he left for FIVE days!

I've had such a tragic week.

The spacebar on my keyboard stopped working like normal, making it really hard to type at any decent speed (and apparently if I can't type over 100 wpm, it's not worth the effort).  That means I haven't been able to email much or update our blog.  I know.  It's awful.  I do have a keyboard for the iPad  too, but the batteries died, and all the rechargable batteries I found had died...like all-the-way-dead-toss-in-the-garbage dead.  (Seriously, how do these things happen?  How is it that nowadays someone with two keyboards could end up with neither one working?!).

And...I'm pretty sure my 50mm f/1.8 lens, and possibly my camera, are having some front and/or back focusing problems.  Maybe not, but I wanted to have them checked out since they're still under warranty, and this checkup should be free (see photo HERE.  I had several photos like this where the focus was inches in front of where I placed it (which I put it on his right eye, not the wall, like it shows)).  They just need to calibrate it correctly and then send it back.

So, what I'm saying is I DON'T HAVE MY CAMERA!  I feel like I'm missing a leg or something.  Yes, that's exactly it.  I now know exactly what it feels like to be a one legged person.  (No offense to any one-legged readers here.  I hope you know I'm being sarcastic...).  But, for real, it feels really strange to see my kids doing something funny/dangerous/bizarre, to start running for the camera, only to realize I DON'T HAVE MY CAMERA!  Then I usually fall to my knees crying for five minutes, then eventually laying in the fetal position for a while.  How am I supposed to go back to a little point and shoot camera?  Maybe I'll just sleep for a while, until my camera comes back.

I'd like to thank my mother for teaching me such awesome coping skills.

Then, to add to an already tragic week, Tyler had to leave for five days for a conference for work.  FIVE DAYS.  One day per child we have, apparently.  But, it's okay.  I know single moms out there who survive. I know women who have husband's that leave for long periods of time regularly, and they survive too.  I was going to survive too, by golly.

So, to keep it short and sweet, it went something like this:

-  We take Tyler to the airport and say our goodbyes.
-  He closes the van door and the children turn into demon-possessed crazy psychos.
-  For the next three days, the kids are overly emotional, whiny, fighting, disobedient, screaming, unhappy, etc...until I finally got them to act a little more like themselves.  But the whole time (the remaining days beyond that) they were so disobedient.  It was crazy.  I could go into more detail, but there is no reason.

Actually I will go into a little more detail:
We had a dr appointment on Monday.  We went, and the kids did great.  It was awesome.  It was SO awesome, and I thought, "We should ruin this awesomeness and go to the nature park and see the ducks!"  So that's what we did.  Only, I didn't realize I was going somewhere that would ruin the awesome.

It went about like this:

We arrive at the park.  Everyone is so excited.  They jump out and we start on our walk with joyfulness and an abundance of energy.  They're all smiles and giggles.

By the end of our journey, no one was excited.  No one was jumping.  There was no joyfulness.  There was no energy.  Violet was even crawling until I sat her on Rhys in the stroller.  It was similar to pioneers crossing the plains.  Only, my kids would have made loser pioneers.  I mean, they couldn't even make it around a duck pond without crawling by the end.  How would they walk across the United States?

I'll skip all the other details because my kids were behaving horrible, and I really don't want to speak negatively of them - just trust me that it was a way unexpected outcome for the walk.  haha.  Now it's funny. Then, not so much.  Oh, and I got some geese poop on my hand with no way to wipe it off!

When we got back in the van, the kids were like "That was the worst idea ever!  We should never do that again!"

And, I was like, "I completely agree!  Whose idea was that anyway?!"

With Tyler gone, I was not expecting such awful days.  I could not wait to get them in bed at night so I could have a moment of peace.  Normally, I don't feel that way about them.

Speaking of getting them to bed at night, that was quite a challenge.  Tyler and I typically split off and he takes TS and Violet, while I take Ella.  He usually goes in there, lays by them for a few minutes and they talk about whatever they want.  Then he'll sit in there (on his iPad) until they fall asleep.  Meanwhile, I take Ella and nurse/rock her to sleep.

So, having three kids, who are used to going to sleep certain ways, suddenly not have daddy there to help do his part, was a bit challenging.  For the first two nights, we ended up having Tyler FaceTime with them, and it worked.  hehe.  It was so sweet to see!  I'd sit the iPad on the shelf where they could see him, and they'd go to sleep.  (He couldn't do it the other two nights because he had to go to dinners for work, but I managed to make it work.)

Most of you won't care about this next little part, but I am going to write it anyway (if you don't want to read it, feel free to skip to the photos below these ones).

Normally I can't use my shutter speed very slow.  I keep it around 320 since I have children who won't hold still, and I can't take it lower or else it blurs.  The downside to that is that I have to up my ISO instead, which can get a little grainy at times.

But with the photo above, I was able to put the camera on a tripod and set the shutter speed to super slow - 0.3 sec.  It clicks, pause, then clicks, and the dark room suddenly becomes well lit so that you can see the kids laying there sleeping.  My ISO was only 2000, though I should have lowered it more so that I could have made my SS even sloooooower.

This is about how dark the room actually was:

Letting the shutter speed go slower/stay open longer, allowed it to soak up more light, which is why the photo below (the same one as up above) is so much brighter:

I'm not sure how well you can see this without clicking on the photos to see them larger, but the photo below was at ISO 6400 and the shutter speed was still slow but not nearly as slow as the one above (it was 1/25 sec).  But if you look at this photo below and the photo above, the photo below is WAY grainier.

Pretty much I'm rambling for no reason except to say it was SO FUN to have subjects that DIDN'T MOVE!!  And, I could slow the shutter speed down enough to get the lighting nice.  If you notice in the photo directly above, the iPad was very bright.  It was even brighter, originally, in the photo above this photo.  So, I took two shots of the same photo and exposed them differently, then I combined them and replaced the iPad image so you could see Tyler better.

See.  I told you it wasn't going to be very interesting, but since I don't have my camera, I can at least talk about it.

Here's some random photos that I took before MY CAMERA WAS MAILED AWAY! *sob*

The girls put makeup on Ella...

 Rhys posed like this for 4-5 pictures.  hehe.

This is Tyler when he was a little boy.  I don't know how obvious it is from Rhys' photo above, but I think they look a lot alike, especially her eyebrows and the position of her eyes.  I see Violet in there too!

Though I think her actual eye shape is more like mine...

Here she is being Dora by wearing her Lighting McQueen backpack that TS gave her.

I thought this was cute.  It's not quite right and it's a little too close (I really want a 28mm lens), but I still liked it.

Oh, and Tyler and I celebrated our 11th anniversary while he was gone.  I still need to write a blog entry about that.  But for now, I'm going to go fall asleep.

I'm so glad Tyler is back home!  Life runs so much more easily when he's here.