Day 88 {puddle jumping}

Today was a pretty uneventful day. It was miserable outside so we decided to have a movie afternoon while the boys were asleep.

Ava finally agreed to watch Sleeping Beauty. She got it at Christmas but refused to watch it because of the dragon on the cover.



I told her we'd make a bed on the floor...



and that there would be snacks (Ava's favourite - popcorn twists).



We also practiced what she would do when the dragon showed up.



The movie was a hit and we ended up watching it twice. The boys woke up a bit later. This is Ethan with me.



Uncle Jarret came over to help us mount the tv on the wall. Why are we mounting it? Let's recap, shall we? Jarret built us a beautiful tv cabinet and because of the style we picked we can't use child locks on the doors. The boys like to slam each other's fingers in the doors so we pushed a coffee table against it. But now, one of the boys will create a diversion like this:



So the other one can do this:



This is Ethan in both pictures but you get the idea.

Anyway, this is the new solution we are giving a trial run. The drawer pulls are tied together with the lace from a skate and the red thing is a tie strap from a pickup truck. Does this make us rednecks?



We had another discovery today. Ethan has a hell of a throwing arm and pretty good aim.



The sun finally came out at dinner time so we decided to go for a walk. The sky of course clouded over the second we left. The park was a mess so that was shortlived. Instead I saw a huge puddle and told Ava to get out and jump in it.



While she was jumping Jason was telling her that she is going to get pneumonia and I was telling her to jump higher.

So we headed for home



and as we were walking, I noticed there was a full moon out. It was Ava's.



Anyway, I wanted to post a little note on my puddle jumping picture from today. It was a happy accident that I made that I thought would be helpful to somebody. I had changed my metering mode to spot metering earlier in the day for pictures in the house and I forgot to change it back. So when I took the picture of Ava, even though it looked good on my camera screen, it turned out like this:



Cool sky but the whole picture is really underexposed. But because I always shoot in RAW, I was able to salvage it in Photoshop. I was able to lighten it to this:



But because I am picky I still wanted the cool sky from the overexposed picture. (This is where the happy accident came in. If I had shot my camera in the evaluative metering mode I use most of the time, the sky probably would have been blown out. But because I spot metered on a dark subject, the sky ended up dark too.) So I put the lightened image on top of the dark image on a new layer. Then I erased the sky from the top layer to reveal the dark sky underneath. Then I did a bit more editing and voila:



So my tip for the day is always, always, always shoot in RAW if your camera supports it. Edit the exposure of your picture in RAW and then save it as a JPG when you are done. RAW files are double the size but you can lighten them a lot without ruining the picture. If I had shot this in large JPG this amount of lightening would have caused the picture to fall apart and I most likely would have trashed it. Anyway, I hope this helps somebody.

I'm off to watch Twilight with Jason. On a scale of cinematic brilliance I give it a D-. I'd give it an F but it's based on the books and they were amazing. I've told Jason to set his expectations very, very low.

Thanks for looking!