Friday, January 11, 2013

Something to Cry About

No worries- it wasn't anything terribly serious or life-changing, but being the pregnant emotional wreck that I am, it doesn't take much these days.

On the plus side, now I have something to write about, too...

I'm sure I've been dropping hints, if not flat-out whining throughout the last few posts, about how maddeningly short on ideas I've been lately. It's to the point where I'm wondering if I'm finally just burning out on this blogging thing, and whether it's better to keep pushing on, as I've been doing, or whether I should consider cutting back a bit to give myself more time to come up with content.

This evening was no exception, and I was weary of expending the energy to rack my brain for something that simply wasn't coming on its own, so I took a bunch of pictures of Abby in the cute pumpkin hat that she was sporting just before bedtime, and made plans to do a wordless post titled "My Little Pumpkin" (or something cheesy like that).

However, Michael had other plans. He grabbed my Nikon from its temporary perch on the coffee table (I know, I know- you'd think that putting stuff out of baby-reach would be second-nature by now), and knocked it to the floor with the Speedlight still attached. The result? A broken Speedlight. In case you actually know something about Speedlights, I should clarify that my hot flash is not technically one- I believe that's the product name that Nikon gives to the ones that they produce for their own cameras- I just use the term out of convenience. My hot flash is Nikon-compatible, but made by another company, so it doesn't technically qualify. The reason this matters is that if it were a Speedlight, I'd be sobbing to the tune of $400+ dollars. Mine was not cheap, either, but I'm fairly sure it was not that expensive. It was, however, a gift, which makes the loss of it sting all the more.

I think this also wins Michael some kind of prize for being the first to break a relatively expensive item. The closest Abby has come was the hand that she may or may not have played in the demise of our first X-box, which appears to have died of an overheating problem. This happened shortly after we made a habit of placing pillows in front of the machine to keep her busy fingers off of it, and once or twice she turned it on anyway, unbeknownst to us. So it remained on, with little to no ventilation, for indeterminable amounts of time on several occasions before calling it quits. However, since we played a hand, too, by unwisely blocking airflow with pillows, and because this explanation is strictly theoretical, we could hardly attribute the breaking of the thing to Abby, herself.

As for joining the ranks of parents everywhere lamenting the "stuff my kids ruined:" it was inevitable, I know. I've known since Abby first entered our lives that we can "no longer have nice things." It still stinks when those few things I do have anyway get destroyed.

As for the pictures, they didn't really come out. I knew it even as I took them, that I was fighting a losing battle between my near-nonexistent skill level and the abysmal lighting in our living room at night. I had to set the ISO to maximum, which means they're grainy as anything, and the shutter speed as slow as I dared, which affected the focus, and they came out pretty dark, in the end.

However, disappointed as I might be with their quality, the subject still makes me smile. So, I'll end on a happy note, with my little pumpkin.