images and most of them don’t make it out of our external hard drives. I’m trying something that will hopefully kill several birds (including that one) with one stone.

As a photographer, lately I’ve struggled with:

  • not being motivated to shoot
  • being motivated to shoot but not having time
  • desiring to get better at shooting
  • desiring to get better at post processing
  • what to do with all these images I’ve accumulated over the years!

We’ve all heard of Project 365s and 52s, where you take a picture a day or a week, usually with some kind of prompting to help kickstart your creativity. What I’m going to attempt this year (starting in February, because my brain was still in Snowzilla mode in January) is . . .

*PROJECT EDIT 365*

I’m sure some clever soul has already thought that one up, but my brain thought of it the other day, and it’s going to help me overcome that list of struggles I detailed up there. It’s also going to help me post more. Right now I’m going back through pictures I took in 2015 and using Lightroom to edit them. I’m posting them on Instagram with the hashtag #ProjectEdit365. I’ll also post them here Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

So, there you go, an amazing post for my first one back after a long hiatus. PLUS, I’ll be generating material to post on here at least once a day. I hope. Please, please, could time and motivation – STICK WITH ME! Below are my first two edits of Project Edit 365. They were both taken in January 2015 in California.


My Artifact Uprising Prints

5x5 prints from Artifact Uprising Not So SAHM

I was introduced to Artifact Uprising recently. I ordered the 25 prints above and couldn’t be more pleased with them. 5×5 and printed on 120lb paper – they’re super cool. Now, how to display them!?

Do you print out your photos? I need to print out more – they’re not much fun to look at hidden in my external hard drive!

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Missing the Pacific Coast

Summer has a death grip on the area we currently live. Multiple days (weeks, even) in the 90s. Normally I’d much rather be hot than cold, but this heat stranglehold has me missing the perfectly mild climate of “northern” California. Reminisce with me. . . and click on a pic to bring up the full-size images.

along the coast
Pacific Grove
Coastal Pathway
McWay Falls


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Homeschool – Fitting in field trips

Field Trip Digital Scrapbook page Not So SAHM

One of my desires in homeschooling, and passions in life, is to get out and see the world. Homeschooling gives you so many freedoms, so why stay cooped up inside the house with noses buried in books? I actually don’t know many homeschoolers that do that, but I always feel like I’m not doing enough to vary our girls’ educational experiences.

For years I’ve attempted to fit field trips into the school year, but it always seems that they either don’t get planned or they get pushed off until next week, which becomes the next week, which becomes never. Sigh. In previous years I’ve been scheduling them on FRIDAYS. Why? Because that’s the end of the week. A field trip on Friday would be a great ending and a good reward for working so hard Monday through Thursday. Something fun to look forward to. But then they were almost always pushed to the wayside. Or I couldn’t think of where to go.

I realized two of my problems:

1) Not planning the field trips in advance
2) Making Fridays our trip days.

  1. It’s hard to get anything done if you don’t plan. Desiring to take field trips is one thing. Just like a visit to the dentist, or getting family pics made, if you don’t plan it *and get it on the calendar* it’s not going to happen. So before this school year started, I looked through what we’d be learning for the first five or six weeks and did some research as to what trips around this area would fit in. I preplanned and then wrote them in on the calendar. I’ll actually be planning the next five or six field trips this coming week. First step.
  2. This is the ingenious step, IMHO. I gave up the idea of trying to schedule field trips at the end of the week and have now switched them to Mondays. Instead of being the last thing we do, it’s what opens up our week. We’ve been schooling for four weeks now using Monday as our field trip day and it is working out really well. We have a shortened school schedule that day and leave the house around lunchtime. Sometimes we take a picnic and eat out, and sometimes we eat before going. It has been a fun way to start off the school weeks! And we look forward to Mondays now instead of grumbling.

The one downside I’ve noticed to having a shortened school day on Monday is that Tuesday seems to be pretty long. Two out of the four Tuesdays have ended with me wishing the yellow school bus stopped at our house. Right now I’m attributing that to growing pains and us having to learn our new schedule. I am also toying with the idea of lessening the Tuesday schedule somehow — rearranging our history, most likely, so we’re not spending around 2 hours on that. I haven’t figured out how to rearrange it though. But that, to me, is an issue with our history program, not necessarily the field trips.

So, there you have it. If you’ve been struggling to fit field trips into your weekly schedule and haven’t given the above tips a try, work on it and see what happens. If you are a pro at this and have tips for me that I should implement, I’d love to hear them! One of the great things about homeschooling is the freedom to be flexible – to incorporate or scrap what does or doesn’t work any time you need.

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Roadschooling W to E – Thermal Yellowstone

I had never been to Yellowstone before. In fact, there was only one stop on our trip that was a return visit for me; everything was a first-time experience.

YELLOWSTONE!

Today I’ll share some pics of its thermal wonders. We learned a little about plate tectonics, lava, geysers, and heat from the earth. It was cool to tie this in with the lava fields of Craters of the Moon in Idaho. The hotspot now under Yellowstone was once under Craters of the Moon. Here’s a link to explain it better (although we ascribe to a young earth viewpoint).

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Roadschooling West to East – Wyoming Wildlife

Wyoming – so many words to describe it. Wildlife is a big one. Touring around in the midday is not the best time to catch wildlife. Fortunately for us it was very mild and we were never short for elk or bison sightings. We were really hoping to see a bear and a moose. The bear let us watch him forage just off the road. The moose? He remained reclusive.

We learned that the “buffalo” in America aren’t technically buffalo – they are bison. And they’re pretty stubborn animals. They caused many a traffic jam in Yellowstone as the herd decided to cross the road, or meander in the road. Nobody cared though – they were so fun to watch.

Black Bear in the Grand Tetons Wyoming Not So SAHM
Bear in the Tetons
Elk in Yellowstone Wyoming Not So SAHM
Elk in Yellowstone
Baby bison kisses mama bison in Yellowstone National Park Not So SAHM
Bison baby kiss (I can’t stand it, so cute!)


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