Today I am thankful that my best friend Erin discovered her love and talent for photography. Check her out on Facebook here on her website here.

I am thankful that E was able to come home this weekend. I am thankful for sleeping in. I am thankful for the beautiful weather. I am thankful for apple donuts and fresh cider. I am thankful we live in New England, where things like “steam-powered cider press”es exist.

Happy Monday! Only five days until another weekend!

I bet you’ve been waiting anxiously to see my official 1 year of iPhone photos post. I know it’s the most exciting part of your weekend. Unfortunately, it’s hard to type when my hands are full of mini powdered donuts, so I had to eat ALL of the ones left over from yesterday’s party before I got to today’s blogging. Don’t worry, they’re all in a better place now. Let the photo posting begin!

Sunday:

NOM PIZZA NOM NOM

NOM CUPCAKE NOM NOM

Thank goodness it was a padded room

Monday:

Caroline's new favorite thing is forts and/or anything that sort of looks like a fort. FOOOOORT!!!

"Uh oh mama! Fall denoun!" "No sweetie, you threw them."

Picture frames for the party

Hungry baby eats her own hand

Bathtime rave

Tuesday:

It was so scenic at the park for Stroller Strides it made me kind of nauseous. SO SCENIC. BLAH.

Party prep - sugar cookies!

She's adorable, even with snot on her face.

Shopping with my Kate Spade and my Dunkin Donuts is so much more pleasant that two screaming kids.

Good dog doesn't eat the toys even when forced to lie on them.

Wednesday:

More party prep - tiny pumpkins!

Sharing siblings are the best kind of siblings.

So, do you come here often?

Nice quiet knitting + gossiping with friends = my favorite night of the week

Thursday:

Mama, can I borrow your shoes?

Weight Watchers suggests making mini cupcakes to satisfy sweet cravings. I think we have different definitions of "satisfy".

Time to break out the slippers for the cold winter floors.

Friday:

Because OF COURSE the day your houseguests come is the day you should clean the toybox

The top blankie is MY baby blankie. I still love it.

MESS. It never real got better. Sorry party guests!

Me & Erin. We met on the first day of college and now have toddlers only 3 months apart. Isn't that the best?

Saturday:

Having 12 toddlers in my house suddenly made having 1 toddler and 1 baby seem SUPER EASY.

Tiny cheesecakes from my friend Heather. I think she's trying to make me fatter.

Four people in this picture think they are playing Kinect on the XBox. Only two of them actually are.

There you go! 52 full weeks of iPhone photos, which means I’ve unintentionally and successfully completed one of those 365-photo-challenges I never start because I’m terrible at follow through. TAKE THAT SELF. I DID IT.

For the record, the chair from my first week in iPhone photos is still sitting on my front porch. Oops.

Did you take any camera phone photos this week? Link up with one or lots using the linky below and grab the code (so it shows on your blog too!) over at Amy’s . It’s really fun!

I’ve told this story approximately a zillion times, not because it is a super awesome story but because it is one of only 3 celebrity-meeting stories I have and definitely the most interesting.*

A zillion years ago, I met my husband at a country line dancing bar. Wait, let’s call it a club instead. Cool people go to clubs. Huge rednecks go to country line dancing bars, and even though I played one for a while in my early 20’s I am not really a redneck – although I can do a mean Boot Scoot Boogie. I noticed E because he was the best dancer. Seriously. He is a REALLY GOOD DANCER (back me up, real life friends) even though he is a skinny white guy from Ohio who played soccer while his brother and sisters took tap and jazz and ballet. He told me once that when he first started going to clubs/bars he recognized very quickly that he was a terrible dancer so he would practice in front of the mirror – but he might die of embarrassment if I wrote that on the internet so pretend I didn’t.

(Truthfully, I am NOT a very good dancer, but if I let E lead I can fake it enough to pass for someone who knows what they’re doing.)(Also, we’ve tried taking actual dance lessons before and get super bored and quit because who wants to spend all their time one-two-cha-cha-cha-ing when you can just TWIRL?)

Anyways, we spent a lot of time at that country line dancing bar club. We were friends with the bouncers and the bartenders, we knew which dances you were supposed to do to which songs, we knew the HARD VERSIONS of all the HARD DANCES*. One of the guys who also came and danced a lot was named Chad, but because he wore suspenders and button down shirts like a chorus orphan from a local production of Oliver we called him Suspenders. It turned out Suspenders was a choreographer, quite a good one, and was contacted to work as the choreographer for a movie that was being filmed in town. He had already invited all his fancy dancer friends to audition as back-up dancers for the movie but he needed a couple more people. He told E and I to show up on a Saturday and proved to the movie people we could fake-swing dance and smile pretty we could have parts in his movie too.

And that’s how I ended up as a back-up dancer in The Notebook. I had two costume fittings and one rehearsal and then I showed up one day to hair and make-up and BAM! I was on the set with James Marsden and Rachel McAdams.

Yep, that's me.

There wasn’t actually too much dancing involved – we were just background to the main character’s fancy choreography – but E and I were Couple Number 1 and it was our job to spin back and forth in front of the camera because my skirt looked cool when I did that.

After being on set for a few minutes and rehearsing with the director’s guidance and gawking nervously at the movie stars who deigned themselves TOO GOOD to come say hi to us (except for James Marsden, who watched us dance and said “Hey, when do we learn to do that? You guys are great!”) one of the wardrobe ladies came over to me.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I need your earrings.” And then she removed them from my ears, walked over to Rachel McAdams, and put them on her. Apparently they were TOO SPARKLY for an extra. Or maybe just too sparkly for an extra with SUPER AWESOME HAIR.

Wearing my replacement, less-sparkly earrings. Also, my own mother looked at this photo on my mantle and said "Oh, is that E's grandparents?"

In the movie, the entire scene has been cut down to five seconds of slow-motion dancing during a montage of Rachel dating/falling in not-good-enough-love with James. I am not even a tiny bit visible.

They told us not to bring cameras (and cell phone cameras weren’t a thing) so to prove this really happened I only have these two pictures in the parking lot, plus a pay stub for $125 worth of work as a “dancer”.

It was still really really cool.

*Here are the other two stories:  #1 I won backstage passes to the TRL Concert Tour in 2001 and met Jessica Simpson who was incredibly sweet and got me a Diet Coke from her dressing room and also Destiny’s Child who were bitches and wouldn’t let anyone touch them or take photos. #2 I was an extra in the movie Radio, where I Cuba Gooding Jr called me cute and Ed Harris swore a lot and was very short. I told you they were boring.

**Because I am a dork, I YouTubed one of the fancy line dances to see if it was there (it is) (but they’re not doing it very well, I’m way better) and got lost in a YouTube hole of ALL the line dances we used to do. It’s kind of ridiculous HOW MUCH I miss line dancing. DORK OF THE YEAR.***

***ALSO, I would like to point out that YouTube wasn’t really such a thing in 2000, so to learn the dances you had to watch people in real life do them at full speed and then just JUMP IN with the choreography. You didn’t get to learn it at home in your living room. This is why they are mostly done at bars – you need a couple beers before you’re brave enough to try it.

The place that has the sunflowers in the summer also does a corn maze and hay ride in the fall. I talked my friends into dragging their toddlers out into the cold evening for some ice cream (obviously the snack of choice when it’s 50 degrees out) and some fall fun and ended up having pretty much the best night I’ve had since having kids. Or at least right up until my friend Jessica lost her engagement ring in the GIANT CORN PIT. Her yellow gold engagement ring. (Spoiler alert: they found it!) But even sifting through a literally ton of corn kernels couldn’t ruin the rest of it.

Here’s the rest of it:

I totally forgot to get a steppin’ out picture until AFTER I’d been rolling around in the corn for an hour, so I am FILTHY with corn starch.

On Caroline: Head to toe hand-me-downs
Pumpkin hat seen in other photos hand-knit by me
(Although it’s really too small already. I’m making her another one & need to find someone with a small-headed baby for this one. Or at least a slightly younger baby. Do YOU have a 4 or 5 month old who needs a hat?)

On Me:
Fake fake Uggs – Walmart, at least 2 years ago and damn do I love them
Jeans – Old Navy
Shirt – Target
Hoodie – Target (half of a very sexy sweat suit set)
Necklace – Lisa Leonard swag from The Creative Connection last year

p.s. Every time I start to feel really good about the quality of my photos I end up lost in a Pinterest wormhole of truly gorgeous and professional pictures and realize I know NOTHING about photography. All the fancy lenses in the world aren’t going to make me a better photographer until I sit down and actually LEARN THE BASICS that my brain seems so reluctant to absorb. Plus even if I DID learn all the things, there’s a level of natural talent involved that I just don’t think I have.  My only consolation is that on a night like this one I was having too much fun participating to stop and set up every shot I wanted to capture. I’m just a MWAC (mom with a camera), and I’m mostly OK with that.

p.p.s. It also helps that E has finally gotten on board with playing assistant photographer, which is why I’m actually IN half of these shots. If only he understood how to take a more flattering photo of my double chin I’d be golden.