Hello loves! I am excited to offer you a chance to win some great ad space on 6 different blogs, including VIP ad space on my own. Plus a few other goodies. I am happy to be a part of this giveaway and hope you take the time to enter! Check out all the sponsors below and what they are giving away.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Red, White and Blue Giveaway Hop
What better way to celebrate the Land of the Free than Free Giveaways!?
Welcome to the Red, White, and Blue Event hosted by the Blogging Mamas Network. We're celebrating Independence Day with a bang - an Event full of giveaways! Each giveaway is either patriotic, made in the USA, OR color themed! So, be sure to hop around and see the fun, unique prizes at every blog!
I am super excited to be a part of this fun giveaway hop. I am giving away an amazing red, white and blue bracelet set, compliments of my Etsy shop, Hole In Her Stocking Designs. This patriotic set will be perfect all summer long and you can wear it with American pride! Not only that but you will get a $20 shop credit to this trendy jewelry shop!
Enter Below!
Now that you've entered to win on my blog, be sure to hop around to all the other bloggers offering fun, patriotic giveaways. If you're a cloth diapering fan, you'll want to check out the color themed giveaway from Thirsties - an USA cloth diaper company!
Enter the Grand Prize Here!
According to Jenny, So Easy Being Green, the Blogging Mamas Network, and the Red, White, and Blue participating bloggers are not responsible for sponsors who do not fulfill prize obligations.Sunday, June 30, 2013
Must Have Tips For Taking Great Selfies
Hello everyone! Seeing selfies flood social media and being guilty of snapping a few myself I sometimes wonder if everyone is as crazy as me with doing things a certain way to have them come out just right. So I decided to reach out to some fellow bloggers to see what their tips are for getting that perfect selfie.
Marquis from Simply Clarke had this to say: " I make different faces and tilt my head in different ways to get the optimal results from all angles. By the end, I normally have about 10 different selfies to chose from. What can I say, I like practicing my modeling skills."
Michelle from The Nurse Mommy Blog had this important piece of advice, I hope everyone adheres to: " My biggest tip for selfies, if you're going to take one in the bathroom, clean the countertop and PLEASE close the TOILET! We don't want to see it!"
Kassie from Going Green With the Grizls had a great tip: "One tip I picked up on when I was younger is that if you aren't comfortable in a photo, it will show all over your face. Instead of trying to hold the perfect smile, or angle or whatever other people were doing to look "pretty", I just be myself and usually when I'm not concerned with how I look, I get some of the best photos. =)"
Dianna from Savings In Seconds had these two tips "My tip is to always go chin-up. No one needs to see that double (triple) chin of mine, self-portrait or not!" and "the crop feature is your friend." She even used her second tip and cropped her head out.
Alyca from A Table For Five said this: "My tip is to use the front camera on your cell phone so that you and your baby can see yourselves and then smile like a maniac in an effort to get the baby to smile too. See my daughter in the background? She's got it down."
Alyca also had advice for solo selfies: "As for taking a picture of myself solo, I only do that on the rare occasion that I have found the time to shower and fix my hair. I suggest making sure your huge pile of laundry is not in the background. I {unfortunately} have posted pictures to Facebook before realizing that my baby is photo bombing me wearing no diaper!"
My tip for taking selfies indoors is to be facing a window. Make sure you pull up the blinds or pull back the curtains. Looking into the light can make your eyes look really cool and vibrant. I try to always do this to give myself, what I call, "vampire eyes."
I hope you enjoyed reading through our pieces of advice. I would love to hear your tips and rituals for taking selfies. Please share!
Friday, June 28, 2013
Being Your Own Boss Is Not All Rainbows and Butterflies
Does being self employed have it's perks? You bet but it's not as easy as some may think. And those who are self employed and actually make money, actually work. We don't just sit around and watch TV all day, although that's what many seem to think. Most of the time when I say I am self-employed, a freelancer or my own boss, I get a look from people like "oh so you don't have a job" or I get an enthusiastic response of "you're so lucky!" Am I lucky? Heck yes! But being self employed has it's own obstacles and difficulties.
You need to be disciplined, I mean really disciplined. You have to get work done with all the distractions in your home. Whether it be doing the dishes that piled up or the fact that the awesome book you just bought is sitting on the coffee table. And one of the biggest distractions nowadays is social media. Since a lot of my work is on the computer it is hard not to navigate to Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest to take a quick break which could possibly turn into hours of personal enjoyment. This is a hard one for me because a lot of what I have to do is social media marketing so I need to make sure to stick to specific tasks when heading to those sites. And there's always the temptation to go shopping, go to the beach, go to a friend's, etc. and there is nobody telling you not to. You must keep your eye on the prize!
You do it all, at least until you are established enough to hire employees or an assistant. When your computer or printer isn't working or a particular computer program or website isn't working as it should there is no IT department to call to fix your headache. You need to figure it out yourself or spend hours on the phone with different customer service centers. Not fun and you need to make up for the hours you spent dealing with this technological problem. When there's a complaint you cannot just pass it along to your boss. You need to deal with the client and think of a solution that keeps both parties, especially the client, happy. Thankfully, this happens very rarely for me so I don't lose that much time doing this but it's a headache when it does happen. One thing you will learn when in business for yourself or not even being in business for yourself, as good as your service or product is there is always a handful of people that will have something to complain about. The self employed wear many hats and need to be good at all positions.
I am always on call. I could have worked all day but due to the nature of everything I do I get many emails and calls in the evening and on the weekends. Some have the attitude that they work Monday-Friday 9-5 or whatever hours they establish for themselves and if they get an inquiry out of those hours it can wait until the next day. I get it, I do but it's so competitive you could lose the gig because you replied the next day when someone else replied immediately. I know if someone really wants you they will wait for your response but then there are people who don't know what they want, contact several vendors and sometimes their decision just comes down to who got back to them first. I was guilty of that with my wedding. I contacted a few photography vendors and loved all of their work but I went with the one that I spoke with first. Some others finally contacted me and everything sounded great but I already booked with who got back to me the fastest. This is why I choose to answer emails, messages, phone calls during my "off hours." That being said, I completely understand why some people don't choose to do so.
And here is the BIG difficulty and this doesn't apply to everyone who works from home but I know it applies to many women. One of the main reasons I wanted to be able to work from home was that when I had children I could stay home with them. Well, my daughter is now a toddler and already seems to be in her "terrible twos" stage even though she is only 17 months. She is into everything and has an attitude when she isn't getting my constant attention. It's hard to get work done while chasing and entertaining a toddler. Because of this I often need to wait until my hubby gets home to start my work which means I am often up until 2am getting stuff done and then need to be up at 7am with my daughter and the cycle starts all over again. It's exhausting!!!
I am not trying to throw a pity party but I just want people to know that the self employed DO work. Am I grateful to work from home? Absolutely! I worked extremely hard to get myself to this point. I had a full time job with a printing company for many years while I busted my booty building my other businesses. Because working from home certainly has it's perks: I get to be with my daughter, I can work in my pajamas while doing office stuff such as returning emails and doing online marketing, you don't have anyone keeping tabs on you whether you were late, left early or took a long lunch, I can make doctors appointments during their regular business hours, not have to take off to go to the DMV, I can decide to go to the beach during the day if I choose to stay up late finishing work and so on. So I wouldn't change a thing except the perception that some people have about us work at home individuals.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Things I Don't Love
It's that time of week! Time to share something I don't love and at the moment that particular thing is swans!! I used to love swans because they are so pretty and majestic but now I realize they are just plain nasty! When we used to go to the park with our dog, every time we got close to the water they would come towards us squawking in a confrontational manner so we always steered clear of them.
Well today my dislike turned into hate when two swans and their baby approached my daughter ready to attack her innocently sitting on our beach towel. My daughter and I were at a small private beach and she was playing on her beach towel with her back to them, completely unaware of them. I watched them swim towards us and then get out of the water. No big deal, I thought. We were just minding our business and were originally nowhere near them. They proceeded to approach us and at first I thought they would veer away but one got scarily close to my daughter and raised it's wings and neck, looking ready to attack. I had to swoop my daughter up and yell at the swans until they went back into the water.
Swans are just nasty creatures and I definitely don't love them. What about you? Have you ever had a confrontation with a swan?
 | ||
| My daughter minding her business |
 |
| Here they come. On a mission! |
 |
| Too close for comfort |
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Girl Booklet's June Sponsor Giveaway
a Rafflecopter giveaway
And here's a look at the people that made this happen:
Making My Job Easy
Happy Hump Day! I hope you are having a great Wednesday. I had the pleasure of photographing cutie, Dean, today for his 1st birthday cake smash photos. Whenever I do a cake smash session I customize a backdrop that can be destroyed. Together with the parents I decided what colors we are going to use for the backdrop and cake. Sometimes, especially with little boys I feel it is a little limited that the choice is usually blue or green or a combination of the two. Don't get me wrong I love doing blue and green backdrops for little boys but I always love to be able to do something a little different.
So I was thrilled when Dean's mother came up with the idea of doing a patriotic color scheme of red, white and blue. This is especially fitting this time of year. Not only did she come up with a great theme she picked up some great props. She got some red, white and blue balloons, a wooden frame for me to do photo effect shown below and fabulous letters spelling "ONE." Along with my backdrop and cake, I think we came up with some great images!! Here are just a few. What do you think?
I hope you enjoyed the cuteness as much as me. The good news...I get to do it all over again tomorrow with another little boy! It's a tough job but someone's got to do it!
P.S. The winner of the Keeping Cool In The Sun Giveaway is Lauren H. who was notified by email.
So I was thrilled when Dean's mother came up with the idea of doing a patriotic color scheme of red, white and blue. This is especially fitting this time of year. Not only did she come up with a great theme she picked up some great props. She got some red, white and blue balloons, a wooden frame for me to do photo effect shown below and fabulous letters spelling "ONE." Along with my backdrop and cake, I think we came up with some great images!! Here are just a few. What do you think?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)