14 months + Father's Day + walking + standing

We just celebrated little John turning 14 months old and he is officially able to stand on his own without needing something to pull up on. He is also VERY into walking and hates being carried for too long because he wants to get down and explore on his own. I took him to a park to try to take some pictures for Father's Day and while my original idea didn't quite work out (since I forgot the necessary props in the car that daddy had, doh!), we still had fun trying to get some shots. Here's just one shot from that day.

Happy Father's Day to my husband, who is the best dad to little John. =)

Off the wagon...

So it must be completely obvious to everyone by now, I've fallen off the 365 Project wagon with a loud resounding thud. I knew that it was going to be a difficult and ambitious project when I started. And part of me knew that I wouldn't be able to keep up. The good news is that it's also a project that can be started whenever YOU like, which means that I hope to begin all over again one of these days.

Here's a recent shot that I took while staying over at my parents' house. I LOVE that they have a backyard and I LOVE that these gorgeous geckos like to hang out in my dad's garden.

Friday night and Saturday morning

This is my beloved Sparky. He's in pretty good condition, considering he's nearly 30 years old... Growing up as an only child, Sparky was my best friend. He went everywhere with me. Washington, California, Las Vegas, New York, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Canada. He's even lived abroad in Japan, TWICE.


Taken on Feb 18th, this is what happens when daddy decides to lick mommy's gym card and try sticking it to the baby's forehead. Little John, we're sorry that this is how we decided to celebrate your 10 month birthday. =P We love you!

Two more...

Meet Hammy, or Bruno, as our neighbor calls him. He answers to pretty much any name as long as it means he gets food and belly rubs. He's an extremely friendly stray cat who found his way to our apartment complex almost two years ago. The very first night we befriended him, we fed him some pieces of ham so that's how he got stuck with the name Hammy. Our neighbors just bought a house so it looks like Hammy may be going off to live with them there. It makes me a little sad but I'm glad he'll have a good home and I'm also glad I got to snap this picture of him before he leaves.


Little John practicing his standing in his exersaucer. Sassy little guy, isn't he?

Still trying to catch up...

This is actually today's picture, 2.17.2011. Little John was enjoying a snack of steamed sweet potatoes this afternoon and was in a smiley mood. That little white speck on his chin, probably a piece of runaway sweet potato. =P


What's better than chocolate? Godiva chocolates. What's better than Godiva chocolates? Godiva Bakery Dessert Truffle chocolates. Mmmmmmmm.


Ritz crackers, the current bad guy who is sabotaging my efforts to not snack as much. Why is it impossible to eat just one of these? Thank goodness these come in smaller packs because I've been known to eat an entire regular sized roll in one sitting, but still, the smaller snack pack is unfortunately pretty darn bad for you.

Another photo blitz...

I spent another long weekend at my parents' house while John got more cleaning done at the apartment. One thing I love about their place is that I actually get to take pictures outside. Here's a shot from the backyard. The bright green blob is a leaf that was lit up in the most beautiful way by the sunlight. =)


One of the caterpillars finally turned into a butterfly! This one was waiting for its wings to completely dry before flying off. Butterflies are so beautiful!


Time, which is something that I always seem to not have enough of....until recently! John's been taking the baby with him on his weekly walk around Kapiolani Park so I get to stay home and enjoy just being by myself. I hope it doesn't sound awful to say, but being able to just be alone is sooooo refreshing and exactly what I need to recharge. The first time I was home alone, I did a ton of house stuff but I think I need to learn how to just sit back and do nothing.


Our cheapo dresser from Walmart that we had to buy when we found out that we desperately needed more storage space for baby stuff. This dresser has four drawers. I have the top drawer for my clothes. Little John has the other three for his stuff!

One of the best pieces of mail I've ever received. This contained a letter from the Japanese government saying that my pension refund had been transferred to my bank account. Cha-ching!! This is how I managed to finance my camera upgrade. =)

Ruffles and dots. Yay!


Little John at the park, surprising me with his willingness to sit and play in the grass. The first few times I tried standing him up in the grass, he surprised me with his mastery of the one-legged stand to try to avoid the grass. What a difference a month makes. Here he is, sitting in the grass like they've been best friends forever.


The view from our booth at the Ukulele Picnic at Kakaako Park. The craft fairs we usually do don't have awesome views like this. Blue blue sky. Although we got sunburned, it was a pretty fun day!


For Valentine's Day. =)

35/365: My God, I am soooooo behind.

But here is our little man, playing on his new 'toy' without any work or deadlines to worry about...

I've been taking pictures but just haven't had any computer time lately! Aaaaargh!

22/365: I'm married to Zoolander

Not quite Blue Steel, but just as intense. =)

23/365: It's here! It's here!

Woohoo, the wooden blocks and teething toys that I ordered from Little Sapling Toys finally arrived! (If you missed my post about their awesome work, click here to read it.)If wooden blocks could ever be considered gorgeous, these definitely are. Each block is unique with its own grain patterns and they feel so nice and solid, unlike the cheapo ones that are made in China. We love these blocks!

24/365: Attack of the finger

Here's little J's pointer finger, or what we like to call his 'probe-y finger' because it's always the finger that comes out to explore. This was at meal time last night when his sneaky little finger came out to snatch a Cheerio to stuff into his mouth.

And yes, I am woefully aware that I have fallen behind on my Project 365 posts. =P You'll have to excuse the randomness of my catch up posts and ignore the fact that they're totally not in proper chronological order.

Frackin' Photoshop!!

It's broken and my computer genius husband who can probably fix it in two seconds is at a craft fair today. So much for catching up on Project 365 while the baby is sleeping. Damn you, Photoshop, damn you.

19/365: Indian food, in a jar

This is quite possibly the yummiest thing to come out of a jar, ever. I bought this a few weeks ago on one of my daily walking/shopping trips with Little John at the local vegetarian grocery store, Down to Earth. The pretty label caught my eye AND it was on sale! Score! And the directions written on the jar? Saute protein of choice, add sauce, and cover and simmer for ten minutes. Ten minutes! During those ten minutes, you can be heating up your oven to 400°F and right before getting ready to serve the curry, pop in a few pieces of frozen naan to warm up.

365 Blitz!

We are finally back after spending the weekend at my parents' house while John spent most of his weekend cleaning our apartment and making room in our spare bedroom/workroom/storage room for Little John's crib. The cleaning/reorganizing still isn't 100% complete but John did manage to get a ton of stuff done. Thank you, wonderful husband, I love you!

15/365: Creepy Crawlies! My parents have a plant in their front yard that has TONS of these monarch butterfly caterpillars. When I went to visit about a week and a half ago, I counted five but when I went over again on Saturday, there were so many that I couldn't even count them. Yes, there were seriously that many. I wonder how many there will be when I go over again this week!

16/365: Grandma did it, I swear. Why would I put a pink hair curler in my son's hair? =P

17/365: Octopus balls... Japanese octopus balls, takoyaki, were on the menu for lunch on Sunday. =) The secret to yummy takoyaki is to use big chunks of octopus and to not overcook them. This was just my second time making takoyaki but it was pretty easy, especially with the help of a special electric takoyaki pan. =)

18/365: Closed to the public... Except for us, since we got to help out with something at Hanauma Bay this morning. =) In addition to mongoose and feral cats, this guy was also enjoying the peace and quiet. It was overcast, which made for perfect beach weather for us, the people who were on Little John got to dip his feet into the water and unlike the last time he was at Hanauma Bay, there was no screaming or crying involved. Hooray!

I'm still alive and so is Project 365

I've been spending the weekend at my parents' house, which means no program to process my RAW image files so no pictures until either late Monday night or Tuesday afternoon. =)

14/365: Wheeeeeee!

(Disclaimer: So this is technically three photos but hey, only one of them is in focus so I say it still fits the 'one photo a day' guideline for Project 365. =P)

Who needs all the fancy schmancy rides at Disneyland when you get to wooosh around on Daddy's shoulders and have just as much fun. No lines, no heatstroke or sunburn from waiting in lines, no having to stand next to dodgy people who would mistake you for a baby of the opposite sex while waiting in line, and best of all, no crazy admission for all of this excitement. =) Daddy is the best!

In desperate need of a haircut...

I should be ashamed of how long it's been since my last haircut. I went two years without a haircut because I was living in Japan and was afraid the stylist would give me a Japanese mullet. Too many of my students were sporting these looks and I knew that I'd somehow end up with one too. Oh, you don't know what a Japanese mullet is? Here you go:


*shudder* Full on top and pathetically stringy and spider leggy on the bottom. Japan may be the only country where you can find more females with mullets than males... So I waited until I moved back to Hawaii and finally cut my hair after our November 2007 wedding.

Well, I got my hair cut once more after that but it was close to a year later. That puts my last haircut at around November 2008. It's now January 2011. Yes, it's been that long since my last haircut.

I'm thinking about something like this:

It's too bad a hairstyle can't also transform your entire body. =P

13/365: My little puppy dog

Even before I was a mom and even before I was married, I knew that when I had a kid of my own, hats with ears would HAVE to a part of his/her wardrobe. Well, I have my own kid now and believe it or not, I haven't bought any hats with ears for him yet. This is all daddy's doing. On his last trip to Japan, he picked up two hats for little John. This puppy one is still a bit big on him, even with his large noggin, but I think he still looks pretty darn adorable.

Dare I take him out in public like this?

12/365: My new lenses...

No, not camera lenses, unfortunately. This is my new pair of glasses, or what I like to call my 'Coke bottle glasses v.2.0.' My eyesight is so bad that my eye doctor once told me, 'No, you don't qualify as legally blind but yeah, you pretty much are blind.' It's a little hard to tell with these frames how thick the lenses are but trust me, they're thick. The sad thing is, I think they're probably thicker than Coke bottle bottoms. =(

With my extreme near-sightedness and my husband's extreme far-sightedness, our hope is that our boy will be spared from a sad fate that involves his own pair of Coke bottle glasses. Fingers are crossed!

11/365: Still stuck on Christmas

I guess I must be missing Christmas more than I realized because here's another related picture. Christmas sprinkles. Looks yummy, right? Well, then I probably shouldn't tell you that these sprinkles are at least two years old. We go to a Christmas party every year and every year I tell myself that it'd be nice to bake some cupcakes to bring but we ALWAYS end up having a craft fair to work during the day so I never get around to baking those darn cupcakes. Two years ago, I bought these sprinkles and they've sat in our cupboard since then, totally sad, neglected, and unused. They finally came out to play today but unfortunately not on any cupcakes.

This year will be the year of Christmas cupcakes, I swear. With new sprinkles, of course!

For a limited time only...

You can get your coffee fix AND One Breath Photo fix in one place. The pieces we never get to bring out to most of our craft fairs are up on display at Morning Brew in Kailua. Oh, and if you're not a coffee fan, they've got some pretty awesome Italian cream sodas, baked goods, and a pretty impressive food menu for a coffee place. Go get your fix, now!

10/365: An oldie, but a goodie.

I loved this book when I was a kid and so did my husband. On a trip to the bookstore over the weekend, we bought this for little John. =) One more book to add to his collection!

On a sidenote, today marks day 10 of Project 365. Woohoo, we are now in double digits! I should go have some chocolate to celebrate!

Has motherhood turned me completely batty?

I was recently browsing on Etsy in search of some wooden blocks for our little boy when I came across a seller named Little Sapling Toys and their listing for this:

$23 for a wooden toy. $30 if I want it personalized. Yes, thirty freakin' dollars. And I'm seriously considering it. Have I gone crazy? Would it be worth $30? I'm telling myself yes. It's cute. And it's awesome. Little John would have his own little dslr until he grows into one of ours. AND it's handcrafted in the US. And it's organic and eco-friendly. And if I bought it, a donation would be made to plant a tree through Trees for the Future. See, how can I NOT buy it??

Or maybe I should stick with something more like this until little John gets a little older?

A dslr teething toy! I think this would be more age appropriate and would make a much better teething toy for little John than the iPhone he's currently using.

What to do, what to do? Maybe I should just get both....plus the wooden blocks I was originally planning to get. =)

9/365: Kewpie, holiday style

So Christmas has already come and gone but since it's still technically winter, here's a photo to celebrate the season. I bought this Kewpie figurine when I was living in Japan. I became mildly obsessed with Kewpie after hearing a jingle for a food product, tarako (fish egg) spaghetti. A little quirky, a lot strange, and a teeny bit disturbing, Tarako Kewpie is also unexplainably charismatic and likeable. He's got a bit of a cult following and is probably one of the most awesome characters to come of out Japan.




Oops, perhaps I should have cautioned you that the song may be stuck in your head for the next few days....

8/365: Working on a Saturday afternoon

This is what glueing 500+ little glass marbles to magnets begins to look like after marble #368.

7/365: iPhones make great baby toys

I love my iPhone and so does little John. He will grab for it if he sees it within reach on the bed and will bring it up to his face so that he can gnaw on it. How is it that the spots that he always ends up gnawing and drooling on are the exact spots where the little outlets for the cables are supposed to plug in?

6/365: Thank God for puffs

This is what helped us survive our trip back home to Hawaii across the continental United States AND the Pacific Ocean with an 8 month old. There was a lot of turbulence on our flights so standing up and walking around with the baby was not an option. Rice puffs saved our lives and the sanity of all of our fellow passengers on our flights.

5/365: Teefs!

The reason why we were getting sleep in only hour increments while on vacation...

Guess who made it into a magazine?

1.4.2011 - "Little John's Magazine Debut!" Okay, so it's really a teeny tiny picture of him but if you look through the current issue of Hawaii Skin Diver magazine, you'll see him. =) And if you look extra hard, you'll find another tiny photo of him somewhere else in the magazine!

Project 365? Ready, set, go!

I've been thinking and talking about doing a 365 project for the looooongest time. What is it? It's a commitment to take and post/blog a picture every single day for an entire year. It's a ridiculously crazy time to start now since we JUST got back from a two week vacation to Florida and South Carolina and have tons of One Breath Photo work to catch up on. We also have an almost 9-month old little boy who is starting to show signs of being independently mobile... But hey, life wouldn't be fun without a bit of craziness, now would it? So, here I go! Project 365 has officially begun!

Since we were traveling, I wasn't able to post my 1.1 and 1.2 pictures so here I am playing catchup already on day 4. Oh, we're off to a lovely start, aren't we?

1.1.2011 - "Acorns" Did you know that those acorn tops fall off pretty easily? Well, I had no clue until I picked one up, wanting to use it for my picture. I think it was the first time I actually touched an acorn. We don't have them in Hawaii and the only time I get to see them is when we go back to South Carolina for the winter holiday. =)

1.2.2011 - "First Snowfall" Okay, so this picture wasn't technically taken on the 2nd but we were traveling for most of the day so I'm allowed to cheat and post a picture from another day. Here's our little boy, fascinated and enjoying his first snowfall ever.

1.3.2011 - "Swoon-worthy" We came home to an abundance of mail and this little treasure was in it. A letterpressed holiday greeting card from a fabulous designer friend, Kristen of Cry Baby Ink. =) I know I'm being a tease by only showing a tiny portion of the ornament-shaped card, but trust me, it was fabulous!