Categories
Mommy Diaries

I Hope the Sunsets Never Get Old

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“Wow!”

I sit up quickly from my relaxed position on the couch. “What is it? Is everything okay?” I say.

“Check out that sunset!” Sam exclaims from across the table. “Its beautiful!”

I watch in amazement as he snatches up his phone, grabs his shoes and is out the door in 5 seconds flat. He’s gone for a few minutes and then comes breathless back in the door. I can tell he had been running pretty hard.

“Did you get it?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” he says as he shows me the sunset over the lake captured brilliantly with his camera phone. “Oh yes.”

How often do you notice the sunset? Everyday? We have spent lots of our life never seeing the sunset. Living in the Airstream gives us a window in our kitchen that faces West and we can watch as the sky lights up orange, red, yellow and then fades to black.

We have been full-time on the road for nearly 2 months now. 2 months of ever-changing scenery, glorious vistas, and stunning sunsets. I hope they never get old. I hope that we can continue to cherish each day. Each new place, each lake, forest trail, and museum will continue to force us out of the mundane routine. That nothing ever becomes “normal”.

This lifestyle is forcing us to live in the moment, and we love it.

Categories
This Week on Instagram

This Week on Instagram: January 4-10, 2014

Cara and Andrew fought over some game they were playing in the car. This resulted in both of them getting scolded by me. Silence for a few moments while both of them pouted.

We then overheard this conversation:

Cara (trying to start up again): And my guy was knocking on the door….

Andrew (super grumpy): No Cara. I don’t want to play anymore.

Cara (all quiet and innocent): Is it because of your attitude?

Sam and I had to suppress a chuckle in the front seat. Where does she learn these things?

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This week has been cold! Our only conselation is that it has been cold EVERYWHERE so we hunkered down and had game & movie nights, touched a baby alligator, visited the Houston Temple, and bundled up for cold walks at Brazos Bend State Park in Texas. We also met up with some college friends for Orange Leaf frozen yogurt. Yum!!

Categories
Mommy Diaries

Why I Am Not a Pinterest Worthy Mom

Why I Am Not a Pinterest Worthy Mom

There are a lot of things I am not.

I’m not super skinny.
I’m not an amazing cook (I’m just decent).
I’m not a world famous photographer (not sure I could even deal with the attention).
I’m not a Pinterest-worthy mom.
And I really do hate glitter.

I struggle with this. In a world where there are amazing mommy bloggers that come up with cute crafts seemingly out of nowhere, take amazingly good photos of them, write a blog post and get a million pins on Pinterest, I feel a little out of place. They have so much ENERGY. How do they do that?

I hate it when my kids mix the Play-Doh colors, or when their water coloring activity ends up as puke brown smears across the paper. I just want to get in there and do it for them! It has to be PERFECT. I get stressed, kind of cranky and mostly just have to leave the room. And then I remind myself that they are just kids. They are little and still learning. Maybe eventually they’ll draw something I can recognize, but right now when my 3 year old looks at me with those shining hopefully eyes and hold up a paper of random circles declaring it to be her “best work” how can I not praise her efforts?

I loved when I posted on Facebook back in December about hating glitter and how it was everywhere in the Airstream after we put our names on our .99 Christmas stockings, and so many of my friends jumped in with “me too!” and “I hate doing crafts with my kids, I get so stressed out!” It made me feel a little bit less alone in this world where everything seems to be measured on the Pinterest Scale.

HOWEVER. I do have my moments. As time passes (and honestly, as my kids get older), there are certain crafts I can do with my kids that DON’T stress me out. Well, at least not to the level that I banish all the paint from the premises. We pulled off some of the crafts over Thanksgiving – and my kids looked absolutely adorable in their Native American headbands and vests. And the other is actually playing with modeling clay. Probably because I actually enjoy it, there’s an instruction manual, and my kids love it when I help them and their animals end up looking exactly like they do in the book.

Maybe there is hope for me yet. Until then, however, we’ll keep the crafts to a minimum and the adventuring to the max.

Thanksgiving Crafts with Kids

 

Categories
Photo Gear Photography

BlogStomp & PicMonkey – Two Amazing Tools for Your Photos

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BlogStomp: A Photographer’s Best Blogging Friend

As a photographer, blogging your photos used to be ridiculously painful. So many companies sold “blogboards” or templates with actions you could use in Photoshop to automatically insert photos into cool grids and storyboards. While the photos looked great, it still took FOREVER to do. Then along came BlogStomp and the entire photography blogging world turned upside down. I’m telling you. Worth. Every. Penny. And then some. You drag and drop photos into the desktop program (yes, you have to install it). After selecting a group of photos, BlogStomp will automatically generate storyboards based on the number of photos and their orientation (vertical or horizontal). You then hit “stomp” and voila! Ready to go. Okay, okay, you have to configure some settings first, but once that is done everything is pretty streamlined. You can even auto add a watermark.

Do me a favor and buy through THIS link. It’ll help pay our campground fees.
BlogStomp Tutorial: http://blogstomponline.com/support/blogstomp-tutorial/

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PicMonkey: A Blogger’s Best Pinterest Friend

I’ve cruised Pinterest and seen the super cute title overlays that those bloggers always manage to put on their main photos. When we first started blogging, that was my biggest question. How do they do that? I pulled a few photos into Photoshop, played around with text and shape layers and immediately thought that this was WAY too much work. Ridiculous. No one has time for that. While I’m sure there are more automated ways to handle title overlays (actions for one) I didn’t want to go that route. I knew from my experience as a blogging photographer that there had to be the “thing” that everyone used. There had to be. A quick Google search came up with a pretty awesome tutorial for an online photo editing program called PicMonkey. Super genius! It has quite a few tools, but I use it mainly for adding text & the reduced opacity shapes you’ll see on my photos. Is it the “thing”? You tell me. Its definitely turned into my #2 (BlogStomp will always be #1) getting-photos-Pinterest-worthy-and-ready-for-the-blogging-world tool.

As to not reinvent a perfectly good tutorial (once again, no time for that) I’ll just link to hers. She put all the effort into it, so she might as well get the credit, right? Check it out HERE.

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So there you go. 2 great tools for photo editing and displaying online in blogs. You don’t have to be a professional to use these either! Dress up your photos for Facebook or create a collage of your vacation photos for your personal blog. Come back and leave a link so I can see what you do with them!

Categories
Finances & Money

How Much Does it Cost to Live in an Airstream? December Edition

How Much Does it Cost to Live in an Airstream Dec 2013Sam & I talk often about the costs of living on the road full time. How much money is it going to take? Can we really make this work? Honestly, we are not sure yet. We have a few numbers in mind from our own experience as well as others’, but because we are so new at this we don’t have much data yet.

As an experiment, we thought we’d do a monthly summary of our main expenses over the last 30 days or so. We felt like this would give our readers a general overview of what it takes financially, as well as give us a running comparison of numbers. So, here we go:

December 1st: Tampa, FL
December 31st: South Houston, TX
Total miles driven: 2,247
Total miles towing the Airstream: 1,228
Average Towing Miles per Week: 277

Camping Fees (State parks, RV campgrounds): $842.45 ($31.20/night average)
# of Nights Courtesy Parked with a friend/free parking: 4
Gas: $626.88
Propane: $83.62
Groceries: $776.32
Laundry: $29.75
Dining Out: $180.58 (ouch! I didn’t think we ate out THAT much. It must’ve been the beignets in New Orleans!)

Obviously there are more expenses (clothing, entertainment, decorative upgrades, etc.) but these are the main ones. The thing is, what it costs to live on the road is highly subjective. Just as living in a house can be. How nice of an RV Park or Campground do you want (camping fees)? How far are you traveling every week (gas)? How many people in your family (groceries)? How cold is it outside (propane costs)? What do you like to do for fun (entertainment)? These costs completely vary from family to family just as they would in a brick house.

There are definitely plans in the works to cut down on both camping fees and gas (just bought new batteries for the Airstream, we’d love some solar panels, traveling SLOWER). Getting to milder climates will also save on propane, and dang. We could definitely eat out less. That number still surprises me. Was it the seafood? The ice cream?

If you’d like another opinion on costs of traveling full-time, our instagram friend Kyle has a great article that breaks down various costs on his blog Where Is Kyle Now? Go check it out and let us know what you think!