Lifeguard Anyone?

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Okay, okay, we admit it -- we may have been a hair slow to update the blog lately.  That's because we've been really making the most of this whole "maternity leave" thing, but rest assured that we've been taking the requisite photos to prove it!  Here's a brief rundown....

One fantastic outing was over to the annual Rock for the River concert - without a doubt one of the best events of the summer.  Suffice it to say the quality of the music is top notch, and equaled only by the heaps of grassroots river lovin' that hangs in the air throughout the evening.  Kudos to everyone involved - including the babysitters who made it possible for us to sneak across the river to the concert!

 (I'm listening to Joe Purdy, Garrison Starr, and Joey Ryan as I type this, all of whom are veterans of the river.  I bet at least one of them is headed to town near you soon...  We can heartily recommend you check them out if you're looking for some good times and great tunes.  Same goes for Chris Pierce, Chris Seefried, Amber Rubarth, Eliza Moore, Matt DelVecchio, Adam Christgau, and of course the good Jay Nash who organizes the event each year.  Take our word for it, WOW.)

Of course there was plenty of boat time involved.  Actually - the past couple days have been dreadfully hot, so it's been all about the boat and repeated leaps into the river in order to maintain a reasonable body temperature.  This means that Zoe got to wear another life jacket - this time a snazzy red and black ordeal that only coincidentally (I think) matches Cara's suit/dress.  And then it was time to get in the drink:

There goes Cara, fearlessly jumping off the boat in order to save an errant fender.  Do note the similarly fearless puppy watching.  He does not take such aquatic endeavors lightly...

Rut row raggy...  Rocco's on the case!  Believe it or not, Cara cannot walk on water, despite her best efforts here.

Splish splash, she's in the bath!  And Rocco's hurtling through mid-air with apparent reckless abandon! We're well aware that he can jump darn near five feet vertically, but when it comes to horizontal leaps, we may well be talking double digits...  Particularly when there's a Cara to be saved!

Funny thing is, Cara generally doesn't need saving when she's in the water.  In fact, she made a tidy living saving other people from the water for a while...  Regardless, Rocco doesn't leave anything to chance, and insists upon saving us each and every time we get wet.  Interesting then, that his idea of "saving" us is really more like jumping on us and trying to climb on our head while we're treading water.  Not exactly my idea of a good lifeguard.

Zoe kept a keen watch on the helm.  Thankfully she's not quite as quick to leap out of the boat as the rest of us.  Yet.

Rocco, again on lifeguard duty...  This time he didn't even wait until I hit the water before he decided a rescue was necessary.  There's nothing quite like coming to the surface face-to-face with your favorite wet dog.

This amused wee Zoe Mae tremendously.  She tried to explain the whole wait-for-distress thing to Rocco, but he'd have none of it.  Silly dog.  At least one of the little ones in our family knows what's up. Chalk up another point for the humans.

Then again, upon firing up the old outboard, Zoe does tend to pass out straightaway.  I mean who can blame her?  As gorgeous sunny day on the water draws to a close, Zoe knows that she's well protected:  She'd kickin' it in a life jacket rated for thrice her weight, Momma's right next to her, Papa's at the wheel, and there's the most hair-triggered lifeguard in the business keeping watch.  Perfect time for a nap indeed.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and it's always nice when they come to a beautiful end.

A day without a good sunset is like a pub without beer.

fin.

The Camera

The first in a series of "The ..." posts, is our newest baby-essential item: Our new dSLR.  We're both researchers, so we read a fair bit about various SLR rigs, and here's the result:

It's a Pentax K-x. We chose it based on a zillion reviews, but the features that really sold us are:

1. Fantastic low-light shooting capabilities. Because it's not always sunny in paradise.
2. Super-duper fast burst speed (~5fps) coupled with a similarly speedy shutter speed (1/6000 sec.)   Because as the inimitable Ferris Bueller one said: "Life moves pretty fast.  If you son't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it."  
3. Wide ISO range (up to 6400 - again about the low-light shooting.)
4. HDR Capture. (Can shoot three simultaneous shots at different exposures and combine them.) Funky cool feature usually handled in post.
5. AA Batteries.  Lots of stuff runs on AA's, including this camera.  We've got lots of good rechargeable AAs.  The two can play together, so we don't need to lug around another charger and special batteries.
6. It shoots HOT pictures.  It's arguably the best entry-ish level SLR right now, and it puts up some pretty stiff competition to higher-end cameras when it comes to image quality.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, we humbly submit the first three photos shot when we arrived at the a few days ago.  (More will follow, I promise!)

And if you want to check the camera out yourself, they do indeed sell it at Amazon.  And it comes in various colors!  Dig it:

 

Do You Want To Making Photo?

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After a weekend shooting with our old SLR, we remembered just how fun photography can be!  So we took a cue from Cara's parents, and got a new camera to shoot the new baby with.  Voila - mucho incentive to take even more great photos to share with yinz.  Because, you know, we know how much everyone likes pictures!

And look: Zoe's holding her bottle up all on her own!  Such a hard little worker...

I believe this look is called the hairy eyeball.  It's a look that brilliant people don when faced with encroaching crochet giraffe.  A warning to keep your distance Mr. Giraffe, and don't you forget it. 

Headed out through the park.  The new camera has some funkalicious features, such as digital filters that let us pull the color out of certain parts of the photograph.  (Hence the color people and the b&w landscape.)

And here's little Zoe Mae with her favorite hat.  (We think she looks a bit like Grandpa P at the beach...)

And here's the captain hard at work late one night.  We fired up the old sewing machine to make a little big curtain to block some light out so that we can watch the important World Cup games on the big screen.  (And it's been a project that's been on the back burner for a long time, so this was a perfect excuse to get it done!)  After an hour at the well-oiled machine and a couple glasses of wine to oil the old man, the curtain looks absolutely fantastic acceptable.  Even better, it works great. 

We leave you in peace: Budda Baby Zoe in a rare zen moment.

Meet The New Intrepid World Traveller

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Will you look at that?  Wee Zoe Mae has a passport!  And how about that photo?  The US Dept of State is very explicit about how passport photos must be taken...  Right down to the exact mm measurements of head in the frame, white nondescript background in soft focus, no shadows, and eyes open.  Which is all well and good, but damn difficult when shooting a baby that's less than 2-weeks old!

We took over 300 shots, on various backgrounds, and with different light, all trying to get a good straightforward shot of Zoe, with her eyes open, and that meets the criteria.  Finally we nabbed the above photo with Zoe laying on one of Tommy's white t-shirts on the little table on our back porch, in the afternoon sunlight.  After all, passport photos aren't meant to be sexy, right?

Strange Days

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[DISCLAIMER:  The following photos err towards crazy, and your brain and eyes will hurt as they strain to make sense of them.  Just click on any photo for a larger view, which makes it a bit easier on the eyes.]

After that last cliffhanger, we figured that it'd be best to continue the story straightaway.  For those who don't recall the last post, here's the note we'd left off on:  Tommy had found his old film SLR, and it the photo count showed a partially exposed role of god-knows-what from their past.  Always très exciting to be sure.  That's the story, and here's what happened:

Here's an example picture.  You can clearly see us, circa 2002ish, climbing up to Slide Mountain in the Catskills.  However, you may have noticed that Tommy's chest is uncharacteristically, well, rocky.  And fluffy.  Wait a minute - that's Rocco!  Yes friends, the camera tricked us.  The frame-count said that we had about 20 pictures left, but it was sorely mistaken.  Somehow, some way, the film had been partially wound back in the camera.  

Now we have absolutely no idea how this could have happened, as it's not something that can happen accidentally on this camera.  Someone would've had to manually release the film catch, and then wind the film back -- by hand -- but not all the way, only about 15 frames or so, otherwise it would've been in the can.  And Patrick was 12,000 miles away when this happened!  Strange indeed.

 

Another example:  Viewed Cara-side-up, it's Cara eating an apple in the wilderness, Circa 2002.  Viewed tri-colour-up, it's a shot from the interior of our porch at the river, 2010.   If you really look closely, you might even be able to make out Rocco on the wicker chair in the corner - the intended subject of the latter frame.  (Admittedly, Tommy isn't consistent in his portrait SLR-holding: Sometimes it's trigger up, sometimes it's trigger down, as evidenced by the opposite orientation of these exposures.)  As always, the brighter image wins.

Now here's an interesting one for sure.  It's a beautiful vista of the Catskills.  With Rocco bravely leaping off of Giant Ledge Slide Mountain.  Pretty cool how the blue sky blends with the river water, and how the green rocky shallows are revealed in the shadow on Tommy's back, nearly merging with the greens of the pine tree in the background.  Neat.  

 Again with the reverse orientation:  Here's Cara swinging in the playground with Zoe strapped on (2010), and there's a corner of our kitchen in Prague (2003).  We're not ones to cry over spilled milk, so we aren't lamenting the losses of the original photos too much.  That said, these were the only photos that we had taken of our really nice penthouse apartment in Prague, so we are a tiny bit bummed that the photographic evidence of our previous life is now literally tainted by our current one! 

And here's proof positive that little Zoe's got momma on the mind!  More specifically, it's wee Zoe, sound asleep on our porch in Thousand Island Park (2010) dreaming about Cara in a chiffon dress on stage in Arthur Kopit's Chamber Music at Divadlo U Hasičů, Prague (2003.)   We like this one, it looks like Cara's either trying to get out of Zoe's head, or is reminding her of something.  Probably couldn't have gotten it framed that well if we tried.

                   Dear Film:

                            Thanks for keeping it real.  

                              

                                                        Love,

                                                         -Cara & Tommy (2002) 

                                                           and Rocco (2010)

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Old Man River...

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The story goes something like this.  Cara and I and Zoe and Rocco all went to the river.  (That's a great start to any story to be sure...)  And while we were at the river, I found my old camera and lenses stored safely in a box under our bed.  It's an old Konica SLR that's probably about as old as I am, and over the years I've pulled many rolls of film through it.  However, in this digital age, our well worn Konica had become all but forgotten.  Until now.

Gloriously, when we resurrected this fine old manual camera, it had film in it.  According to the dial, there were about 20 shots left on the roll, and in the on-deck tube on the neckstrap, there was another new roll of B&W film.  Score.  So, on the porch, I fired it up as Cara eased the tension of the moment with an adult beverage and a relaxed Zoe in her arms.

And then we headed down to the dock, where the blazing sunlight and low water was a perfect recipe for a proper film camera, and Cara, of course, was a gorgeous subject for such photographic documentation.  She bravely lowered herself into the frigid depths of the mighty St. Lawrence, while Rocco was left to stare in amazement:  How did she just have a baby? Good question puppy, good question.  Cara, as always, looks like a million bucks.

Above is our favorite photo of the day: Cara and Zoe playing it cool on the rocks of Prospect Point.  You can click any photo for a larger view, and I really recommend it with this one...

Of course, we wasted no time introducing Zoe Mae to the river spirits, and our fine child acknowledged their power straightaway with a ruckus greeting-scream.  Nice to meet you too, Zoe.  One benefit to the unusually low water this May is that it's (relatively) warm for this time of year, so Cara's feet didn't even turn blue while braving the shallows for this shot.

After so much excitement, it was back to home base.  (That's the front porch to you foreigners.)  Cara and Zoe got a chance to relax and steal a nap under cover of film grain.  Sure, you can fake photos like this these days, but there's something appealing about an actual grainy b&w photograph.

Example B:  The evening bath, this time caught on film.  Again with the great grain.  The soft corners are from shooting at the wide end of a zoom lens with a UV filter and scope lenscap: the extra exposed barrel stack unintentionally rounds off the corners.  Again, it might look like a cheesy digital effect added in post, but it's actually a side effect of a chunky filter/lenscap combo. Film is great.  Plus, there is the undeniable thrill of the chase, knowing that you only have a few feet of film on which to capture the moment.  And then there's that feeling of proud satisfaction as you hear the shutter ka-chunk at the exact moment your 5-week old daughter cracks a smile.

 
Sometimes you just know when you've gotten a shot that you want, even without that little screen to confirm it right away.  G'night.

P.S. - If you're a particularly attentive reader, you might be wondering about that first, partially exposed role that was in the camera to begin with.  Well, dear friends, that role is another story altogether.  A hilarious story.  I'll need a few days to scan some of the photos, but suffice it to say, the photos will feature Cara and myself as you have never seen us before.  Seriously.

Zoe's 1st Super Duper Car Adventure

We begin this story with a nice little family in Pittsburgh, PA:

This nice little family then pointed a Wee Box north for a few hours to stop by another nice family in a nice new house.  The children were welcoming and kept a close eye on little Zoe Mae...

 

Then came the real adventure:  A long, long ride in the Wee Box.  Zoe was a champ, and closely guarded by our faithful wingdog, Rocco the brave:

And even in the rest stops Rocco kept an eye out for intruders. (read: Squirrels)

And then we got to the river, where we promptly ensured Zoe's safety in the event of a flood or boat ride:

And then we went in search of water.  And found some. . .

. . . in the bath!  Yup, after the long anticipated departure of Zoe's umbilical cord stump, we promptly deposited her in the cottage's sink.   We considered the river, but at ~50° Fahrenheit, well, we're just not that mean.  Besides, Zoe was really good on the ride up...

All clean and ready for action, we wandered down to the river.  Actually, we generally do this about 85 times a day.  It's not far, and Zoe really likes walks.  So does Rocco.  Come to think of it, Cara likes walks too, and even Tommy will amble down to the water at the slightest provocation.  Sadly, among the many great baby gifts that were generously given to us, we've yet to get beverage holders for our strollers, so at present, we're forced to carry our beers in our hands while we walk.  The horror.

Luckily, Zoe is largely unbothered by such a minor inconvenience, and gracefully rocks the watermelon safari hat on our adventures around the park.

Back at the homestead, and ever vigilant, Rocco fearlessly keeps watch from his perch on the porch.  (Note to all who might try to invade:  Unless you're a chipmunk, he'll happily let you in the house, so long as you don't try to steal his seat.  Drinks, as always, are in the back fridge; help yourself.)

Much Ado About Pictures

 
 
CARA: Argh, we didn't update the blog today...
TOMMY:  I know.  Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow.

(the next day)

CARA: You didn't update the blog, did you?
TOMMY: Ahhh no, not yet.
CARA: (exhausted) Just put some photos up, all people care about is the photos...
TOMMY: (also exhausted) Okay, I'll update it, but we should write something to tie it all together.
CARA: Really, just the photos are fine, we just need to get something up.
ZOE: (not exhausted at all) WAHHHHH WA WA WAHHHHH WA WA WA
TOMMY: Awww Zozo, it's okay...  Shhhhhhhh....  Shhhhh......

(Brief quiet.  TOMMY bounces ZOE on his chest.  CARA finishes her wine.  ZOE pushes TOMMY's hand away and searches around with her expectant mouth and screams again.  ROCCO buries himself under his bed.)

TOMMY: Shhhhh..... Shhhhh......
CARA: Here, I'll go upstairs and get ready for bed, and then feed her again.
TOMMY: Okay - I'll go put something up on the blog and take Rocco for a walk.

(Exit TOMMY, CARA, ZOE, and ROCCO to upstairs.)

Mayday, Mayday, Zoe Mae Day!

It's wee Zoe's one week birthday, and wikipedia notes that today is also an occasion for popular and often raucous celebrations.  We'll get right on that...

Both mom and baby are great!  Cara's on the mend, and we've already started going for walks around the block as a little family, Rocco included.  Speaking of the mutt, he's taking the whole thing quite well.  Often when Zoe cries Rocco likes to run right over and console her with an eager sniff.  One of these day's we'll catch it on camera, as it's pretty darn cute when he perches on the side of the Bugaboo to have a look at the sleeping Zoe inside.

We've also now had a chance to Zoe-test some of our baby gear.  According to Zoe, we've done a good job...  She digs the carseat and even sleeps in it inside sometimes too.  Both strollers also seem to be working splendidly.  The Bugaboo has been smoothly dealing with some of our friendly local uneven sidewalks, and its bassinet has also been doing double duty as a mobile place for Zoe to sleep inside.  Our smaller travel stroller is also working swimmingly; it's surprisingly comfortable to push and our carseat docks in it perfectly, a very nice surprise.

The sleep thing has been just what everyone said it would be: not much.  That said, we've been able to log some good naps, and last night Zoe even slept pretty consistently in between feedings.  It's hot here in Pittsburgh, and she's fast asleep right next to me as I type (as is Cara), so perhaps the summerish weather has something to do with it.  In any event, two consecutive near-3-hour stretches of sleep in a row was awesome.  Maybe all those 10-hour nights of sleep that we put in the bank before she was born are paying dividends now?

And finally - yes - we hear the many calls for photos, and realize that yinz would much rather look at pictures of our cutie pie than read about her, however glowing our reviews may be.  So we'll try to keep the stream of new photos here every week or so...