Grouchy Mommy Takes Pictures

I'm trying to get Liam to tell me what to write.  Amazingly he has no idea.  I even asked him "If Grammy was here what would you tell her?" 

He said, "The things we've been doing this week." 

"Like what?"

"I don't know."

Seriously?  This child talks almost constantly.  I thought for sure he would rattle off a quick blog entry and my job would be done.

Liam wants me to play Carcassonne with the dragon expansion.  I do not want to play.  I tell him he can play a "practice" game - solo.  He goes and gets the expansion.  Pretty soon he has me reading the rules and he's talking about how we will play.  I say, "How can I be more clear?  I do not want to play with the dragon expansion." 

He says, "I don't remember the beginning of what you said."

Ha ha.

I used to really enjoy strategy board games.  But after Liam was born it was more effort to think through the games with my sleep deprived brain.  Plus I was always being pulled in two directions - baby or game.  Of course Allen helped, but it's easier for him to get absorbed in the game and then I'm left getting the snack or answering the question or making sure that the curtains don't get set on fire (exaggerating slightly).

Plus, this is a genre of games that has grown very quickly in the past ten years and it seems like there's always a new game to learn.  It used to be "Settler's of Cataan" and a few others.  Now our game collection fills the top of Liam's closet and spills onto the shelves below.

Lots more I could say on this topic, but meanwhile Liam was ready to move into the living room and actually start his practice game.  And Devin was very tired of hanging out on the bed.  So I took him to the living room and decided to try to make "tummy time" more tolerable for him by taking some pictures.  Plus, I was hoping to replicate my earlier success at getting the camera to focus on the foreground and leave the background blurry.  Yeah.  Did I mention that I was already feeling very grouchy?  This project did not help with my mood. 

 So put it on Av and set the aperture to the lowest setting.  Right.  Take the picture.  Nothing.  Totally flat, everything in focus.  OK.  I think if you look very closely the corner might be a little blurred, but I was going for something much more dramatic.

 I experiment with backing up and zooming in.  Still nothing.  Really cute baby.  That's a given.  The camera automatically sets it to a larger number on the aperture setting when I zoom in.

 Zoom out, reset, etc.

 The baby's getting really tired of this.

 Tried overexposing it slightly just to see what happens.  At some point I even changed back to purely manual settings, with similar results.

 The game continues.  I get really irritated when Liam wants me to help him figure out the rules.  "This is why I didn't want to play!"  (Me, with great emphasis.)

 Well I can get the whole thing to be blurry.

 This is about as close as I got to when I was trying for.

But my subject and his companion had had enough of that.  I'm still grouchy.