look who's here...

After moving past the mushroom/fun guy/fungi theme, I quickly settled on an owl theme for Twain's birth announcement.

I wasn't originally intending to use an owl, but I found a cute baby owl cartridge for the cricut, and was smitten by its sweet simplicity.

The baby owl cartridge was new and scheduled to be released at the end of June.

In the meanwhile, I ordered Twain some organic onesies and beanies, and made him a rough-applique owl onesie.

Enters girl and camera.

After manipulating my camera settings and getting everything situated, Twain would start to fuss.

Click.

and click.

Oh boy. This was not going to be easy.

Enters John. The ever present voice of reason.

After the umpteenth shot, he exclaims "Enough already, for crying out loud! Just pick a photo. This one. Or that one. They are all fine!"

Fine????

Over things such as this, John really is from mars and I really am from venus. I wished he would come to my land of fairies and unicorns...and at least humor my attempts at capturing the magical and elusive picture of the perfectly coo-ing baby.

I was perfectly willing to wait indefinitely for Twain to acclimate to my camera, so I could get the shot I wanted. But John? Not so much. He wanted me to move on so he could get his tidy house back.

persistent girl + camera + screaming baby + unsympathetic husband = very frustrated girl.

And that girl may or may not have snuck in one more attempt the next morning, before throwing up her arms in despair and settling on a photo.

Meanwhile June turned into July and there was still no release date for the baby owl cricut cartridge. I was getting ants in my pants here! I called the company and they were not sure when it would be released. I was dismayed, mind you, having revolved my entire announcement around the silly thing. But I was not willing to sit around waiting much longer. I was going to have to improvise.

I kept trying to make the announcement more elaborate, but this just made it look worse. Sometimes less is more. So after all this fuss, here is my simple little announcement.

I used a different cricut cartridge to make the yellow branch seen above.(And no, I did not cut it out by hand, as some have asked me:)

And here is the back.

I wanted to use the die cut of the baby owl here on back, but since it was not released, I had to use a bitmap instead. Such a sad tale.

And here are some runner-up photos, where Twain was not wailing his head off.

And of course, the photo I ended up using.

It's a good thing I enjoy wasting wiling away my time playing with cards like this...