A little of this and that

Kind of a random post...I'm all over the place.

First, two adorable things to share; little things that Lucy said over the past few days that just tickled me.

Lucy loves writing on the dry erase board on the fridge, and she was writing names of people she knew. She wrote Audrey's name of course, and then she scribbled another picture and said, "That's your name, Mommy, 'Mommy Martin'" So cute!

The next day at breakfast I had Lucy's current fav cd playing, Ziggy Marley's "Family Time." I was singing to it, and Lucy said, "Turn yourself up, Mommy, turn yourself up!" Unsure that she really wanted me to sing louder (I may have a few things I do well, but singing is NOT one of them :-), I asked her if she wanted me to sing louder, and she nodded and repeated herself, "Yes, turn yourself UP!" How precious!

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So, while in Steamboat over Christmastime, I worked on our digital photo family album for 2009. I can easily spend ten hours or more total working on these photo books -- there are hundreds of fun backgrounds to choose from, lots of photo layouts for organizing your photos on each page, photo borders to choose, not to mention color tones and effects. So, Colorado was a great time to work on it a little at a time.

In 2008, I changed the albums Jason and I will keep from "paper" scrapbooks to digital ones. That year I made an album on Snapfish which reviewed our year in pictures and journaling. I ordered from Snapfish because at the time Oprah had offered that special with Snapfish for a free 8 X 11 album, and I'm not one to pass up something free like that! Anyhow, the album arrived, and it was of good quality.

Well, this year I decided to try ordering from Shutterfly and see how the quality compared. It wasn't a free album (guess Oprah's feeling the change in economy ;-), but the photo books were 20% off, and that was good enough, I guess. I wasn't patient enough to wait until a better sale came around.

Our book arrived two days ago, and I LOVE it! Superior to Snapfish's quality by a landslide.

Just my two cents...(You can see the album above this post).

Next bit of randomness...we're changing from Comcast cable to The Dish Network...after reviewing our '09 budget and how we did, we decided $170 a month for cable, internet and dvr was way more than we actually needed to be spending. We wanted to increase our "vacation budget" for 2010 and our Comcast bill seemed like a good area to take money from. (A few of you have asked about our summer trip we've booked...here's a link to the place we're going, "Splash" in Panama City, FL.

Jason spent a lot of time this weekend pricing options from DirectTV, The Dish, even buying our own cable box and some sort of option that came with that, and it looks like The Dish will be a great way to go. We'll still need a separate service to provide Internet, but we're going to go with a slower speed, and BellSouth has a service that provides internet for around $40 a month I think. The Dish with the"Bronze Package" as well as local channels and DVR/High Def will be about $45 a month for the first year. (We'll have to sign a two-year agreement, and the second year's prices go to $60 a month), but overall, it amounts to a substantial savings. Wish we had done this sooner!

We have a nice, easy week ahead, not too much on the calendar-looking forward to it! Just hope it warms up a little; I'm quite tired of dealing with temperatures in the teens! Yikes!