Anna Says - How to Get Children To Smile At The Camera

Taking photos of children can either be a simple joy or a big fat pain in the big fat butt. Trying to co-erce a smile from a grumpy baby is near impossible. Crazy six year olds don't always want to pose and do a proper smile and don't get me started on three year olds! 

But having photographs of your children at different stages is important {here is where I could share that there are very few photos of me as a child, as I am the youngest of four etc etc, but I won't...}. I did a bit of surfing and came up with some great tips on how to take nice photos of your kids. Oh, and you will get a peak at how the 'Cool Kids' are shaping up.

Photopoly is a great website for all sorts of photography things. I gleaned these 6 tips from their site, they made a lot of sense to me....

1) Make the camera an everyday device

I have to say that I have noticed our children are much happier to have photos taken since my camera has been out and used more and more. We also take photos on our iPhones and with my compact Fuji all the time, so it is something that is just a natural part of our family life.

2) Bend Down, Stoop, Crouch, Kneel

Get down on their level. It just makes sense to make the experience as natural and organic as you can make it. You want relaxed happy faces, not fake, threatened ones. Clearly, I need to get better at this - no photographic evidence! Ha ha!

3) Take Advantage of Good Light

We have taken some stunning photos in the late afternoon/early evening when the light comes in at a low angle. It makes for photos full of halycon moments. The light at the beach is amazing too!

4) Tweak Your Composition

Instead of thinking that you need to have a head and shoulder shot against a white wall - try to fill the frame with your child - close ups and super close ups can be truly cute! Also, take note of what is in the background, if it is too busy, you lose your child in it. Photopoly suggest grass or trees as a background. If you can use a wide aperture and get a blurry background, you will also get the same effect.

5) Don't Make Them Pose For You

Keep it natural. I like to think of taking photos of my kids like a trip to the zoo - I take photos of them in their natural environment and doing their own thing.

6) Take Age Into Consideration

Taking photos of crawling babies is hard. You have to take lots of photos to get that one decent picture. We have lots of photos like the one below, BabyCool doesn't always smile nicely for the camera! But, he was enjoying his first birthday cake! With digital technology, we can afford to take twenty photos to get one good one. 

More Ideas....

Some other great ideas could be to get your kids to act out emotions. I got this idea from the fabulous blog - Be A Fun Mum.... Try - happy, sad, scared, thoughtful, princess etc... There are some more great photography tips on this blog. Click HERE to read more....

I then used the program 'Picasa' to make them into these collages. Picasa is a free download and allows you to edit and do cool things with your photos.

And finally, to wrap up... 

Here are some more B style tips...

1) Take your photos OUTSIDE - get some colour and life into those backgrounds! Try photos in the rain, on a windy day, with leaves etc etc.

2) Don't always take photos of your kids when they are looking at you. Photos of your children looking at something or enjoying life are wonderful. This is one of my very favourite shots of BabyCool - it is his first experience of sand {this was taken seconds before his first TASTE of sand ;0) }

3) Use your phone to take photos and then get some good apps.... I love Instagram, Bokeh Booth and Diptic. There are hundreds of them. Such a great way to add filters and fun to your pictures. The photo below is of Miss Z at a wedding, filtered through Bokeh Booth for iPhone.

Go out today and take some photos of your little cherubs. There will never be another today and....

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

Eudora Welty

10 Things - 10 Ways Children Are Easier To Raise Than Chickens

10 Ways Children Are Easier To Raise Than Chickens

I got a few puzzled looks and questions about last week's '10 Things' about how chickens are easier to raise than children. I thought I had best balance this out and tell you why kids are better...

1. Children smell nice most of the time
2. Children can take out the rubbish
3. Children don't leave excrement all over the backyard
4. Children don't peck the sparkly buttons off my jeans when I bend over
5. Children zip up the net on the trampoline once they get on
6. Children can tell you when they are hungry and thirsty
7. Children can snuggle in bed in the mornings and tell you about their crazy dreams
8. Children are cute and give a good excuse to watch G rated movies
9. Children have arms so they can hug
10. Children can tell you that they love you

Next week - 10 of my top weight loss tips {I am looking forward to that...}

Anna Says - Things I Wish My Mother Had Kept

Things I Wish My Mother Had Kept

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this post. Not because there are lots of things that my mother threw out, rather, the opposite. My mother has actually held on to a lot of things. She has kept a Delft Blue cup full of her children's lost teeth. I know, gross. She also still has my one and only Barbie doll, her wedding dress, a very funky 'brunch coat' and other bits and pieces. I am often surprised at the things my mum has kept, and I love stumbling upon treasures and stories tucked away in special places around her house. Over the last few years, she has given us more of the things we had as children to do with as we please. It is strange what things we see as precious and what our mothers see as precious - but that is a whole other blog post.

After racking my brains for things I wish my mother had kept I remembered something in a little dusty nook in a very dimly lit corner of my mind. My 'Berry Best Friends' plate, cup and bowl set.

My mum gave me one of these sets for my birthday when I was about 8. I think my set was a boy set though, I am sure it was grey and blue. I loved it. I used to use for as many meals as I could. I just loved that it was a little person when all stacked up. I took great pride in using it - even getting very cross at anyone who would dare use it for themselves.

I used to spend a lot of time making cubby houses when I was a child, under our pool table was a favourite spot. On Saturday mornings we were forbidden to wake up mum before 9am, so this meant we had to fend for ourselves if we wanted breakfast before then {what a cruel mother we had! :0)}. I remember taking my Berry Best Friends set full of rice bubbles, tea and toast under the pool table to have my own secret little breakfasts {I may or may not have spilt an entire bowl of sticky sweet rice bubbles}. It was fun, I was right in the middle of the action, but no-one knew I was there. Until of course, I started blocking all the balls from getting back to the ball holding box with teddies and dirty dishes, then I was promptly poked with a pool cue.

I don't know what ever happened to my 'Berry Best Friends Set'... I remember the cup being broken in my dad's workshop and being really really upset.  I think after that I lost interest - if it wasn't the whole set, I was not interested. I do wish I still had even just the bowl and the plate, but, you know, you can't keep everything. I might start keeping an eye on ebay and in the op shops for a set. You just never know.

Whilst looking for pictures for this post, I was poking around Pinterest and just got caught up in nostaligia. I have put together a 'Board' of things that remind me of being a kid again. I know I am showing my age, but these things were so important to me back in the 80s....

Pinterest - B's Child of the 80s Board.

One of these days I will work out how to copy a Pinterest Board onto a blog post - I have been trying and now my head hurts. Cassette tapes and LPs were much easier to work with I swear!

What things do you wish your mother had kept?




PS - Look what Anna sent through to me today....




Her very own 'Berry Best Friends' set! We are indeed children of the 80s! Thanks Anna - you rock!

Crumbs

When I started this blog, there were some topics I just did not want to touch on.  Firstly, I did not want to comment on children, especially my children, as I really don’t think I should be giving any advice, stories, findings or evidence that may result in me having my children taken from me. I would miss their cute little faces. Secondly, I did not want to write about cleaning. How dull. Cleaning is something that empty nesters or real grown ups talk about. I also wanted avoid to eluding to the lunacy that is intertwined in my thinking regarding this topic.

But, here I am, about to do something I said I never would. I am about to discuss Crumbs. Sigh.

I hate crumbs. Crumbs wreck a perfectly clean floor. They wreck a clean tablecloth. They work their way into drawers, cupboards, corners and cloths. They require more work to get rid of than I have time to give to the task. They blow from tables to floor, they are indiscriminate in their origin and can be made from virtually anything. They are also created by another thing I was not going to discuss on my blog - children.

One of the nick names for my five year old is ‘Captain Crumbulator’. She has an amazing ability to make crumbs out of anything. We have a little joke that she can make crumbs when eating yoghurt. She is a shocker. Can you sense the conflict I live with?

Now, I do love having a clean house. I know that this probably puts me further down the cool thermometer, but that has to be a reality I live with. I like to know that my house is ready for people to drop in any time - not that this happens in this day and age anymore. My mother lives not ten minutes away, that is reason enough to keep my house in some form of order! I have a little mental list in my head of the bare minimum to be done each day, week, fortnight and month but I have to be careful not to get too thingy about this as it kind of stresses everyone out. However, I do love a clean house.

I have been quite remiss in my cleaning for the last couple of months and I have a good reason. I have been pregnant and I have been working part time. This has meant that for the past 6 months I have been either sick, tired, aching, bloated, swollen or generally stressed pretty much the whole time in varying combinations.

Now, lets meld all these pieces together. 

1. I like a clean house
2. I do not like crumbs
3. I have not been cleaning
4. I do not have much time 

Of course you have made the connection; my kitchen drawers have been a disaster. I had put off cleaning out the kitchen drawers for ages, knowing that this is one job that just could not be half done, once I started it, I wouldn’t be able to stop until every drawer had been completely gone through and cleaned.

So, the day came when I could not avoid it any longer - I had run out of excuses, the crumbs were out of control. We had gotten to the point where I thought by putting utensils back in the drawers would make them dirty again.  It didn’t actually take that long to do in the end, and I was able to get rid of things from my drawers that I hadn’t used for ever and my children got some new things for their pretend play stash.

Feeling rather sorry for myself for being so danged boring, I vented on Facebook. My status basically said that,  ‘I would rather be people watching sipping lattes in a trendy cafe, than cleaning crumbs from drawers.‘ I was hoping for a whole heaps of ‘Me too’s but this is not the response I got. I got a whole stream of people commenting how cool it was to have a clean cutlery drawer. Or how cool a clean house is. One of my Facebook friends has since said that there is nothing cooler than a clean house.  So.....  I guess I am cooler than I thought!

There is a cup Friend #458 has at her house that I like to use, it says, ‘A dusted house is the sign of a wasted life’. I think this is hilarious, and I chortle away while sipping tea from it, secretly trying to track how much of my life I have wasted dusting and polishing, cleaning up crumbs and arranging my house. Years I imagine. Drats.