No bottles, no sippy cups!

Little man (herein known as LM) is exclusively breastfed.  For the first couple of months I had to supplement his feedings with formula, so he was used to taking a bottle, and never had any problems with them.  I was able to get him off of the formula completely by the time he was about 7 weeks old, but he still had no problems taking a bottle on occasion.

In less than 2 days I'm supposed to go spend the morning and a large part of the afternoon in the hospital having a colonoscopy done.  I haven't had one done in 13 years, so I'm way overdue.  He's supposed to stay with my Mom for the day, but I've just discovered that he will NOT take a bottle anymore.  It's my own fault, breastfeeding became so easy that I didn't keep up with giving him an occasional bottle - formula is expensive and bottles are a pain in the butt to clean, breastfeeding means that his food is always the perfect temperature, requires no extra cleaning/care and is free.  Unfortunately, it also means that I can't be away from him longer than a couple of hours, since my breasts are not detachable.  This is going to be a huge problem - there's no way I can spend 8+ hours in the hospital if he's not going to eat the entire time I'm away.

I've currently tried 3 different brands of bottles and 2 different sippy cups, no dice so far.  He's just not having it.  This is what my kitchen counter looked like today after multiple attempts.

I'm more than a little worried about how Wednesday is going to go.  People have been telling me that he won't let himself starve, but I don't know. He's pretty stubborn.  I guess all I can do is wait and see.

Oops!

What a bonehead move.  I was playing around with my tripod and remote the other day, so I turned off the Auto Power Off fuction.  Well, I guess I forgot to turn it back on again, so this morning my camera battery was dead.  Luckily I do have a second battery, and the dead one is now charging, but I guess I really need to make a note to myself not to do that!

Today apparently is yardwork day.  We're on a watering ban at the moment because of the flood scare we had here in town - the water levels rose high enough that the water treatment plant is working overtime and we're supposed to be cutting down on our water consumption, so no uneccessary water use.  That being said, I just planted 4 hanging baskets and a rose bush yesterday, and I'm not about to let them die, so I did stealth watering this morning - not the easiest thing in the world when you back out onto a walking path and a main street.  Hubby was up bright and early this morning to dispose of a tree that we cut down last weekend, he now has the lawn mowed and is getting ready to reseed after having it aerated the other week.  I really need to weed, but I hate weeding, so I'm procrastinating on that.  Instead, I grabbed Little man, a blanket and a bunch of toys, and took him outside to the front yard to play in the shade while I helped dispose of 3 years worth of leaves and junk hiding under the hedges.  And of course I brought my camera outside with me, just in case there was a good photo op.  I really need to get some practice shooting outdoors - I'm having real trouble with blowing whites, even more so than indoors, and I thought I was bad with that indoors!

Anway, here are a few from today.

Starting Out

I've always thought about starting a blog, but really I have a hard time believing that other people could actually find me interesting enough to want to read about me on even a semi-regular basis! But since I picked my camera back up again and set myself the goal of learning how to use it inside, outside, upside-down and sideways, I've realized that I probably need a place to start putting all my pictures - you can only spam your Facebook friends so long before they get sick and tired of seeing yet another picture of your (albeit incredibly adorable) baby pop up on their feed. So here at least, I'm making it optional. :)

My wonderful husband was recently wonderful enough to buy me a new lens for my camera - a 50mm f1.8 and I'm head over heels in love with it. I love the bokeh I can get from this lens, but it's a real bitch figuring out how to nail the focus with it. So that's going to be a big goal of mine, trying to acheive perfect focus on a regular basis.

Here's a picture I took earlier this evening, of my new hanging baskets. This is the first year I haven't had plain ugly pastic white baskets, so I'm actually quite proud of these! I had my lens wide open on this shot to try to get good bokeh, and I'm not 100% sure that I acheived perfect focus here, but I like the effect.